PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' second test server for its PC version 1.0 went live earlier, however has since been pulled to undergo "emergency maintenance". Whenever it's reinstated (at the time of writing, the game's official Twitter feed suggests around 12noon GMT), it'll bring with it two new weapons.  

(Update: test servers are now again live.)  

Found scattered around the Erangel island, the DP-28 is a light machine gun that carries 47 rounds and supports 4x scopes and RDS sights. The AUG A3, on the other hand, is a bullpup assault rifle that houses 5.56mm rounds and is a care package-exclusive.

As you might expect, some players aren't best pleased with the test server maintenance delay—while others have voiced concerns with the servers' new UI and fonts. 

If you plan to jump in, let us know how you get on once servers are back online. Head in this direction for full patch notes relevant to the latest testing schedule. 

IEM Oakland gave the world a second glimpse at PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds at a large international LAN event. 20 of the world’s best squads airdropped into California to compete across eight maps for their share of $200,000 in prize money. 

To many spectators, an Early Access PUBG is still not quite ready for the international stage. To PUBG Inc. and ESL’s credit, both organisations made adjustments based on their learnings from Gamescom to put on a more polished event this weekend. 

Evaluating PUBG's watchability

PUBG is played very differently when thousands of dollars are on the line. At Gamescom we saw plenty of conservative play, and at IEM Oakland we continued to see players reluctant to engage in the opening phase of the game, despite guns being readily available—assault rifles were set to spawn at 1.5X the normal rate at the tournament.

One thing motivating this is the ESL's scoring system, which at IEM Oakland awarded 10 points per kill, and survivor points ranging from 300 (first place) to 40 points (for 20th place, the team that lost all its players first).

The incentive for teams to play aggressively simply wasn’t there and as a result the first 10 or 15 minutes of each game was spent looting, scouting, and migrating. Each team was able to stake out a town or territory for themselves with almost no interference. FaZe would drop Mylta Power, aAa plunged into Mylta, and Method consistently hit Pochinki. After 20 minutes of play in the first match, 60 of 80 players were still alive.

This slow start consistently led to explosive, bloody firefights for the fourth or fifth circle, when many teams began competing for the best terrain. Still, these frenzies of mapwide action were almost too frenetic for the observers to cope with. While gunshots rattled in the background, the audience was sometimes treated to shots of someone healing behind a tree, or third-person shots of no real relevance. When chasing vehicles, the camera would occasionally clip under the map. The casters would call out a firefight, but before the camera reached them they'd be massacred.  

The final moments of a match were more focused and watchable, of course, but without a permanent statistics screen for viewers to keep up with who’s alive and who’s not—it was difficult to follow each game’s storyline. 

Still, we should spare some patience for the devs and ESL as they continue to figure out the best way to present PUBG. It's an extraordinarily challenging game to broadcast—at some moments, the crew has to monitor more than a dozen similar-looking map areas simultaneously. The task of running an 80-person LAN, on a tight schedule, without major technical miscues, is likewise daunting.

There are some hopefully-simple steps that PUBG Inc. and tournament organisers can take to immerse the viewer. There’s so much data available, and fans are crying out for it to be made available live. Basic information such as current kills, gun loadout, and even just who’s alive and who’s not would make spectators considerably happier. Whether it becomes available through a Twitch extension, standalone app for a second monitor or phone, or in the game’s client remains a different issue, but one worth exploring for PUBG should it wish to join Dota 2 and CS:GO in the upper echelons of esports.

The winners, and how they won

The IEM scoring format allowed the eventual winners, Against All Authority, to win the tournament without scoring any kills in the final two maps. A qualifying team rather than an invitee, the French roster was a picture of consistency throughout the weekend, finishing in the top five in half of the eight maps and finishing sixth in the final two maps. 

Digital Chaos were the only squad to win more than one map across the weekend. The mixed European team took both the first and seventh map, securing 27 combined kills in the two victories. In their other six maps they could only manage one top ten finish and a grand total of eight frags. 

Tempo Storm on the other hand failed to win a single map yet secured second place overall. Shotcaller Keane “Valliate” Alonso and his squad made squeaky clean rotations and nearly always had solid positioning ahead of the next circle. Pre-tournament favourites FaZe Clan were seen being picked off in vehicles due to late rotations and perilous circles but this was something Tempo Storm avoided fantastically. The team notched a somewhat meek 28 kills across the eight maps but finished 2nd overall with five top-five finishes. No matter the circle, Tempo Storm were well-positioned and rarely caught out. They’re not the most exciting squad to watch but they most definitely know how to score points. 

The format we saw at IEM Oakland made it clear that it's a marathon, not a sprint. If you're watching a popular streamer like Shroud or DrDisrespect on Twitch, you'll usually see them follow a reckless, entertaining shoot-on-sight policy. That strategy doesn't transfer into the professional game. Oakland proved that patience, stealth, and positioning remain just as important as outright fragging ability. In the final map of the tournament, winners aAa earned a sixth-place finish on the map by hiding their last living player, Monkey, in a patch of grass, where he avoided any conflict for minutes.

The importance of compounds

Pro PUBG's meta is still developing. One thing that was evident across both days of the competition is that compounds, wherever they were, were hotly contested. The later the circle goes, the more coveted structures become. A single compound can provide solid cover for an entire squad with clear vision over wide areas of land where there’s no cover. They provide perfect opportunity for players to grab pick-offs as other team scramble for better positon. As soon as the circle was revealed and the “migration phase” begun, the compounds in the next circle would very quickly be filled by a squad looking to catch the late-movers languishing in the blue or anyone having to expose themselves across sparse open areas of land. 

Compounds don't guarantee survival, though. In game seven, Miami Flamingos, PENTA, Method and Corn Shuckers all found themselves shacked up in or around the same three houses. Between the tiny shack and the three rather flimsy looking yellow houses the game burst into life with Method, PENTA and Miami Flamingos players being KO'd and traded left, right, and centre. Again the circle didn’t behave and the teams had to mobilise to survive the imminent fast approaching doom. Unsurprisingly, every other team still alive had heard the gunfire and knew exactly where they were coming from so they didn’t survive long when bursting late towards the next circle. 

IEM Oakland was an improvement on the Invitational at Gamescom. Considering the game is still in Early Access, it’s not made a bad effort of becoming a top tier esport. The viewership figures are modest compared to the heights of CS:GO and Dota 2, but in sparks of combat and clutch grenade throws, you can see PUBG's potential for competition. Arguably Overwatch, with a much more established business behind it, is at a similar stage of finding its footing.

Better observer tools, in-client spectating, and better presentation of stats are no-brainer improvements for PUBG, but I'd also love to see the studio experiment with wildly different formats for competitive PUBG while they still have some room test weird ideas. Tinkering with the points system to incentivize kills and damage would be one step, but what about king-of-the-hill-style points accrual awarded to teams to spend time in the circle? If PUBG can force teams to get out of their comfort zone and fight for the same territory in matches' opening minutes, that'll be a big step forward for the game.

The two greatest three-point shooters to ever play in Oracle Arena are now, officially, Steph Curry and Noble Esports' Edakulous. 

I mean, just look at this beauty from the end of Game 7 at IEM Oakland. It is, without a doubt, the most devastating grenade in the young history of professional Battlegrounds.

Evil Geniuses has been on the wrong end of some truly stunning highlights this weekend. Earlier today we showed off a dispiriting clip of them getting their souls blown out by a detonating car. To wrap up their inglorious run, they caught Edakulous' pineapple like it was a chest pass. Boom. That's a triple kill, and a long flight home. As soon as it left his hands, you knew it was over. IEM's analyst desk said that this was the loudest they've heard the crowd this weekend.

To be fair, this is barely EG's fault. The scramble at the end of a PUBG game leaves everyone out of position, and Edakulous' throw, which leveraged a slight incline in the terrain to travel about 30 yards, was one-in-a-million. If they ran, they would've immediately been gunned down by the teams on their flanks—their only choice was to suck it up and blast off.

This is the thing that sets a great Battlegrounds player apart. The game encourages a boatload of unpredictable situations, but despite that, Edakoulos has clearly played enough to be absolutely positive he could land a grenade in Evil Geniuses' breadbasket from his positioning. To me, that's more impressive than memorizing every corner of de_dust down to the pixel.

Perhaps the most exciting moment of the first day of IEM Oakland's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Invitational happened at the tail end of game four. Evil Geniuses built a makeshift fortress out of cars and motorcycles in an extremely compromising open field. 40 people were still alive, and the circle of death was funneling everyone into a tight, frantic murderhouse. EG seemed content to play as defensively as possible before shifting position—until Fuzzface, who plays for FaZe Clan, sensed a one-in-a-million opportunity. 

He jumped out of cover, took aim at one of the rickety humvees guarding the their flank, and detonated it with a few well-placed assault rifle rounds. Both of the remaining Geniuses were killed by the explosion, and FaZe went on to secure a fifth place finish for the day. 

If there's been one centralized theme from the second major LAN PUBG tournament, it's that pro teams are still figuring out the best way to use vehicles without getting killed. Evil Geniuses' decision to hunker down behind their barrier of cars wasn't even a terrible call on paper—in the second game of the afternoon Cloud 9 did the exact same thing to bleed out the other teams in the last circle—but in a game with so many variables, there's a pretty fine line between a smart tactical outmaneuvering and a spectacular suicide. 

Obviously, you need mobility to loot buildings and outrun timers, but when you're playing against the best marksmen in the world, you're fixing a pretty huge target to your back when you're behind the wheel. 

This is especially an issue at IEM, where assault rifles are being distributed with a frequency bonus. It doesn't take long for an AR to chew through a PUBG vehicle's health pool, and it's been interesting watching teams come up with ways to mitigate the damage. Some are each independently travelling in their own cars—like a patrol squadron—so they won't be utterly decimated if one goes down. 

Of course, not every team gets lucky enough to find a wealth of resources like that, and then you might end up like Teabone and Jazza, who bailed out of their flaming car in no man's land and were essentially pinned down for the rest of the match. 

The Battlegrounds meta is still in its embryonic phase, but I think one thing has become absolutely clear: spend as little time inside the vehicles as possible.

The Intel Extreme Masters pro gaming tour has kicked off in Oakland, California, and you can watch the action streaming all weekend for both PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Above, you can see the PUBG battle royale 20-team tournament, competing in four matches on Saturday and four more on Sunday, all in first-person perspective. The action is underway and will pick back up Sunday at 1pm Pacific. The teams are competing for a share of a $200,000 prize, with the winners taking away $60K.

Meanwhile, CS:GO's tournament (embedded below) will feature the semifinals (now in progress) on Saturday and finals on Sunday beginning at 1:15pm Pacific. The purse is $300,000, with the top team to walk away with $125,000.