I haven't handled a gun in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds for weeks. In that time I've played over 30 rounds, covered hundreds of in-game miles, and have spent more time hiding in bushes than Sean Spicer. Anyone familiar with Brendan Greene's one-time-Arma mod-turned-runaway megahit will know this is unusual.
On the off-chance you're not, here's the deal: PUBG is a battle royale sim that parachutes players into an open-world island, has you scrambling for supplies and weapons, and pits you against up to 99 other combatants in bloody warfare till but one person remains. To complicate things further, an ever-enclosing forcefield intermittently shrinks the battlefield to expedite the fight. Spend long enough outwith and you'll expire. Spend long enough within and you'll likely be shot dead—assuming you don't waste everyone else first.
Achieving the latter armed with a S686 shotgun or an M416 assault rifle is no easy feat. Doing so barefisted is… well, nothing is impossible, right?
Before commencing my bare knuckled quest, I decided against enforcing hard rules. I was aware players better than I had shared similar experiences online—however my one and only chicken dinner to this point came as a result of my final foe inadvertently falling foul of the forcefield. When it was all said and done, I'd rather pitifully managed to run over one enemy with one of the game's yellow, Mr Bean-esque Dacia cars, and had offed another with an inordinately flukey grenade lob. With this in mind I decided to take whatever I could get.
At first, perhaps expectedly, this wasn't a lot. I spent my first several rounds aimlessly sprinting and dying, dying and sprinting (in no particular order) in and out of buildings which, shy of being accompanied by a Benny Hill score, was almost comical. As I danced over well-placed M249s, full ammo clips, and Crossbows, I could almost hear opposite players screaming: What the fuck is this clown doing?!
I imagined their laughter as I charged at them, fists flailing, as if mimicking that one drunk uncle invariably capable of emptying a wedding dance floor to the tune of Eye of the Tiger. Even when I outsmarted foes, I failed. Sneaking up from behind, or getting the jump on my aggressors was swiftly superseded by being shot point blank between the eyes. Moe Greene got off lightly against my plight—and my boxing technique when given a fair chance left much to be desired (skip to 1.50 below).
After a handful of single barefisted kills in almost 20 rounds, it was clear my strategy needed a drastic overhaul. In his esteemed and enduring treatise on military tactics The Art of War, the Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu writes: "The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy."
Which to me of course translates to: If you can't win, hide in the bushes. Hide in the long grass. Hide in the toilets. Hell, hide wherever you can't be spotted.
And so I did. I hid in bushes:
I hid in toilets:
In the most literal act of trolling, I hid under bridges:
And, in a Theresa May-like rush of blood to the head, I hid in wheat fields:
I became a shadow, an unknown, and, still too often literally, a ghost. I racked up hours of peaceful wandering, as I toured The Island unarmed and rarely unchallenged before being abruptly offed as the circle inevitably and resolutely shortened.
I grew to understand what Gil Lawson was getting at when she suggested Battlegrounds' map gets more haunting as you play it, happening upon quaint nooks and crannies I hadn't previously realised existed—all the while becoming interminably frustrated by my inability to tuck my bloody legs beneath a bed frame or under a hedge or behind a parked car.
Seriously, I reckon I put new meaning to the term 'trickshot' by way of the amount of times I was killed with one-shots to my overimposing appendages.
Eventually, though, I got my break. The gods took pity on me and the lay of the ever-enclosing battleground fell in my favour. With every reduced arena came planes of rough, or conveniently situated shrubbery. I crawled for what felt like miles till it was just me and two others in the final squeeze. The Good, The Bad, and The Suspicious Bush.
Explosions tear through the otherwise tranquil forest. The two active fighters exchange gunfire. I daren't move a muscle for fear of my inflatable tube man legs being spotted.
And then boom! The soldier at the far end is brought to their knees and suddenly it's one-on-one.
I'm torn. Do I get up, run and hope for the best? Or do I lay in wait and hope that the now fallen third party shaved enough health off the remaining foe for me to stage a one-punch sneak attack?
I can't decide. Maybe I should move ever so slightly to the left and—BLOODY HELL WHY AM I SO BAD AT THIS GAME?!!!!
A bullet to the head and my indecision and cowardice has cost me, which feels like a fitting end to my bare-fisted saga. Ah, well at least I've got my memories.
Now if someone could please pass me that shotgun, that'd be grand.
When I spoke to PUBG's Brendan Greene a few weeks ago, he told me the promises he made at the beginning of the runaway hit's development regarding launch dates "came from naivety on [his] part". Bluehole has now stressed that the revised "Q4 2017" target is still on-track, but that weekly and monthly updates will be sidestepped in order to maintain a "high standard of quality."
By way of this Steam Community update post, Bluehole says that changes to the game's schedule aim to improve how it as a team works on the game and how it continues to set "realistic" expectations for players.
"Until the official release of the game, we will not have our scheduled weekly or monthly patches rolling out as often as before," reads the post. "We’ve found internally that being rushed to finish certain features, and having shorter QA test time between pushing updates caused more issues than it solved in regards to maintaining a high standard of quality. We want to put our best content out, and ensure that everything we do is making the game more enjoyable with every update."
Bluehole continues to say that while weekly patches may fall by the wayside from hereon, the developer will use the time to test for "significantly" longer periods. In turn it hopes to produce more polishes and accomplished updates.
The post adds: "Again, we would like to assure you all that we are still on-track to release our game as per our updated timeline, and we want to emphasize to you that we are not winding down the development, or complacent. We have a lot of work to do, and we want this game to be released with as many fun, rich, enjoyable features and mechanics as possible. Our team will continue to be hard at work, and we are always listening to your feedback."
As exclusively revealed during the PC Gaming Show at this year's E3, the ability to vault, climb, and dive through windows is coming to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Now, one of the game's programmers has shared some work-in-progress footage that shows how the new animations are coming along.
What might seem like a small addition to PUBG has scope to grossly alter strategy as it stands. Being able to throw yourself over and therefore behind walls while being pursued, for example, could mark the difference between life and death; while snipers stand to access better vantage points by reaching highers up nests.
As you can see there, players will be able to stall vaults mid-animation which will definitely come in handy when facing off against the aforementioned opportunist snipers.
Again, the above is marked as a 'work-in-progress'. And while we don't as yet know exactly which update vaulting, climbing and window-diving are coming to PUBG, there's still no sign of this ultra-cool maneuvering:
The highlight of my Battlegrounds career was the time my squad held out in the underground military bunker against multiple enemies with only crossbows. It wasn't some zany challenge we had set for ourselves—just an incredibly shitty string of loot luck. Yet, amid the twangs of crossbow strings snapping, we persevered. One squad retreated sporting a few new feathers in their caps, and we eradicated another one entirely. I'll never forget the flood of "oh my god" and laughter when we emerged from the bunker, stole a car, and actually made it away with our lives. That was months ago, but every time we play I call us the Crossboyz.
It might not have been a moment as gif-worthy as jumping a bike into a house's second story window and killing its occupants, or those people who discovered that hiding in overturned cars is a surprisingly viable tactic. But Battlegrounds is so damn good at churning out an endless stream of small anecdotes just like these, and so many of them are hilarious.
That's why we want to hear your best Battlegrounds stories. Regale us with tales of bold heroics, of insane car stunts, or the clever tactics that produced surprising outcomes. We want them all. Share your stories in the comments below and we'll round up our favorites and shower you with glory next week.
The internet is vast and full of streams. The prevalence of YouTube and Twitch ensure that more gaming silliness is being captured and shared than ever. People are still doing amazing work with Source's film making tools and The International 7 produced its share of amusing moments. Here are some of the videos and gifs that tickled us this week.
Valve announced a new game at The International 7 to... let's say a mixed response.
Also at The International
One of Dota 2's most loved players takes on an AI at The International 7. The contender walkouts at 1:36 are perfect. Head to 7:32 to watch the actual contest.
The community backlash is no surprise: the idea of selling items in an unfinished Early Access game typically results in a wave of unhappiness from gaming communities (see Ark's paid DLC expansion). There's also the fact that Brendan Greene stated a few months ago that no monetization would occur during PUBG's Early Access period. Anytime a system goes from free to paid (after launch, Greene has said there will "probably" be no more free crates at all) there's bound to be a lot of unhappiness.
Greene explained his turnaround on a paid crate system for Early Access, saying in the August update post: "While our intention was and still is to add the full feature to the game when we move into actual release, we do need to test it prior to launch and at Early Access so that it is stable and ready to be fully introduced to our community."
For the most part, the community seems unmoved by Greene's explanation. While it's nothing like the dramatic review-bombing we've seen with other games, PUBGs recent Steam review score has slipped from Mostly Positive to Mixed in the past 30 days, which is a change from about 75% positive reviews to around 65%. While many of the reviews express positive opinions about the game itself, most of these recent thumbs-downs cite the paid crates as the main reason.
"Although I love the core game, I can't recommend it to anyone now as the developer has broken one of the most paramount promises made during EA," says one Steam reviewer, who has played 135 hours of PUBG. "They said no paid content until release, now they're introducing keys, needed to open crates, which are purchased with real money, akin to CSGO."
"Don't let BlueHole pull the same things other early access devs have," reads another review. "Even though this game is wonderful and has the potential to be a staple in PC gaming, we have to let them know we won't accept these practices."
"Fun and addicting game but I'm jumping on the boycott bandwagon with the way they are going about loot crates / cosmetic items," reads a review from a player with nearly 90 hours of play. "If they added the ability to receive the same loot by grinding i would tell everyone to buy it."
On the PUBG subreddit, one of the highest upvoted posts, published two weeks ago, is titled 'JUST SAY NO to real-money keys."
"I don't think people getting these things are getting an advantage. I don't think my gameplay is affected by other people having them, or me not having them," the post reads. The poster laments that unlocking the schoolgirl outfit they want would require a potentially sizable investment of cash due to crates containing a single item, not a set, and the random nature of the crate's contents allow for finding duplicates instead of the costume you might be looking for.
"I know some of you play games like CSGO or whatever and think a system like this is reasonable because you're used to it, but it's not," the post continues. "In those games, it's also possible to get items for free. In this game, it will not be possible to get anything for free." (Emphasis theirs).
There are currently some 2,500 comments on the post, which has over 14,000 upvotes. Not everyone agrees, mind you: some point out that microtransactions are voluntary, and no one needs to actually buy keys for the crates. Others fear the crate system will lead, as it did for CS:GO, to a swarm of gambling sites, bot accounts, and scammers hoping to cash in on valuable items.
One redditor is completely fine with microtransactions, even in Early Access, and sounds perfectly willing to spend money—just not like this. "I'm all for selling cosmetics," the comment reads. "I'm completely against selling cosmetics using an RNG slot machine approach like crates & keys. Simply sell me the full outfit for $15 please."
And, for some who haven't yet bought PUBG, this controversy may be resulting in some hesitation about purchasing it. "I've been watching this game and was planning on potentially buying it after its release," one comment reads, "but here I'm seeing the birth of the usual EA pattern.
"Everyone was hailing this as 'EA done right'," the commenter continues, "but I'm skeptical, as that's what they always say."
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.
They're also now available worldwide, as developer Bluehole announced earlier on Twitter.
As you can see there, Bluehole suggests first-person leaderboards across all regions are en route, while this week's update has now been deployed to the Live Server.
In case you missed it yesterday, PUBG's Week 20 update addresses a number of bugs—not least one which occasionally disable voice chat on the Starting Island—introduces some optimisations, and lets dead players view their still-living teammates' markers on both the mini and world maps.
"'You have to keep in mind a few things,' says Kripp about Hearthstone snipers. 'I changed my username on Battle.net several times, even throughout [a long period of being stream-sniped], and I do often, not always, but almost every day I stream with a delay. Now the delay is fairly short, rarely do I have it over ten seconds, but if I have a five second delay one day and then the next day I have a twenty second delay, then you're just not going to be able to queue against me because you don't know when I'm queuing.'
"Even with those measures, Kripp has found the problem persists. 'I have been experiencing, in the last few months, even with my efforts, playing against the same players every night in some cases. I remember throughout almost a full month, like a quarter of my losses were to the same person. Right? The same guy queuing against me like every day or every second day. Just absolutely ridiculous.'"
Stream-sniping—the practice of playing a game against a streamer while watching their broadcast to gain an advantage—is nothing new for those who play games on Twitch or other streaming services for large audiences. It's been getting a bit more attention recently due to some controversy in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds: a player was recently banned by Bluehole for stream-sniping in PUBG, despite the developer stating they didn't have real proof of the offense, just suspicion.
It's a conundrum: proving someone is stream-sniping is difficult—perhaps impossible—and banning players from a game without proof they have violated the rules is, in my opinion at least, a highly questionable and unfair policy. Some games, like Hearthstone, don't have set rules about stream-sniping, so it's debatable whether stream-sniping can even be considered cheating in the first place (though I'd definitely call it poor sportsmanship, like stealing signs in baseball). Meanwhile, streamers who are vocal about stream-sniping are often criticized for complaining or being paranoid. "Just stream with a delay!" is a common suggestion, but as we'll see below, that's not really a viable solution for streamers whose livelihoods depend on engaging in real-time with their audiences—and often doesn't even prevent stream-sniping anyway.
I reached out to a few developers, streamers, and stream-snipers to get their thoughts on how big an issue it is, the various motivations snipers have and the methods they use, how it can be detected or avoided, and how (if at all) snipers should be punished by developers. I heard back from Brian Hicks, creative director of DayZ (and avid streamer himself), Hearthstone pro Andrey "Reynad" Yanuk (who also plays PUBG, which has recently seen the rise of a new form of griefing—'stream-honking'), and Hearthstone streamer Octavian "Kripparrian" Morosan (Kripp) who recently discovered a sniper 'guild' had formed against him.
Kripp mailed me a link to his video, and his quotes in this article are taken from that. Other quotes are taken from emails and Twitter DMs, including from a number of snipers, current and former—many who now stream games themselves. In some cases the quotes have been lightly edited or rearranged for clarity.
DayZ
How big of an issue is stream-sniping?
Another sniper claims he stream-sniped one streamer so often the streamer gave up playing games on Twitch entirely.
"DayZ hands down has suffered from stream sniping as an issue all the way back to the earliest builds of the mod," says Brian Hicks, who says he's been dealing with it as a developer since 2012. Since much of DayZ's success is due to streamers and content creators broadcasting the game live (rather than through traditional marketing) Hicks says he has "run into obvious pressure to try and prevent it, and support said content creators in combating it."
"You can't really quantify how 'big' of an issue it is," Hearthstone streamer Reynad told me via Twitter. "That depends on the streamer and their goals in-game and as an entertainer. It is an incredibly frequent issue." For Reynad personally, he says in a video posted below, "It does happen. And it happens like a hundred times more than you'd expect."
"For a whale streamer, someone at literally 10K concurrents or higher, in a hundred-person game [of PUBG] at least 10 people [in the match] will be watching on stream, ballpark," Reynad says in his video.
StDxDougisRaw, pro H1Z1 player for team SetToDestroyX, says, "For me, streaming sniping doesn't happen on a regular [basis] so I'd go on a limb here and say half the time."
Popular streamers not only draw snipers, but can find themselves hounded by the same stream-snipers again and again. Current streamer and former stream-sniper KBubblez contacted me to say she used to target a particular well-known streamer "everytime he played H1Z1". Another sniper claims he stream-sniped one streamer so often the streamer gave up playing games on Twitch entirely.
"You have to keep in mind a few things," says Kripp about Hearthstone snipers. "I changed my username on Battle.net several times, even throughout [a long period of being stream-sniped], and I do often, not always, but almost every day I stream with a delay. Now the delay is fairly short, rarely do I have it over ten seconds, but if I have a five second delay one day and then the next day I have a twenty second delay, then you're just not going to be able to queue against me because you don't know when I'm queuing."
Even with those measures, Kripp has found the problem persists. "I have been experiencing, in the last few months, even with my efforts, playing against the same players every night in some cases. I remember throughout almost a full month, like a quarter of my losses were to the same person. Right? The same guy queuing against me like every day or every second day. Just absolutely ridiculous."
Hearthstone
Why do snipers do it?
That's the trade off you get for being a streamer. If I was to offer my hand to my opponent in poker they would opt to see it every time.
"Chip", Hearthstone stream-sniper
I mainly assumed stream-sniping happened for attention or laughs, or out of some personal dislike for particular streamers, but the snipers I talked to gave me a number of different reasons.
One former sniper, now a streamer that I'll call 'Ray' for the purposes of anonymity, said he started sniping simply because he was bored. "I was an avid player of DayZ, and after about 3000-4000 hours of gameplay, I had been to every city, every corner of the map, found every item, and been in hundreds upon hundreds of shootouts." Ray was looking for a new way to entertain himself, so he "...turned to stream sniping because streamers in general tend to be entertainers, and I knew that interactions with them would probably be funny or interesting."
Typically, Ray says he didn't just hunt the streamers down to kill them, but to interact with them. "I would put on different accents and screw with them by picking nonsensical arguments or introducing myself as an annoyingly persistent hat salesman, or whatever other routine I had settled on for the day."
Not every sniper is out for laughs or fun. One Hearthstone sniper—I'll refer to him here as Chip—says that for him, stream-sniping is about one thing and one thing only: winning. Streamers, while making a living and entertaining their followers, are also voluntarily handing an opportunity to their opponents.
"Why is [it] up to me to say, well, I better not take this free advantage being offered to me?" asks Chip. "That's the trade off you get for being a streamer. If I was to offer my hand to my opponent in poker they would opt to see it every time."
"You take the trade of making 100 thousand dollars a year to someone seeing your cards in your hand," Chips says, in this case directly referring to Reynad's video (above) about stream-sniping. "Clearly the trade off is always going to be worth it to you. So why bitch about it in the first place?"
For many, though, stream-sniping is just another path to entertainment and fun. Says KBubblez: "I think it's funny when people are always going after them—it also shows how good [the streamers] actually are. But [I sniped] mostly for the reactions, it's very funny." In the next breath, however, she admits "Sniping in general can also be annoying though, it gets on your nerves when people are always coming after you, it makes it not fun and it's definitely not fair."
How stream-snipers operate
I could tell the time of day on the server by the position of the sun.
"Ray", former DayZ stream-sniper
The lengths snipers will go to to locate their targets is pretty staggering and, in some cases, quite impressive. Ray says he had an elaborate system for tracking down DayZ streamers, even after they'd begun taking preventative measures to hide the name of the server they were on, and even hide their Steam names.
"I could tell the time of day on the server by the position of the sun," says Ray. "I had every common server bookmarked, I could rapidly spot fake Steam profiles, and could look at their bio pages on Twitch to see what part of the world they lived in and know which regions their servers would be on. I even had an Excel spreadsheet with a list of the top 40 streamers for the game and which servers they frequented. This attention to detail allowed me to find them in minutes every time, no matter how much effort they put into hiding it."
"Often they will try and create identifying scenarios to ensure they are on the proper server," says Brian Hicks about DayZ stream-snipers. "Broadcast messages, fire off gunshots, or use VOIP to receive instant feedback on the stream that they are in fact on target."
In other games, streamers don't just use detective work but patience, setting up an ambush and lying in wait. "They play [Hearthstone] Arena all day until they get really good decks, and they wait until I get a deck that's weak to it, so if they get like a really good tempo Rogue, well, they'll wait until I play Priest that doesn't have much early game," Kripp says in his video. "And then on top of that they'll know my hand, they'll know my deck, they'll know all my answers, and I'm expected to actually do well against these people."
In Kripp's case, the lengths players are willing to go in order to stream-snipe him are extreme, to the degree that a 'sniper guild' had actually formed (which Kripp then, somewhat amusingly, infiltrated). The video above is fascinating and well-worth watching to understand how these Hearthstone snipers work and why Kripp playing with a delay didn't stop them.
"Of course sometimes you run into non-destructive forms of stream sniping (what used to affectionately be called stream stalking)," Brian Hicks says on the topic of those who don't necessarily want to beat the streamers but just play alongside them, or interact with them. "However unfortunately, that always ends up being the exception and not the rule. More often than not you encounter your average young kid, looking to ruin someone's fun or get their five seconds of fame. For the stream sniper this is a heart-pounding moment of excitement, watching on one monitor as they sneak closer and closer to the content creator—enabling themselves to have a direct impact on the stream, and feel powerful. It is incredibly frustrating, and demoralizing as a streamer. Hands down."
How can stream-sniping be combated?
...any streamer of any game will tell you the difference between playing on and off stream.
Andrey "Reynad" Yanuk
Detecting stream-snipers, not just as developers but as the streamers encountering them, can be nebulous. "As streamers, we've played games both on and off-stream for thousands of hours," Reynad says. "After that much time playing, any streamer of any game will tell you the difference between playing on and off stream. Sometimes it's something obvious a player does that gives away that he is sniping, other times it is a pattern of behavior across games from an individual. More often than not, and regardless of the game, a streamer will notice that something just feels 'off.' Something that is not in line with the game experience off-stream."
For instance, in Hearthstone, when the opposing player holds back a card that would be heavily punished by a card in the streamer's hand. That's not proof on its own, but if things like this happen far more often while streaming than while playing offline, it's natural to afford it a little suspicion. In other games, there are far more obvious signs.
"Watch a streamer queue up a game of agar.io and see how the server changes to nothing but Twitch emote characters hunting him," Reynad says.
Developers, too, have attempted to find ways to detect streamers beyond just letting players report them. "With DayZ Taviana (a mod I did with a small team prior to me joining Bohemia) our backend programmer slapped together several tools to allow us to monitor movement and behavior on a live server, but when you scale this up to something the size of DayZ or Battlegrounds the overhead becomes much more difficult," Brian Hicks says.
DayZ
"Things like heatmaps help, but in the end—on a larger scale it's really down to user reporting. When dealing with user reports, you also run into the obvious methods of abuse and larger content creators having the audience (fully outside their control) that can tip the scale and make things clearly unfair.
"To the best of my knowledge," says Hicks," the only gains we have made in combating stream sniping have been in aiding content creators in removing identifying information on screen. Things such as UI elements, server messages, and player names."
Should stream-snipers be banned?
"While we understand we cannot prove that this player was watching the target stream's broadcast, we see no other reason why they would consistently attempt to be in the same lobby as someone who is broadcasting live other than to have an advantage in the game." That's a portion of Bluehole's statement on why they banned a player from PUBG after detecting them trying to join the lobby of a streamer.
I can personally think of a non-nefarious reason someone might want to locate a streamer's server: to simply play with them. I used to watch several DayZ streamers religiously and often considered trying to join the server they were on. Not to snipe them while watching their stream, but just because I enjoyed their broadcasts and I thought it would be fun to run into them in the game. I never did this, and I like to think that if I had, I would have turned off the stream once I'd joined the server they were on. And, if I had run across my favorite streamers in-game, would I have tried to kill them? Well, yeah. Part of the fun of playing with streamers, as KBubblez said, is finding out how good they really are. Someone who makes an effort to deliberately join a server that a streamer is on might not necessarily be watching the stream when they clash, and shouldn't, in my opinion, get banned for it. True proof of stream-sniping may be impossible to obtain, but bans simply shouldn't happen without it.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
That kind of harassment isn't okay in person, and it isn't okay online.
"Ray"
Many of the people I talked to also said snipers shouldn't be banned (and even many streamers agree). "I don't think stream snipers should have any punishment," says KBubblez. "It's a game. If you're gonna broadcast yourself online and have a following, you have to understand that there are going to be trolls. Is it annoying—yes. But it makes for good entertainment."
Stream-sniper Chip doesn't feel that his sniping in Hearthstone is cheating in the first place, because Hearthstone doesn't have a specific rule against it. "Some games do have rules on third party programs, for example, League of Legends has a rule about no scripting. Using that program to directly affect how you play each game and giving yourself a huge advantage," he says. "That rule seems completely reasonable. Maybe something is to be said about how much of an advantage you get from these things, I don't know. It seems to me like unless it's directly [affecting] the way you yourself play, like scripts in League or aimbots in CS:GO, it should be completely fine to use."
Ray feels differently, provided developers can find proof of sniping. "If the developers have the tools to detect stream sniping and can enforce it, then it's healthy for the game to prevent that kind of cheating. Especially in competitive games where people are playing for rank, and also especially in repeat cases where one person is stalking and ruining games for a specific streamer. That kind of harassment isn't okay in person, and it isn't okay online. The people who defend this behavior truly puzzle me; it's not very different from going into someone's workplace and stalking them for hours on end."
H1Z1: King of the Kill
Mike "StaX" Baxter, chief creative officer of SetToDestroyX, says "Permanent bans from chat would be an alright punishment, but nothing can really combat it. As long as you press 'Start Streaming' people will find a way into your channel." Meanwhile, Doug (also of SetToDestroyX) thinks progressive bans are the way to go, with more harsh bans if the sniper doesn't get the message. "In front of the other viewers who are watching and see the sniping happening with no consequence will just cause more of a problem. An example needs to be made."
Brian Hicks notes that punishment of stream-snipers just isn't viable without developers having proof and not just suspicion. "Personally, I've always wanted to be able to find a position where we can punish folks abusing the advantage of live streamed content (what I like to equate to the type of people who would screen peek during coop games in the 16-bit and later eras) however I have yet to find a position we can do this from, while retaining the moral high ground."
Reynad, frustrated as he might be about the issue, says: "I don't advocate banning players in these scenarios, because even as streamers we cannot be 100% sure it is happening."
It's clear stream-sniping is a problem, and one without any real solution. Developers can make changes to a game and invent tools to try to detect it, and streamers can hide server details, change their usernames, and even play with delays, but none of these measures seem particularly effective against the dedicated and resourceful stream-snipers (past and present) we've heard from. Banning players proven to be snipers might eventually dissuade some from the practice, but banning without concrete proof isn't fair, and that proof is nearly impossible to come by. For now, at least, stream-sniping will continue to be an issue, and streamers will have to keep looking over their shoulders for the people they know are watching.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has deployed its 20th weekly patch to Test Servers ahead of live introduction tomorrow. With it, comes a typical host of bug fixes, some optimisation tweaks, and a world and mini-map adjustment designed to aid team play.
From front to back, a bug that caused players to stand before crouching has been fixed, as has one which prevented players from rebinding 'Unarm' to an alternate key. Character animations when using throwables in the prone position have been improved, as has default wrist positions on vehicle steering wheels.
Sadly, a bug that occasionally disabled voice chat on the Starting Island has been fixed, which means you're once again forced to mute the torrent of incoherent racial slurs that exist there. Optimisation improvements target the game's UI, as well as game performance for CPU's boasting six-cores or more.
The latest update's biggest asset, though, lets dead players view their still-living comrade's markers on both the mini-map and the world map. In turn this make tracking the game following your demise a lot easier—and creates scope for remote coaching from the afterlife. Until now, markers placed after you'd met your maker were only visible to your squadmates still in the game.
As always, this weekly update is live now in PUBG's Test Servers and, all going well, will appear on Live Servers tomorrow.
