Krafton bans 336,736 BGMI accounts for cheating in-game

Krafton Anti Cheat notice for BGMI June to August 2021

(Image credit: Krafton)

Since the days of PUBG Mobile, cheaters have been high on the priority list of developers like Krafton. Cheaters ruin games for players that are trying to win using fair methods.

And like PUBG Mobile it seems like cheaters in BGMI also use a whole lot of different external software to cheat like knowing where the enemy players are, using aimbots, to knowing where all the loot items are. And now Krafton has announced in a new blog on the website that it has permanently banned 336,736 BGMI accounts. This is the number of cheaters banned in the period between July 30 and August 5.

These accounts, according to Krafton, were using illegal programs and were making the gaming environment unpleasant for the other players. Unpleasant is a mild term for the experience of players encountering cheaters in games, which results in a feeling of helplessness against an opponent that can see your position through walls and does not even need to aim at you to hit you.

BGMI recently hit the 46 million downloads mark and is heading towards the 50 million downloads mark which means that the game is just as popular as PUBG Mobile was in India. And even before being banned in India PUBG Mobile had a big issue of hackers invading matches.

And despite BGMI having a 4.3 rating on Play Store, a large number of reviews on the platform seem to complain about hackers and cheaters in the BGMI matches, and that the developers at Krafton are not doing enough to stop those using illegal means in the game.

Krafton in the blog assures players that it will 'implement strong sanctions' against those that use illegal programs. During this same period, on a global level, the developers banned 1,080,773 accounts in PUBG Mobile as part of the 'Ban Pan project', according to an official tweet.

The dirtier the #BanPan, the cleaner the game 🍳✨ From 7/30 - 8/5, we permanently blocked 1,080,773 accounts. The top reasons were: ❌ Modification of Character Model❌ Auto-Aim Hacks❌ Modification of Area Damage/X-Ray VisionVisit 🔗 https://t.co/YdeCgfdOcr #PUBGMOBILE pic.twitter.com/R3DBr4ydTpAugust 7, 2021

That post confirms that the cheating problem is not restricted to the lower tiers of the player skill tree.

According to the pie chart shared, the banned accounts consist of 20% Bronze players, 3% Silver, 5% Gold, 15% Platinum, 20% Diamond, 22% Crown, 2% Conqurer and 13% Ace. Another pie chart shows the ratio of the banned cheats with 16% being Auto-Aim hacks, 15% X-Ray Vision, 31% modification of character model, 14% Speed Hacks, 15% modification of area damage and 8% using other cheats.

While these numbers are for the global PUBG Mobile game, it can be expected that cheaters in the Indian BGMI version would also be using similar hacks and be equally spread out in terms of player ranks. For as long as there have been online multiplayer games there have been those that tried to use unfair means to get an advantage. This has been the case since the early days of Counter Strike, and posits a major problem for almost all big online multiplayer game developers.