They’ve gotta go fast. You’ve gotta be even faster to stop them.
If you’ve ever joined a PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds match, only to see somebody moving so quickly that your eyes can barely keep up, you probably encountered a speed hacker. Speed hackers are a seemingly rare yet especially obnoxious breed of cheater who fight less like desperate wannabe-survivalists and more like mass fan fiction hallucination turned video game character Sonic The Hedgehog.
Here’s one in action:
It’s not exactly a subtle cheat program, nor is it altogether novel, given that speed hacks have been present for years in games like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, and Halo. This means, in theory, that it should be easy for other players to report, making it a risky proposition for would-be cheaters. That said, there have been a handful of PUBG speed hacker sightings in the past couple months, and that number seems to be on the rise. This has led some players to question why development studio Bluehole doesn’t just train its anti-cheat program to lock its lasers onto characters moving at abnormal speeds and zap them. I reached out to the company and asked, but as of writing, they had yet to get back to me.
In the meantime, there is one slight upside to shitty speed hackers and their dumb existences: watching them get owned.
Here’s Counter-Strike pro turned PUBG pub-stomper Shroud making short work of one:
The speed hacker runs and runs and runs, but Shroud doesn’t even blink. Just like that, it’s over.
Here’s a more tense clip in which wtfmoses finds himself in line for a chicken dinner, with only a speed hacker standing in his way:
“It’s like the Predator out here, man,” says wtfmoses as the speed hacker sprint-stalks through the woods. Suddenly, the hacker runs straight at wtfmoses, who unloads a clip, downing the hacker in a flash and earning him a well-deserved chicken dinner. Turns out, speed hackers aren’t the fastest thing in PUBG. That would be bullets.
Lastly, here’s a speed hacker just, uh, having a bit of a moment, courtesy of Skyan:
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