Battlegrounds patch tackles 'lag switch' cheaters by freezing them in place

It's been a couple of weeks since the last update to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, but this week a patch will arrive for public servers on Tuesday—it's currently on test servers already—and it's aimed pretty squarely at lousy rotten no-good cheaters.

First, a fix to prevent a 'lag switch' cheat, in which a player increases their ping to such a degree that they aren't where they appear to be and thus can attack and kill other players from relative safety. To combat this, players whose ping exceeds a certain (unstated) value will be locked in place, "unable to move, rotate, and attack others."

Another fix is being added to prevent players from removing foliage from the game by editing an .ini file. Sounds like some people just can't live without a chicken dinner, even if it means deleting shrubs just so they can see a little better.

Also of note: flashbang grenades have been a bit problematic in that they can sometimes cause game clients to freeze and crash, so for the time being they have been removed from the game.

There's also a handful of bug fixes and improvements, so have a look at the full patch notes below. And, if you're playing the battle royale shooter these days, we've recently published a great guide for finding the hottest loot locations in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

Client performance improvements

Slightly improved the drop in FPS when driving vehicles

Anti cheat

In order to prevent using "lag switch" to cheat, the characters will now be locked and will not be able to move, rotate and attack others when the ping exceeds a certain value
You will no longer be able to remove the environment foliage by revising the .ini file

Custom games

Fixed the issue that was causing the sound to break when there are too many vehicles in a small area

Bug fixes

Partially fixed a bug that caused the character to get stuck in different objects in the environment
Partially fixed a bug that caused the game client to freeze
Fixed a bug that caused the crosshair to still be visible while in no-UI mode
Temporarily removed the flash bang from the game as it was causing game clients to freeze/crash

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.