PUBG dev letter 2020: Full explanation, summary and key points

PUBG Corporation, in its latest developers' letter, has announced several new aspects that are sure to interest avid PUBG players.

The PUBG dev letter 2020 has new plans to avoid cheating and enhance performance. The new letter highlights the measures that are to be taken against the increasing cases of cheating in PUBG.

The dev letter also talks about the hacking and cheating program, performance & stability improvements, network improvements and preventive measures. Let's take a look at the contents of the letter.

PUBG Dev Letter 2020: Introduction

The dev letter talked about issue players are facing nowadays

The letter began with Taeseok Jang, Executive Producer of PUBG PC, wishing good health to people across the world. He also highlighted the COVID-19 incident and how it has impacted the usual practices and tournaments globally.

Jang went on:

"2019 was a busy year for us, with lots of new content, updates to some of our maps, and a number of quality of life fixes. While much of this content was very well received, we know some of our other efforts didn’t land as well with you. We also had trouble nailing down the causes of a few persistent bugs and struggled against a relentless onslaught of cheat programs. These are some of the things I’ll be talking with you about today."

PUBG Devs Letter: Countermeasures for hacking and cheat programs

Preemptive anti-cheat actions mean disabling cheat programs from functioning even before the cheater runs the program. This is mainly accomplished by targeting the development of the cheat programs. The corporation is attacking it in the following ways:

#1 Two-factor Authentication System

To help prevent hacking of accounts and to improve the overall security, the devs will be adding SMS authentication and a secondary authentication method, which would use a one-time password. Your account will need to have two-factor authentication enabled to participate in ranked games to help ensure the fairest environment possible.

#2 Improve hack vulnerabilities in code

Anti-cheat was the focus area of the dev letter 2020

Cheat programs target specific factors to manipulate our system. Here’s what devs are doing to prevent manipulation to weapons, vehicles and movement of the characters.

Weapons

• Reinforce server authentication related to the gun’s firing angle, recoil, ballistic trajectory, etc.
• Analyze and overcome the vulnerabilities of client logic related to aiming.

Vehicles

• Reinforce server authentication about the vehicle’s speed, moving angle, the period it can remain in the air, etc.
• This will not only ban accounts that are detected, but will also deter cheating tools in real-time, kick cheaters out of the match, and issue instant bans.

Character Movement

• Reinforce server authentication related to a character’s movement speed, the period they remain in the air, etc.

PUBG Devs Letter: Performance and Stability Improvement

Performance and Stability Improvement in PUBG Devs Letter 2020

The developers have deployed a fix that significantly reduces instances of hitching for many users in the game. They also rolled back the blood changes that were made in Update 5.3 after they were found to be causing crashes for some players. Furthermore, the devs are working on making their pre-deployment tests more efficient.

Various aspects where the team of developers are working are optimization of streaming/hitching, optimization of GPU, optimization of animations and improvement for low-spec PCs. Similarly, for stability improvement, the developers are looking to fix client crash issues in a timely manner and enhance the build verification process.

Summary

The PUBG dev letter concludes with Jang asking people to trust the corporation, and committing that the corporation is working hard to resolve the issues raised in the PUBG dev letter 2020. Jang also stated that further topics would be discussed in the next dev letter.

At the very end, he asked people to remain patient and provide feedback, by reporting the bugs and cheats that are experienced in the game.