Jun 1, 2018

Introducing Shroud and DrDisRespect Weapon Skins

PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS - RKRigney

UPDATE (6/8/2018)

The issue preventing these crates from being delivered immediately after purchase has been resolved.

Please see the bottom of this post for troubleshooting steps if your purchased crate hasn't been delivered.

UPDATE (6/5/2018)

We’ve become aware of a couple of issues preventing these crates from being delivered after purchase, and we’re working on a fix. We’ll post another update here once the problem has been addressed. In the meantime, we’ve added some links to the FAQ section of this post to help out players who’ve encountered the issue.
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Starting on June 4, you’ll be able to show your support for two of PUBG’s most legendary content creators by equipping their custom-designed weapon skins in game.

Get Shroud’s Ghosted Crate, purchasable directly on Twitch or on Steam for $9.99. Crate is guaranteed to contain:

Ghosted – AKM

Ghosted – KAR98K

Get DrDisRespect’s Speed & Momentum Crate, also purchasable directly on Twitch or on Steam for $9.99. Crate is guaranteed to contain:

Speed & Momentum – M416

Speed & Momentum – KAR98K

We worked closely with Dr. DisRespect and Shroud to design these weapon skins. It’s a true partnership between them and PUBG Corp, and we’re thrilled that these creators will get a share of the profits every time a fan buys one of these new crates.

Content creators from around the world have been fundamental to the success of PUBG. We want to celebrate that, and this is just one of many ways we’ll be doing it going forward.

For more info on how to get the skins, check out the FAQ below!

FAQ

How do I unlock the skins?
The two weapon skin bundles will only be available through Twitch or on Steam. (More details to come)

How long will the skins be available for sale?
The skins will only be purchasable during the month of June: June 4 – June 30.

Will these be marketable on the Steam community market?
No, not according to our current plans. We’ll update you if we change this plan.

Are you considering doing partnerships like this with more streamers in the future?
We’re definitely open to it. We love content creators that support PUBG, and we’re actively experimenting with more ways to partner up.

Can I purchase more than one set of each crate?
Nope. Each account is limited to one purchase of each of the crates (to be super clear: you can buy both, just not more than one of each).

How do I get these skins through Twitch?
You’ll need to link your PUBG account with Twitch by clicking the Twitch logo in the PUBG game main menu. Then follow these instructions.

TROUBLESHOOTING

I’ve been having issues with these crates. Help please!
If you purchased the crates through Twitch, and have not yet received them, please unlink and then relink your Twitch account by pressing the Twitch button on the main PUBG lobby screen.

If you purchased directly through Steam or in-game, any issues with crate delivery should be automatically resolved within 15 minutes. If you're still having issues with your purchase, please contact steam directly through this link

May 31, 2018

Sanhok Testing Patch Notes #4

PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS - MephieKim

Hi everyone!

Sanhok is coming back to the Experimental Server for one last round of testing before the map goes live later in June.

We’ve shipped a ton of upgrades to the map since the last time we ran the test servers. Please let us know what’s working and what isn’t so we can make this round of testing count.

Yours truly,
PUBG Corp.

SANHOK TESTING WINDOW

OPENS: May 31, 7pm PDT / June 1, 4am CEST / June 1, 11am KST
CLOSES: June 4, 4am PDT / June 4, 1pm CEST / June 4, 8pm KST

AVAILABLE QUEUES

Both TPP and FPP are available in all queues
NA, EU, AS : Solo/Duo/Squad

PATCH NOTES

Performance

The performance improvements from PC 1.0 Update #14 have been applied to PUBG: Experimental Server as well.

Gameplay

Improvements have been made to throwables (frag grenades, stun grenades and molotovs)
- For the details, please see PC 1.0 Update #14
Adjusted item spawn balance.
- Overall item spawn rate increased by 3%.
- Weapon attachment spawn rate increased by 3%.
  - Vertical grip, angle grip, thumb grip, half grip, and light grip spawn rates increased by more than double.
M24 will no longer appear in care packages. It now spawns in the world (see update #14 notes for more details).
Adjusted bluezone balance.
- Decreased moving speed of the last three bluezones in Sanhok
- Slightly increased waiting time of the dynamic bluezone
  - Overall playtime increased by approximately 50 sec
- Increased the wait time of the final circle from 30 to 60 seconds
For performance reasons, the waiting area before each match starts will be spread out across three locations
Increased the amount of throwable apples from 10 to 20

Sound

You can now toggle the new HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) sound feature in the options menu (for opponent’s gunshot sounds only). The feature, which simulates fully three dimensional sound even for two-channel stereo headphones, was explained in greater detail in our dev blog last week.
Reduced the volume of the care package airplane.

Visuals

Environmental Set Dressing

Our towns are showing new signs of life! Towns now have been giving a new pass of environmental set dressing.

Cliffs

Thai-style rock walls are now spread across the map. These aren't the final, polished assets, but we wanted to get them in early. Try climbing up them and let us know how you feel about them!

Resort, Cave, and Ruins Improvements

We’ve added additional set dressing and material work to these areas.

Bug fixes

Removed grenade cooking animation and sound when throwing apples in the starting area before match starts.
Fixed an issue where apples in the starting area turned black
Fixed an issue of infinite loading and stuck in black screen when entering the match

Known Issues (Investigating)

Sometimes in FPP, if the player was vaulting at the time when the game starts, the player doesn't get on board in the plane and instead flies straight to the final destination of the plane. (Yes, still, again)
When using the Death Cam, sometimes players disappear or weapons become invisible.
Sometimes in spectate mode or Death Cam, scopes are visible, but scope mesh isn’t.
Sometimes other players appear as zombies.
Sometimes the bluezone indicator on the minimap gets temporarily out of sync.

May 29, 2018

PC 1.0 Update #14

PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS - MephieKim

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UPDATE 3 (6/8/18)
We've pushed a hotfix to resolve some critical issues with footsteps not being heard properly:

Fixed an issue where footsteps from players not in view weren't heard.
Fixed an issue where player footsteps would continue to be heard, even once the player was outside the normal audible range for footsteps.

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UPDATE 2 (6/5/18)
We've pushed a small update to make the following changes:

Performance

Optimized character’s movement logic for a small boost in frames.

Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue where grass color was unnatural
Fixed an issue where characters were intermittently invisible in match replays and death cam.

Anti-cheat

Launcher version is updated
- First game launch after this update will have security mode automatically enabled, allowing us to gather as much data as possible.
  - Following launches will allow you to enable/disable this service.

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UPDATE 1 (5/30/2018)
We removed one performance change that was causing problems with reloading and loot spawn load-in times.
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Hi everyone,

This patch we’re overhauling throwables, continuing to tune weapon and attachment balance, and shipping a whole mess of performance improvements.

First, let’s share a little context about the changes to throwables:

Frag grenades: In a recent update we removed the frag grenade’s knockback effect, greatly reducing its potential impact. To restore the trusty frag’s killing power we’re buffing its effective range and its damage.
Stun grenades: Stun grenades have never been the most popular pickups, and recent changes to frag grenade audio effects have made them feel a bit redundant. To make stun grenades more rewarding, they’ll now affect stunned players’ vision, hearing, and their ability to shoot accurately. We’re also bumping up the stun grenade’s effective radius and introducing new animations so it’s possible to tell when your grenades have stunned opponents.
Molotovs: These have traditionally been among the least popular items in the game. To make molotovs more useful, we’re increasing their area of effect, introducing new properties that allow fire to spread along walls and wooden surfaces in houses, and imposing new debuffs on players who catch on fire. Molotovs will also now explode when shot mid-air.

One last thing before we jump into the patch notes: we’re nerfing the M24, removing it from care packages, and adding it into the world spawn loot tables. Our goal is to make it a viable alternative to the Kar98k (that players actually get to use). As always, we’ll keep an eye on all of these balance changes and continuously make adjustments and improvements.

https://youtu.be/G03DZunofT4

Now, onto the changelist.

Patch Notes

Gameplay

Improvements have been made to throwables (frag grenades, stun grenades, and molotovs).

Increased frag grenade damage and effective range
- Frags previously had to be within 2.6m of player models to deal lethal damage. They now deal lethal damage within 3.5m, moderate damage from 3.5m through 8.5m, and low damage from 8.5m through 10m.
Stun grenades’ blinding effects have been improved
- First, let’s explain some terms. “Direct effect” is defined as stun grenade explosions occurring within a 100˚ angle of the player’s visual field. “Indirect effect” occurs when stun grenades explode outside of that “direct effect” range and players are within 5.5m of the explosion
- The maximum effective range of stun grenade has been increased to 20m
- Depending on distance from the explosion, the direct effect can blind the player for a maximum of 5.5 seconds, and a minimum of one second (when 20m away).
- Depending on distance from the explosion, the indirect effect can blind the player for a maximum of three seconds.
- Characters blinded by a stun grenade now cover their faces. This is a new animation.
- Spectators are now also blinded when spectating someone hit with a stun grenade
- Stun grenades will now briefly blind and deafen the thrower if they explode behind their back when cooked.
- You’ll now be unable to ADS while blinded.
Molotov cocktails now have new effects and their damage has been increased.
- Molotovs can now deal indirect damage and burn damage (as damage over time), depending on whether or not you're standing directly in the flames. If you're in the flames you'll take both types of damage.
- Indirect damage (taken when standing in the flames) has been increased from 10 to 12.5 damage per second.
- After catching fire, players will take burn damage as damage over time (10 damage per second) for a total of four seconds.
- You’ll now be unable to ADS while taking burn damage.
- Flames now spread further along wooden surfaces in houses
  Flames from Molotovs spread further if another Molotov is thrown on top of the flames.
- Molotovs will now explode when shot mid-air.
- A new animation has been added for character models who are suffering burn damage. They’ll attempt to pat out the flames using their hands.
Adjusting some weapon and attachment balance:
- Reduced vertical and horizontal recoil of the SCAR-L
- Decreased basic damage of the M24 from 88 to 79
- M24 will no longer dropped in care package. It spawns in the world
- The tactical stock and cheek pad are now less effective at improving recoil recovery rate. It now improves ADS speed.
- Adjusted light grip
  - Light grip no longer affects weapon basic recoil control or recoil recovery speed
  - Light grip now decreases first shot/single shot recoil by about 15%. Animation kick reduction has been changed to 20% (from 30%).
- To make the Vector a little easier to find, we’ve increased its spawn rate at the expense of the spawn rate of the UMP-9 (overall SMG spawn rate remains the same).
- Increased world spawn rate of DMRs.

UI / UX

Added a UI message showing when healing items can’t be used.

New Anti-Cheat Tech

Note: The new anti-cheat tech is currently only on the test servers, once additional testing is complete, it will be added to live servers.

We’ve added a new anti-cheat solution, developed in-house at PUBG Corp. Before we implement this tech on live servers, we’d first like to see how it works out on the test server. For this, we’ll need your help!

Expect to see a new popup when you start the client. To help us refine our anti-cheat service it would be helpful for us if you play with the "Enable Anti-cheat" box checked, if you experience issues you can disable this.

The option to disable the anti-cheat service will not be available when this is moved to live servers.

Performance

In last week’s dev blog we wrote in detail about upcoming work we’ll be doing to increase performance holistically. Many of these fixes will take time to deliver, but we’ve already finished a handful of fixes that should make a positive difference:

We’ve improved the character model rendering process to prevent some small frame drop issues.
We’ve optimized character movement and animation while skydiving to improve framerate when multiple players are nearby.
We’ve made some improvements to our network code to reduce network latency.
We’ve improved some inefficient processes with the way the server updates certain frames on vehicles and character models. This should resolve resolve some abnormal physics affecting vehicles.

Sound

You can now toggle the new HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) sound feature in the options menu (for opponent’s gunshot sounds only). The feature, which simulates fully three dimensional sound even for two-channel stereo headphones, was explained in greater detail in our dev blog last week.
Reduced the volume of the care package airplane.

UI / UX

Average swimming distance has been added to player stats, on the career screen

Leaderboard

The total rating points gained/lost per match has been increased, to better define the skill difference between players.

Bug fixes

Fixed some issues causing abnormal collisions in spots on Erangel and Miramar.
Characters should no longer get stuck while vaulting in particular spots around Erangel.
Fixed an issues allowing characters to pass through objects in certain locations on Miramar.
Improved the accuracy of the throwing trajectory indicator for stun grenades
Fixed a visual glitch in the inventory screen that occurred when attaching a choke to the sawed-off .
Fixed an issue that was resulting in some strange collisions if players ever jumped on top of a vehicle which had players in it.
Scope zeroing on the crossbow is no longer incorrectly enabled and set to an incorrect value by default.
Fixed an issue causing stun grenades to appear to bounce around for while after breaking a window.
Fixed an issue where the cheek pad’s vertical recoil control attribute was excluded in in-game tooltip.
Fixed an issue which prevented the cheek pad from adding 10% vertical recoil recovery when attached to the SLR.
Fixed an issue when hip-firing for an extended duration, the gun would appear to be lowered
Fixed an issue that caused the effect from stun grenades to appear differently depending on graphical settings

May 26, 2018

Dev Letter: Recent Feedback and Our Development Priorities

PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS - MephieKim

Hi everyone,

Ever since we launched the 1.0 version of PUBG earlier this year, we’ve been focused on building our team so we can invest in the game’s ongoing development. We’ve been building new content (like Sanhok), quality-of-life improvements (like map selection and weapon balance), and a whole series of aggressive anti-cheat measures. We want PUBG to be the best game possible so players like you keep loving—and playing—it.

Although we’ve made some meaningful improvements to PUBG, we’ve fallen short in other ways. Players have rightfully called us out for failing to address complaints about performance, and recently we haven’t done the best job of communicating about the changes we’re making to the game. Today we want to change that by talking in-depth about the things we’re prioritizing. We’ll also tease some of upcoming content we plan to add to the game.

This Dev Letter is the first of many more to come. Without further ado, let’s get into it.

OUR TOP PRIORITIES

We look at feedback from players around the world when determining our priorities. We’ve heard your voices, and as a result we believe that the biggest issues which deserve our attention are performance, server-side optimization, and cheating.

Performance and Server-Side Optimization - Over the past few patches, we’ve seen a big increase in complaints about performance problems, including unpredictable FPS drops, visual stuttering, and overall sluggish performance. Some of the root problems are occurring client-side, and others are server-side.

First things first. We’ve identified a few simple fixes we can make to improve overall game performance:

We’ve discovered that when vehicles move over many different types of ground materials quickly, too many effects are produced, causing players’ GPUS to overload.
Another cause of GPU overloading (and FPS drops) has to do with the way lighting effects are processed.

We’re already working on fixes for both of the issues above.

We’re also changing the way we ship optimizations. We’re planning to push updates to live servers whenever fixes are ready, instead of simply waiting for major patches. We’ll announce each of these improvements in subsequent patch notes.

Looking more toward the future, we’ve identified quite a number of ways we can optimize different aspects of the game to improve performance holistically.

Upcoming Client-Side Optimization Work

Character optimization

We’ll optimize the way the game handles the movement of opponents who you can’t see.
The vaulting process and animations will also be improved—we believe this will address certain screen stuttering issues affecting low-powered PCs.
We’ll improve the character model rendering process to prevent some small frame drop issues.
We’ll optimize character movement and animation while skydiving to improve framerate when multiple characters are skydiving at the same time.
We’ll optimize parachute animations to cut down on frame drops near the start of the match

We expect the final three changes above will make the early stages of each match feel much smoother. War Mode will also benefit immensely from these changes.

Vehicle optimization

We’ll optimize the way the game handles unseen (far away) vehicle movement and the movement of player models inside faraway vehicles.
Currently stopped vehicles demand an unnecessary amount from your CPU. We’ll fix it.

Loading optimization/stabilization

We’ll optimize the core structures of Miramar and Sanhok to improve map loading speed.
We’ll optimize physical texture loading while level streaming, which should address screen stuttering issues.
There’s a crashing issue caused by some level-streaming processes that we’ll address.

Other optimization work

We’ll address the frame drop issue caused by high-magnification scopes
Certain other far-away objects will be rendered in a less taxing way
We’ll optimize the replay system to improve framerate for players who have the replay/death cam activated

Upcoming Server-Side Optimization Work

We’ll optimize network code and reduce network latency. As a result, basic player inputs will be revealed to other players much more quickly.
We’re going to increase the speed at which the server transfers data about objects (items, doors, fences), to address the fact that sometimes item spawn in late after players parachute in.
We’re going to eliminate some inefficient network code. Currently, some objects send updates to the server unnecessarily
Currently the server rapidly updates certain frames (on vehicles and character models) in an inefficient way. When we address this, we believe it will also resolve some abnormal physics affecting vehicles.

Obviously these are a lot of changes. Even once we implement every single one of the optimization opportunities listed above, we will keep looking for more chances to improve the game.

Cheating - Cheating is the area where we’ve made the most progress in recent months. We’ve introduced a variety of encryption based solutions to make it harder for hackers to exploit vulnerabilities. We’ve also banned hundreds of thousands of cheaters’ accounts and refined the process by which we identify cheaters—most cheaters are now banned within hours of using an exploit. We’ve also begun taking serious legal action against the people responsible for creating hacks and cheats.

All of this will continue, but there’s more we can do. We believe we’re winning the battle against cheating, but we won’t stop fighting until we’ve eliminated it. Look for more updates on this in future dev letters.

OTHER UPCOMING WORK

Of course, PUBG Corp. is made up of many different teams, and they’re each focused on improving the game in different ways. The people who work on maps, gameplay balance, or cosmetics aren’t going to stop making things simply because we’ve declared that our top priorities lie elsewhere.

The biggest content drop coming in the near future is Sanhok. We’re aiming to bring it to live servers before the end of June, and development on the map won’t stop there. We’re planning new exclusive vehicles and an exclusive weapon for Sanhok, each of which will drop sometime in the month after the map officially launches. Among these is a big fan request: a drivable three-wheeled vehicle we’re currently calling the Tukshai.

In many ways, Sanhok’s test servers have become a place for us to experiment with all sorts of changes and features, including dynamic weather, a variety of circle systems, and weapon spawn behavior. We’ll continue to test out changes during the upcoming test cycle.

We’re also excited to show off the work that our worldbuilding team has been doing to make Sanhok our most beautiful map yet.

For instance, one person on the team has spent countless hours touching up the island’s various rocks and cliffaces, adding moss to those near water:

Another member of the team has been carefully creating decorative items to make towns feel more like places which once hosted life. A massive pile of original art assets like this...

...will appear in game in places like the abandoned market below:

The team is focused on making literally every inch of Sanhok perfect for players, whether it’s the texture on a rock wall or little unique trimmings around each of the islands houses. Every detail matters, and the team is eager to get feedback from you guys during the latest test.

We’ll have a lot more to share about the other goodies coming to Sanhok in the coming weeks. And you can expect more letters like this from us going forward. There’s so much work we have to do to truly deliver on PUBG’s potential. We’ve teased just a few of the upcoming changes for this year in our Roadmap earlier this year, but the things contained there are really just the beginning.

We’ll talk again soon!

Thank you for playing,
The PUBG Dev Team