A recent update to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds ditched the server selection the battle royale game used to employ in favour of region locking - something players had vociferously called for for months.
However, PUBG Corp., the developer of the game, has since been hit by a backlash to the update, with the game's western players calling for Chinese players only to be region-locked.
PC update 22, which came out earlier this week, made it so your server or region was decided automatically depending on the player's local region.
Playerunknown s Battlegrounds has long struggled with cheaters, popping up from nowhere to headshot you from across the map and possibly through some walls. For 16 months, the developers have been posting weekly accounts listing how many players they’ve permanently banned for cheating a number that now adds up to over 13 million. That’s about as many people as live in the whole nation of Greece, for reference.
We hope you’ve been enjoying all the great new Twitch streamer skins from the participants of the first season of Broadcaster Royale. The first group’s sale has come to a close, but our partnership with Twitch continues today with the next set of items from some of your favorite Twitch streamers! Your purchases directly benefit the streamer so expand that wardrobe and show your support in-game and out! These items can be purchased through the game client, Steam, the Twitch PUBG store, or directly from each streamer via their channel’s extension.
These will only remain on the store until October 25th at 7pm Pacific, after which they’ll be swapped out for the next limited time group. Each individual item is priced at $4.99.
Road rage is the theme of this week’s event mode where fuel and fire are king. In Crash Carnage, no firearms spawn so you’ll need to focus on melee weapons, throwables, and of course your driving skills to carry your duo to that final circle. Circles move considerably faster in this event, so loot quick, grab a vehicle, and crash your way to road warrior glory.
EVENT SCHEDULE
STARTS: Oct 4, 7pm PDT / Oct 5, 4am CEST / Oct 5, 11am KST ENDS: Oct 7, 7pm PDT / Oct 8, 4am CEST / Oct 8, 11am KST
AVAILABLE QUEUES
2-man duo team on Erangel (All Regions) NA/EU/AS: TPP & FPP KR/JP/SEA/OC/SA: TPP
RULES
Teams of duos will fight in Erangel. Up to 100 players can join.
Land vehicles, with the exception of motorcycles, will spawn throughout the map.
Firearms will not spawn; instead, melee weapons, throwables, consumables, and other gear will spawn.
Blue Zone will move faster than usual, especially the first Blue Zone.
The first Safe Zone, and the center point of the final Safe Zone, will be indicated with a flag icon on the minimap.
OTHER EVENT RULES
2-person duos only. Auto-matching is switchable to On/Off
In today’s Dev Letter, we’re talking about a brand new way to track your progress and show off your skill in PUBG. A Rank System has been a highly requested feature for some time now and we’re excited to finally be kicking off the first beta season. With it, we hope players will be able to better see their own growth, while being able to see where they stand among the millions of PUBG players out there, no matter which way they choose to enjoy the game. And best of all, once beta is over and we start real seasons, we’re planning some great end-of-season rewards surrounding this system.
The PUBG Rank System gives players another way to show off their skills as a survivor. You’ll begin each new season by playing 10 placement matches to determine your initial rank. From there, each game you play will adjust your Rank Point total, which determines your overall Rank. For the beta, we’re targeting about a 2 month season as a test window and will take a look at how that feels once it’s complete.
Earning Rank Points
Rank Points are accumulated by simply playing and performing well in games. Kills and overall placement both contribute to these points with a higher amount awarded based on how well you do. The rank tier you’re in and number of players in your game are also taken into consideration to calculate your final RP earned for that game. RP can be lost as well, so consistency is the key to achieving the next Rank.
While the overall calculation for how RP is earned has many different factors, here are some rough examples of the amount of RP a Diamond player can expect to earn in matches:
A Diamond player who wins a game with 8 kills would earn around 30 RP
A Diamond player who wins a game with 1 kill would earn around 20 RP
A Diamond player who ends a game in 100th place with 0 kills would lose around 20 RP
Rank Tiers
There are 8 different tiers for Ranks in PUBG, which progress as such:
Each of the 8 Ranks represents a range of total RP earned throughout the current season. At the start of a new season, RP will be soft reset and you will enter placement matches once again to determine your new starting rank, which takes into account your final standing from the previous season. Ranks will be gained and lost as you cross their point thresholds, with no additional qualifying matches required to move to the next rank.
These tiers are also separated by queue type, meaning that you will have a different Rank in Solo, Duo, and Squad queues which are also separated by FPP and TPP. We want everyone who loves PUBG to be able to experience the new Rank System without being forced into a specific way to play, so the choice is yours whether you focus on one or all of the different queues!
The chart below represents the different RP values required to achieve a certain Rank:
And for even more prestige, each queue will have a Top 100 leaderboard, showcasing the best of the best players in each game mode. This leaderboard is global, so showing up on here means you’ve clawed your way through some of the best players PUBG has to offer. Good luck!
Matchmaking Updates
With the introduction of Ranks, we also want to clarify how matchmaking is handled. There is still a separate MMR that is calculated based on your overall performance in games. This overall MMR will determine who enters matches with you and does not take into account your Rank or Rank Point total. Due to the sheer amount of players needed for each game, the matchmaking pool needs to be a little more open than simply adhering to Rank like a game with only 10 people per match could, while also helping with overall queue times. However, as you achieve higher ranks, many of the same performance factors are going into how many RP you’re earning, so in many cases high ranks will be matched with each other regardless.
We’ve also updated how regions work in general, so that the server closest to you will automatically be preferred when the matching pool in that region is sufficient. If that matching pool doesn’t have sufficient players, the next closest server will be chosen.
We’re excited to kick off the first PUBG ranked season beta with Update 22, and hope our players enjoy the added prestige that comes with your shiny new Rank medal. We’re looking forward to your feedback on the system, so hop in game, knock out those placements, and show the world what you’re made of!
Cheating is a problem in an awful lot of online games, and Playerunknown's Battlegrounds is no exception. It's a fairly common complaint among the PUBG community that the developers aren't doing enough to combat cheaters, but numbers assembled by redditor sjk045 indicate that a whopping 13 million accounts have been permanently banned over the past 69 weeks.
The figure is based on weekly reports posted by Bluehole on the official Korean PUBG Cafe, indicating the number of cheaters banned that week. The banhammer swings gently at first—the first week saw 1,852 accounts banned, 1,294 accounts were taken out in week two—but it ramps up fairly quickly: 132,676 bans were handed out in week 32, and more than 1 million accounts were banned in week 42.
Sjk045 clarified that the numbers represent accounts banned, not people—the great likelihood is that at least some of the banned accounts belong to repeat offenders—and that they do not include temporary bans. "It clearly says that these are number of 영구 이용 정지 (which literally means Permanent Ban in Korean)," they wrote.
The bans have tailed off dramatically over the past six months, and the most recently tallied week dipped under 100,000 bans for the first time in almost a year. But as sjk045 points out, that doesn't necessarily indicate reflect the effectiveness of PUBG Corp's efforts because the number of PUBG players has also dropped significantly, from an average concurrent player count of nearly 1.6 million (and a peak of 3.2 million) in January to 535,000 (1.1 million peak) in the past 30 days.
I've reached out to PUBG Corp for confirmation of the figure, and will update if I receive a reply.
On paper, the big update which hit Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds in the wee hours sounds pretty good. It adds a new anti-cheat system, brings back map selection, whacks in a ranking system to climb, and enables automatic region sorting to hopefully keep distant players from lagging up our rounds. In reality, ah, it seems little it might be a little messy.
Multiplayer games are the best type of games, because they’re built around the most interesting components known to humans: humans. Men, women, and an awful lot of children.
Internet strangers aren’t always the friendliest bunch, but they can surprise you in ways that a static system can’t. People form the living, beating hearts of the gaming moments I value the most. Join me, then, as I point at the games that encase those beating hearts best. (more…)
It s Halloween (month)! I don t know about you lovely lot, but there s nothing I find more spooky or chilling than charts detailing what the most popular video games are in a given week. That’s me, Fraser, filling in for John who is on holiday. A terrifying holiday, I bet.
Playerunknown s Battlegrounds has a massive range of guns currently available, each with its own set of scopes and attachments to glue on. It s fair to say that keeping track of them all can be a little difficult,s o this weapons guide aims to make that easier. With the random nature of the shrinking blue zone, you only have limited control over what situations you ll get into. In other words, you always want to make sure you have a short-range and a long-range weapon on your person. We ll give you a complete rundown of the guns in PUBG, then finish with some advice on attachments.
