A former employee of PUBG noticed Shroud’s frustration with ARC Raiders and shares how he banned cheaters without authorization.
What was the deal with Shroud’s frustration? The Twitch streamer “Shroud” was frustrated because he and his team were once again taken down by a cheater in ARC Raiders. He cursed that ARC Raiders was terrible and was convinced that the developers didn’t care about the problem.
A clip of the scene was viewed over 1.2 million times on X, which caught the attention of a former community manager from PUBG. “Hawkinz,” as he is called on X, then shared his experiences he had while working on the battle royale shooter.
Community manager secretly bans cheaters after hours
What did he do in the fight against cheaters? Hawkinz reports that during his time at PUBG, he often joined Shroud’s matches and banned cheaters and stream-snipers. He claims to have spent hours writing down names:
When I was at PUBG, I would join Shroud’s games and manually ban cheaters and stream-snipers. I watched for hours and entered names into spreadsheets until it got early in the morning. Without manual oversight, there isn’t much you can do against cheaters who want to disrupt streamers.
Hawkinz via X
Hawkinz then confesses that this approach was not allowed: “This was not approved by PUBG; I wasn’t actually allowed to do it.” This is also the reason why a similar approach for games like ARC Raiders is not feasible: “Embark has little incentive to spend this time specifically for Shroud… it would likely cause more problems than it solves,” he explains.
Hawkinz explains that this approach would mean favoring Shroud and other streamers, neglecting the community, “the general public” (via X). That is not in the best interest of the companies.
When asked whether he left the rest of the community to the cheaters to give his favorite streamer preferential treatment, Hawkinz replied: “I was a community manager and mostly did this outside of regular working hours. The anti-cheat team took care of cheaters; that was not my task. But I handled thousands of reports about cheating from randoms on Twitter, Discord, Reddit, and so on.”
This is what Shroud says about the story: For Shroud, this is certainly something that makes him extremely happy – even if he likely overlooked the statement that such efforts are not worth it for ARC Raiders. On X, the streamer responds to the story of the former community manager:
“Holy shit, what a win… this problem isn’t just affecting streamers. Anyone who plays in high-level PvP lobbies has to deal with endless harassment and cheaters. All we ask is for a measly 20% effort from Embark… it’s just frustrating for everyone who loves this game (still my Game of the Year, by the way).”
So for ARC Raiders, the fight against cheaters is far from over. And with the increasing number of banned players, the developers are also feeling the effects of this fight more and more – for example, through unwanted visitors at the office: Players from ARC Raiders violate the sacred rule of online gaming, harassing the developers and claiming they are innocent
