Update: There are now DUO FP servers in Oceania. Read the whole report here.
Original story:
For PUBG players in Oceania, those wanting to join first-person only matches have needed to join special FPP servers based in North America and Asian, which naturally comes with connectivity disadvantages. Many have taken to reddit and Discord to appeal for Oceania FPP-only servers, but it looks like that outcome may take a while to eventuate, according to a post by lead community manager Sammie Kang on the PUBG OCE Discord.
Interestingly, the main concern is a small playerbase – quite an unusual worry for what is probably the most played FPS of the year. "I've heard that OCE players are playing FPP on NA or ASIA servers and would like to play on a better environment," Kang wrote (via reddit). "I fully understand the frustration."
She continued: "I've said it on Twitter but the truth is, [the] current player base in OCE is too small for us to add another game mode. We actively monitor data from different servers and game modes on a regular basis. Even if we consider players who are playing on other servers, the number is so small that it could mean (1) increased matchmaking time or (2) a small number of players in every session which can both result in negative player experience.
"For other regions, the number of active players was much larger which means there will be a number of active sessions filled with enough players throughout the day."
That doesn't mean the studio is letting the problem rest. While special servers may not be coming soon, some other resolution might be arrived at. "...We are currently looking into a solution and investigating to see if what could be done. We are still in the middle of the process which is why I have not been able to make any official statement."
Kang says to hold tight while the team investigates. You can read her full post over here.
It hasn t even been a year since Playerunknown s Battlegrounds launched into early access, and yet somehow every living creature in the known universe has played it. Its popularity shouldn’t come as much of a surprise though. I can t think of a better way to relieve stress than by being dumped onto an island with 99 other people and forced to murder and scavenge my way to the top, all in the name of an ethereal chicken dinner. Bagging that poultry isn t easy though, so we ve thrown together a whole bunch of tips and tricks to help you get a taste of that sweet, sweet victory. (more…)
Since launching into Early Access on March 23, 2017, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has sold over ten million copies. That's ten million copies in just 165 days—which is an average of over 60,606 copies sold per day. Not bad for an unfinished game that began life as a mod.
In that time, PUBG has also eclipsed both CS:GO and Dota 2 in Steam player count, and its runaway success has prompted other online stalwarts to craft their own variations of the hugely popular formula. In case you were wondering, GTA Online's PUBG-style mode is not as good as PUBG.
According to a press release, PUBG has also set a new mark for peak concurrent users with "over 970,000, highlighted by the strong reception at the PUBG Invitational at Gamescom 2017."
With new vaulting animations and a whole new map still en route, among many other things, who knows when PUBG's player count will slow down. It seems unlikely that'll be anytime soon.
Here’s some sort of rule: if a popular multiplayer game has an item drop system, players will try to exploit it – to the detriment of others. This goes double when those items can be sold. Now that Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] is the most populous game on Steam and its rarest items dropped in ‘crates’ can sell for hundreds of pounds, you betcha folks are trying to exploit it. Developers Bluehole Studio say they are away of people joining games then simply leaving it running, accumulating points to buy crates simply by standing still, and they do plan to combat it. (more…)
The Steam Charts aren’t, as you may have been led to expect, large sprawling maps depicting the locations of all the world’s known steam. They were, but due to government pressure we’ve altered them to list the top ten selling games on Steam, in reverse order, like a rocket taking off. (more…)
Daybreak’s H1Z1: King of the Kill [official site] was once the king of the Battle Royale hill but has been dethroned — and how! — by Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. The way forward, developers Daybreak Game Company say, is for H1Z1 to focus more on pace and action to offer a difference experience from the slower, more tactical of Plunkbat. Across future updates, they intend “to put less emphasis on the tedious aspects of looting and more emphasis on power progression and vehicles to speed up gameplay.” (more…)
As anyone who watched the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Invitational at Gamescom can tell you, it was a bit of a mixed bag. In addition to a confusing scoreboard malfunction that showed a team had placed second when they had actually come in third, there are the challenges inherent in presenting a tournament that contains 100 scattered competitors on a large map in real time.
At times during the tournament, viewers would see the camera pointed at a player crouching behind a wall or lying down in a building while the real drama was happening elsewhere on the map. There's also the issue that a good strategy for winning in PUBG is to avoid fighting for as long as possible, leading to long minutes where top players were simply hiding and waiting. Sound strategy, but not always exciting to watch.
At PAX West, Evan spoke with Chang-Han Kim, VP and producer at PUBG developer Bluehole, about the challenges of presenting a tournament for a game like PUBG and what lessons were learned from the Invitational at Gamescom.
"We know that there's been some hiccups here and there," said Kim through translator and Bluehole business lead Hyowon Yoo. "There were some issues, but the bigger thing was all of the existing esports or the competitive games are structured on the 1v1 type of format, and we're not placed like that."
Kim spoke about the idea of capturing the most dramatic moments of a tournament and presenting them in an edited replay if the live cameras didn't happen to catch them. "For example, if it's a solo mode, it could be 100 moments of drama that we could put together," he said. "If it's 25 teams of fours, it could be 25 moments of drama that we could put together and present in a way that's very enjoyable to watch."
Kim also mentioned the possibility of a four-way split-screen, which would allow several players to be viewed at the same time, thus giving viewers the choice of who to watch and improve the chances of the most dramatic moments being seen.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has sprouted an idler problem—that is, players who join matches but don't actually play, letting their characters die while they accrue in-game currency just by being there. This allows the idlers to buy items to sell on the marketplace without putting in the hours of actual playtime everyone else does, and hampers the experience of genuine players.
It's not clear just from anecdotal evidence exactly how big the problem is: what we know is that multiple players have reported seeing a dozen or so idlers at a time in their matches, and that it is a viable way to earn battle points. In a recent story on the issue, Evan managed to find 13 to 14 idlers in a first-person PUBG server by waiting for the plane to eject him at the end of its route.
Today at PAX West 2017, Evan had the opportunity to ask Battlegrounds producer Chang-Han Kim how developer Bluehole plans to deal with AFKers. In short, Kim says that while not many people are AFKing right now, the developers do want to implement some kind of change to stop it. That may be a matter of adjusting how players earn battle points, or "preventing AFKs as a whole."
"It's something we will definitely be addressing," he added. You can hear Kim's full response, as translated by business lead Hyowon Yoo, in the video above.
While Rockstar hasn't billed the new Motor Wars adversary mode in GTA Online as their take on battle royale, it definitely has some of the same ingredients: 4-28 players jump from a Cargobob helicopter in up to four teams, landing on a shrinking kill space that has weapons and armoured vehicles up for grabs. Everyone has one life. It's not quite GTA Online's version of PUBG, if that's what you were hoping for, but it's a fun knockabout vehicle combat mode, despite a few minor issues.
Rockstar has called Motor Wars a marriage of its existing Drop Zone and Penned In modes, and that's pretty accurate. Arriving from the sky, you're shown the locations of weapons and vehicles on the map (a significant difference from PUBG), so you can figure out the best region for your team to land. When you're not in a vehicle, you're invisible on the map. Once you're driving one, a moving icon shows up with the colour of your team, flagging your location to enemies.
It's a mode about everyone piling into the best military vehicles possible, rather than sniping or stealth. But some of the same strategies from PUBG can apply—cowardice can often get your team to at least second place while you skirt the perimeter of the playing area, avoiding firefights—and GTA's systems add their own humour, like when teammates brain themselves while trying to parachute gracefully to the ground (this usually happens to at least one person per game).
It reminded me of piling into a Warthog in the original Halo's Blood Gulch map and tumbling over the horizon towards the enemy.
You're not playing in the entirety of Los Santos, sadly, but in truncated little pockets of the landmass that have been cleared out for this mode. The maps based in the empty city are my favourites, since it's a nice and eerie space to be in while you're waiting for an enemy jeep to speed round the corner as you're sat on a turret.
Rounds last for no more than ten minutes, and you can play one round to win or two. Giving players this choice was an error, I think—Motor Wars should be a one-round mode, for a few reasons. If your team is the first to be eliminated in round one, it's not uncommon for people to just drop out, treating it like they're playing PUBG and leaving the rest of you to it. The host can set the game to auto-balance the team numbers if this happens, but this can be flawed depending on how many players are left: if every other team starts with four players and you have three, that puts you at an obvious disadvantage when the best armoured vehicles require two players to operate them effectively (one on the turret and one in the driver's seat).
Then there's the waiting. GTA Online's matchmaking always feels a bit sluggish to me, but it's the inconsistent pauses between rounds that I found a bit maddening here. In the second round of one game, the camera hung on the cargobob for over three minutes before the round began. During that time, my entire team left the game except me, leaving me to face a round alone against one team of four and another of two (I didn't win that one, unsurprisingly). If Motor Wars was a mandatory one-round mode, this wouldn't be a problem.
That was a one-off, but I still had a couple of occasions where there there was a momentum-killing pause of just under a minute between rounds. It's tons better when the game's over after ten minutes or less.
Shrinking city
The shrinking playing space works pretty well here, even if the maps are so small that you won't spend loads of time worrying about being outside of it. Motor Wars does spotlight how great GTA's vehicle combat can be, and it often reminded me of piling into a Warthog in the original Halo's Blood Gulch map and tumbling over the horizon towards the enemy. Team strategies actually work. Once everyone knows what the best vehicles are and you can co-ordinate attacks on individual enemy cars, you start to get a handle on how to win. Going it alone gets you nowhere here.
I can't see myself playing hours more of Motor Wars, but if you're keen to see some of the basic elements of battle royale applied to GTA, it's definitely worth seeing the result. My guess is that this won't be Rockstar's only effort at this type of mode, and that a solo-focused version of is on the cards as well. Modes like Overtime Rumble and Overtime Shootout show how Rockstar is willing to experiment to get the best possible version out of a format, and I can see this being enormously popular just for its surface-level similarities to PUBG.
I'd still love to see a 100-person version set on the entirety of Los Santos, with randomly placed vehicles and weapons that don't show up on the map, if such a thing is even possible on a technical level in GTA Online. Motor Wars gives you just a taste of what that might be like, but there's a lot of lingering potential here.
Big games like World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2 helped popularize the practice of idling: logging into a game without playing it in the hope of passively receiving in-game rewards. In these games and others, players would join custom 'idle servers,' or use macros to automate their character movement, allowing them to literally and figuratively sidestep getting kicked for being AFK.
As the best-selling game of 2017 on any single platform, it's not surprising that some of the people in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds aren't playing, but are simply logged in to fall from the sky and accumulate Battle Points, PUBG's in-game currency. Currently you earn BP based on your finishing position within the match. The longer you survive, the more BP you earn to spend on crates that contain cosmetic items.
What has surprised and upset some players, however, is the volume of AFK opponents they're encountering. YouTuber and streamer rivaLxfactor plays plenty of Battlegrounds, and has been logging a lot of hours through the week of the Gamescom Invitational. In a video recorded yesterday (above), rivaLxfactor queues into a particularly bad match. At 0:51, 12 AFK players are visible on the screen.
"I noticed over the past couple of days that people were dying instantly. Lots of people," he comments. "Servers would be down to 70 players within a few minutes … It was getting really bad."
The rarest cosmetic items inside PUBG's Gamescom Invitational Crates are selling for insane prices.
Via Twitter, rivaLxfactor tells me that his matches last evening were "the worst it has ever been," and that today has been just as bad. Although it's impossible to know whether these players are running a third-party service to automatically queue themselves into matches, rivaLxfactor suspects they're bots.
It's not a stretch to think that this could be automated because PUBG itself automates so much of the process of entering the game. Once you're queued, PUBG teleports you into the plane, and even does idlers the favor of dropping them at the 'last stop' of the plane, as it terminates its randomized flightpath across Erangel. It even triggers your parachute automatically. The scale of PUBG also makes it easier for idle players to 'hide among the living' without impacting the experience of the game. And for everyone else, fewer players means less competition for loot and locations.
After some investigation and simple math, rivaLxfactor estimates that it takes about five minutes from queueing into a server to the moment of death, from which a player might earn something like 50 or 70 BP. Uninterrupted, it wouldn't take long to accumulate thousands of BP.
Right now, that currency is valuable. On August 3 ahead of the Gamescom Invitational, PUBG made available premium crates that players could only acquire until the 27th. Although they cost $2.50 to open, the rarest cosmetic items inside these Gamescom Invitational Crates are selling for hundreds of dollars.
Compared to CS:GO or TF2, even PUBG's free crates are fetching good money. At press time, thousands of crates are being sold each hour on the Steam Community Market at these prices:
And naturally, some grey market CS:GO item dealers like OPskins.com will gladly take your money too.
Roll call
RivaLxfactor's account is anecdotal, but there are others that echo what he's experienced. In an August 14 stream, Twitch user ChrisAkira racks up eight kills with his bare hands against AFK players. Another video posted yesterday shows more than a dozen idle characters standing together.
Discussion on various PUBG forums is less unanimous. I didn't spot any highly-upvoted recent threads about the topic on Reddit. However, in an August 28 thread that seems to have it all figured out (title: "Game is full of botters to gain BP to buy chests and sell in steam market"), the top-voted comment writes: "I just queued solo in FPP squads and snagged this screenshot. I count 33 'AFKers,' not including the 4 man squad [that] dove straight for the ground as soon as they dropped and proceeded to kill the AFKs." I get the same count from the image. If genuine, that's one-third of the server that isn't participating.
Lower in the thread, other commenters reject the original poster's claim. "In every game 40 to 50 [idlers]? Exaggerating much? It's probably 4 to 7 like any other game. We all see it," writes tooxie11, with 183 upvotes. "i played 450 hours, never EVER saw more than 8," writes another player. "40-50 in every game? That's crazy! I've been seeing maybe 10 or so in squad fpp," says another. A different thread complaining broadly about "The exaggerations in this subreddit," leads with "No, 50 people per game aren't botting AFK."
Over on the Steam forums, an ex-idler claims that it's no longer a worthwhile technique: "Have you tried even AFK farming recently? So many people found out about it, that the only people at the end of the plane are people pretending to be AFK. They land and try to punch each other to death. It really isn't worth trying it anymore, it can't be that bad of an issue."
The map size, player count, different server regions, and randomized plane trajectory of PUBG makes it difficult to get a bead on exactly how prevalent AFK players are across PUBG's millions of matches. But it's clear that right now this a viable way to earn Battle Points, and it doesn't seem like it'd be a difficult thing to automate.
In my own test, I encountered just two idlers when I queued into a normal squad server. But on a first-person squad server (below), I fell from the plane with 13 or 14 AFK players (two more, AFKing in disguise, peel off to punch us to death). I died quickly, earning 60 BP in 2 minutes and 18 seconds.
