Another popular Playerunknown's Battlegrounds streamer has been banned from the game, for yet another bizarre and dubious reason. As reported by Kotaku, the streamer known as Destiny was out cruising around in his truck when he came upon some enemy players and ran them down, as one does. Vehicular homicide is a common (and commonly hilarious) way to dispatch enemies in PUBG, after all. But in this case, it earned him the boot.
The problem with Destiny's kill spree is that it came as the result of a glitch that prevents houses from rendering for some players in a game, which leaves non-glitched players utterly exposed and helpless, without even realizing it. Basically, you're crouched behind a wall, peeking carefully out a window, relatively safe and sound—but to a player experiencing the glitch, it looks like you're sitting out in the open like a big ol' lump of "Shoot Me." And it's not that the walls are invisible—they're just not there at all.
Even though Destiny apparently didn't do anything to trigger the glitch, he obviously took advantage of it, which is a hard "no" in the PUBG rules of conduct: "Do not exploit bugs or glitches: If you find a bug or a glitch in the game that provides an unfair advantage, let us know about it instead of using the exploit for your own benefit." And it's clear that he was well aware of what he was doing, as he acknowledges that his victims are actually in houses and says multiple times that he's going to be banned.
Naturally, his banning led to (another) uproar amongst the ranks of the PUBG community. Some players think the ban is justified, others complain about bias in the distribution of bans (Grimmz's demonstration of how to take advantage of clipping to kill people underwater, for instance, apparently went unpunished), and of course there's the very big and obvious question of what he was supposed to do when he encountered the glitch. Yes, he clearly took enthusiastic advantage of it, but is he supposed to just not kill anyone, or quit the game outright, because of something that's completely not his fault?
Regardless of where you stand on the morality of the thing, at least a couple of redditors pointed out that PUBG is an Early Access game, meaning that bugs are all but inevitable. That makes banning players for encountering them look a little iffy. "People are paying to beta test your game and stumbling across a serious bug at fault of the developers," a redditor named Cynoxious wrote. "It is perfectly fine that he attempted to run people over the reason being it gives a full showcase of what this glitch accomplishes."
The whole point of beta testing, which in most ways is synonymous with Early Access, is to find ways to break and exploit a game before it's release to the public. I can't argue with a serious face that Destiny was trying to get some thorough bug-testing done during this road-rage escapade (although he does at one point describe the video as "a PSA, so the devs fix their fucking game"), but that really is how these things work: Testers make active efforts to throw a wrench into the works in any way they can, so that unusual situations the developers may not have considered get caught.
The trouble here is that Early Access is different from conventional betas in one big way, that being that people have to pay for it. And when a game is purchased, it comes with an expectation that it's going to work as advertised. Protecting those people from shenanigans is presumably a big part of the harsh penalties meted out for taking advantage of bugs, and it's no doubt well-intentioned. But whether it's reasonable is highly questionable—and more to the point, it's increasingly looking like more trouble than it's worth.
