PUBG's pre-match starting island is the pits. And even if being punched in the privates for 40 straight seconds while someone else screams expletives in your face is your idea of fun—watching your performance cough and splutter as your fps nosedives below 20 surely isn't. 

The game's latest patch targets the latter (for the former: mute lobby sound. Always mute lobby sound) by introducing multiple spawn areas, designed to prevent players from gathering in the same place at the same time. In turn, this aims to boost server performance. Likewise, weapons have also been removed from the starting island.

"Through the last patch, we were able to improve server and client performance by adjusting the visible distance while the character is in the air," says this Steam Community update. "In the current patch we are spreading out the pre-match starting locations. Previously, all the players would spawn together at the same location awaiting the start of the match."

The post adds: "Lots of interaction among multiple players in such a small area had a high impact on the servers. To solve this, we have introduced multiple areas where players gather before the match start. As a result, the performance, both server and client-side, has improved."

The developer adds that "additional modifications" tied to airplane performance are also planned, which we should expect more on soon. 

In the wake of its 100,000-player "single wave" ban—not to mention official banned player figures pushing 1.5 million—PUBG Corp is also testing a new anti-cheat measure said to be "still under development". As always, when the above tweaks are stable on test servers, they'll be applied to the live ones. 

Just a few days after PUBG Corp announced its plan to drop the ban hammer on more than 100,000 cheaters in one fell swoop, a new type of cheat appears to have cropped up in Playerunknown's Battlegrounds. Instead of enabling players to kill better, this one, shared on Reddit by MagicIsBull, enables them to heal better. 

The kill cam footage shows a player reviving a fallen partner almost instantaneously, after which he immediately heals himself. Both of these acts normally take several seconds each, during which time the first-aiding player cannot fight back if they come under attack. Eliminating that delay eliminates the risk, and—as cheats so often do—throws the game wildly out of balance.  

At least one redditor replied to the complaint saying that "insta healing and res have been there for months," but cheating in PUBG has become a huge hot-topic issue, and players are not happy about it.  The timing of also comes off as rather brazen, coming as close as it does to the promised banning of 100,000 cheaters. Not that players appear to be putting much stock in that commitment: As happened less than two weeks ago when PUBG Corp apologized for problems with BP distribution, the comments have been flooded with calls for a region lock of China.  

That's the result of PUBG creator Brendan Greene admitting in December that the vast majority of cheaters are located in China, although he made it clear at the same time that he's against the idea of a region lock. Chinese publisher Tencent is taking some action, however. It recently helped Chinese authorities arrest roughly 120 people accused of making or advertising cheat software.

Earlier this week, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds launched a fairly innocuous PC patch that targeted bugs and client optimisation. "We are hoping to give you an update on what we have been working on soon", said PUBG Corp in this forum post. 

Soon is now, it seems, as the developer has announced it will ban 100,000 cheaters in a "single wave" following a comprehensive data review. Moreover, balance adjustments have been applied to the blue zone, which will first appear on test servers. 

"We recently discovered a new pattern of cheats in action. This week, we performed a thorough gameplay data review of 10 million players and completed analysis of tens of millions of data logs," explains PUBG Corp in this Steam Community post. "Through this exercise, we were able to identify over 100,000 instances of the new pattern related to use of cheat and now we have confirmed that it was clearly an attempt of compromising our game. 

"These players will be permanently banned in a single wave. This is an example of additional measures we will be taking on top of the basic detection systems in place. We will continue to check the data logs like this even if it means the anti-cheat team has to filter through hundreds of billions of data logs manually." 

The dev adds that despite recently encouraging players to report cheaters directly from replay mode, a bug tied to the game's deathcam and observing system—"it looks like there is no recoil even for a player who is not using a cheat"—has caused non-cheaters to be inadvertently flagged. It is of course working to iron this out.

As for the blue zone, the following changes will be applied and tested over the coming days:

• Slightly decreased the waiting time of the blue zones in mid-to-late phase of a match.
• Slightly decreased the shrinking speed of the blue zones in mid-to-late phase (In this phase, blue zones will now move at a slower speed and the travel time of blue zones has slightly increased due to this change).
• Slightly increased the damage per second of the last blue zone.

Since launching in full at the end of last year, it seems PUBG Corp has doubled down on stomping out cheaters. But let me now turn this over to you lot: are cheaters less frequent in your games? Share you thoughts and experiences in the comments south of here.