Season 7 is now live and brings back the snow speckled island of Vikendi. While on vacation, Vikendi received several updates to its terrain, buildings, and environment. The biggest of which is the newly updated and rebranded Dinoland, the prehistoric park of the future! Clever boys and girls from all over can partake in the park’s amusements or seek out one of several outfits from Dinoland’s staff through Survivor Pass: Cold Front. If you’re looking for fun, Dinoland finds a way!

Players can also traverse the updated island in style aboard one of Vikendi’s new trains. You can hop aboard at one of several new stations. Other changes include the removals of snowmobiles and snow bikes, an overall reduction in snow, and the temporary removal of moonlight weather, which will return later after some visual improvements of its own.

All this and more as we burn the rails into Season 7. For full patch notes, visit this link: https://www.pubg.com/2020/04/14/update-7-1/

Hello players,

This is Taeseok Jang, Executive Producer of PUBG PC.

With the entire world facing the threat of COVID-19, let me start by wishing you and your loved ones good health. Like everyone, PUBG's teams around the world have had to change our work practices a bit, but we’re doing all we can to safely provide new content and uninterrupted live service to you all.

2019 was a busy year for us, with lots of new content, updates to some of our maps, and a number of quality of life fixes. While much of this content was very well received, we know some of our other efforts didn’t land as well with you. We also had trouble nailing down the causes of a few persistent bugs and struggled against a relentless onslaught of cheat programs. These are some of the things I’ll be talking with you about today.

Last year was also a year of growth and change for our teams. To say that we suffered from growing pains would be an understatement, and most unfortunate of all is that during the massive expansions of our teams, we failed to communicate properly with you all, giving the unfortunate illusions that we weren’t listening or did not care. It’s this that I’m most sorry for, as one of the reasons PUBG was able to grow as much as it has was the love and passion of our community. That dedication has carried us through three years of service and I’d like to reaffirm to you all today that we will focus on the issues that are most important to you and continue to improve the game for years to come.

There quite a bit to go over in each category, so I'll be releasing additional letters in the future to talk about other pressing topics. In this letter, I'll be giving you an update on some of those major areas of focus for us, including anti-cheat, performance, and stability. We may be throwing around a lot of technical terms, but we've tried our best to make everything as easy to follow as possible. Also keep in mind that, for anti-cheat especially, we've tried to share as much of our plan and progress as we can without giving too much information out to the people we're trying to stop.

Let's get started.

• Countermeasures for Hacking and Cheat Programs
  
  • Improve preventive measures
    
  • Strengthen monitoring/banning reliability

• Performance & Stability Improvements
  
  • Performance improvements
    
  • Stability improvements
    
  • Network improvements

The fight against cheat programs is never-ending and something we’ve been trying very hard to find a solution for. Last year, we spent time working on various measures to block cheat programs. Most of these actions focused on blocking cheat program developers to make it more difficult for them to create these highly lucrative cheats. As these cheat developers excel at adapting to our measures, we chose to keep these efforts secret to increase the time it takes for them to react, as much as possible. The unfortunate side effect of this is that it makes us look like we’re doing nothing against a high-priority issue. This year, we will be making improvements to ensure players can feel the impact of our efforts.

Preemptive anti-cheat actions mean making cheat programs unable to function before a cheater ever runs the program. This is mainly accomplished by targeting the development of cheat programs to make the effort outweigh the gains. We’re attacking this in a couple ways.

Two-factor Authentication System
We receive countless support tickets from players whose accounts have been permanently banned after their Steam account was hacked and used with cheat programs. The sellers of cheat programs often trade these accounts due to the high account turnover their customers experience. The vast majority of hacked accounts do not have Steam Guard activated and many have their login information compromised through phishing sites that lure players in with the fake promise of free in-game items.

To help prevent account hacking and improve security overall, we will be adding SMS authentication and a secondary authentication system using a one-time password. Your account will need to have two-factor authentication enabled in order to participate in ranked games to help ensure the fairest environment possible.

Improve hack vulnerabilities in code
Cheat programs target specific factors to manipulate our code. Here's what we're doing to prevent manipulation to weapons, vehicles, and character movement.

• Weapons
  
  • Reinforce server authentication related to the gun's firing angle, recoil, ballistic trajectory, etc.
    
  • Analyze and overcome the vulnerabilities of client logic related to aiming.

• Vehicles
  
  • Reinforce server authentication related to the vehicle's speed, moving angle, the time period it can remain in the air, etc.
    
  • This will not only ban accounts that are detected, but will also deter cheating tools in real-time, kick cheaters out of the match, and issue instant bans.

• Character Movement
  
• Reinforce server authentication related to a character's move speed, the time period they remain in the air, etc.

Enhanced Cheat Detection and Bans
To date, we’ve banned millions of accounts for using cheat programs. However, even with bans happening on a massive scale, cheaters still make it through and in some cases remain for much longer than they should. This year, we’re focusing on enhanced detection for our automated ban system as well as improving our hardware ban systems.

Expand Detection Range
Our teams will further expand the detection range to better prevent cheat programs. While our initial efforts yielded significant results, the developers of these cheat programs soon found ways to bypass our detection methods. We've been working to mitigate this issue by pushing updates on a regular basis. Cheat programs have also been targeting kernel domains to help their programs greatly avoid detection. To help close this loophole, we'll soon be expanding our focus here so that our anti-cheat solutions have higher authority to detect and stop these persistent cheats.

Automatic Analysis
The disadvantage of the manual analysis method is that it requires repeated countermeasure updates due to the cheat programs being constantly updated to stay a step ahead. One example is the automatic shutdown of a PC when our programs initialize the authentication process of a suspected account.

The goal is to automatically find clients using cheat programs by looking for exact differences in values between environments that are legitimate and those using cheats. We can then automatically block the account if the environment is not pure. Our expected timeline for applying this feature is currently scheduled for July 2020.

Toughen HWID Bans
When a Hardware ID ban is issued, it records information on the specific components inside a PC so that even when a new account is purchased or stolen, our servers know that PC is blacklisted. The more information collected, the more accurate the ban is but by seeking this additional information, our methods become easier to get around as sometimes replacing a single component is enough to bypass the ban. In addition to this, the developers of cheat programs have found ways to falsify Hardware ID data, which renders these efforts much less effective as well.

We've have recognized the limitations of the existing HWID ban system and are developing improvements. These improvements will seek hardware information at the user and kernel level using specific algorithms so that even if a cheat program tries to bypass, we will be able to quickly block the program again. This should help apply bans to PCs as well as accounts that use cheat programs.

Strengthen the Level of Bans
One of the ways we detect cheaters is through the reports you send in during your games. Among those reported users, we instantly ban those who have direct evidence of cheating and impose a temporary 24-hour ban on others that need further investigation.

The majority of temp banned users convert to a permanent ban, but a small portion are cleared due to either lack of evidence or us finding that the account was falsely flagged.
Our goal is to avoid false bans as often as possible, so we're cautious when taking action against an account; however, we've come to realize that being too cautious here can negatively impact far more people than the suspected account. Thus, we're changing our investigation methods to be more strict against accounts that have been temporarily banned on suspicion of using cheats.

In addition, we will target suspected cheaters for additional monitoring. If an account has been temp banned at least once, it will be added to a management list to be investigated further, sometimes including live monitoring of how they play the game.

If an account is temp banned multiple times on suspicion of cheating, we will automatically add additional time to their ban to ensure we have time to properly investigate the account. We're also looking to further automate the investigation process so that users who are found innocent can quickly return to the game by accumulating appropriate proof across multiple innocent accounts to check against.

In order to apply these measures, we'll need to re-establish our existing policy standards. Our plan is to apply these in June of 2020.


Now that we’ve discussed our anti-cheat plans, let’s move onto some of your other pressing issues, performance and stability.

First of all, we know it hasn’t been the best year for this category so far, with persistent network, server, and game client issues. Although providing a high level of service is always one of our top priorities, specific issues have endured for far too long and overshadow any good improvements we make. Hitching and game crashes especially have increased and remained persistent in the recent months. Your feedback has been heard loud and clear and is completely justified.

Recently, we deployed a fix that greatly reduced instances of hitching for many users in the game. We also rolled back the blood changes we made in Update 5.3 after they were found to be causing crashes for some players. While it’s nice to have found solutions to these issues, we know we need to be faster at detecting these issues if they make it into the game and, more importantly, finding them before they get there. To this end, we’re working on making our pre-deployment tests more efficient.

In the case of our game servers experiencing issues, the biggest cause here has been an onslaught of DDoS attacks that had persisted for many months. Earlier this year, we rolled out a new defense we developed to mitigate these attacks, which has proved to be effective. Now that it’s in place, we’ll continue to strengthen it where possible to make sure these attacks do not disrupt your experience when they occur.

Optimization of Streaming/Hitching

• Improve Seek Time to find content in the package through pak file optimization
  
  • Pak file: A "package" file that compresses all assets (weapons, vehicles, buildings, costumes, etc.) used in the game
• Improve performance by reducing the number of Level Streaming and through optimization
  
  • Merge Landscape → Reduce the number of Level Streaming and GC (Garbage Collection) → Improve hitching issues
• Improve hitching issues caused by graphic data loading/unloading
  
  • Change the method of Level Streaming from graphic data loading to one frame to loading separately per frame to reduce hitching issues
• List of improvement for stuttering issues
  
• When players open Inventory
  
  • When players turn on Character Preview
    
  • When players equip weapons
    
  • In situations where players make kills
    
  • When players throw items
    
  • When players open UI including Option/Mission, etc
    
  • Minimize the number of Font types used in the game for optimization
    
  • Optimize various skins shown in the game - Items (Weapon, character)
    
    • In particular, improve hitching issues by asynchronous loading of gun skins that take a long time to load

Optimization of GPU

• Optimize and improve GPU performance by further utilizing HLOD
  
  • HLOD refers to a system that combines multiple static mesh actors into a single static mesh actor when these are viewed from a long distance. This can help improve performance by reducing the number of the actors that need to be rendered on a scene and thus reducing per-frame draw calls.
• Optimize it by improving landscape structures

Optimization of Animations

• Optimize the animations so the amount of calculations can be adjusted based on a gameplay-wise priority to address the overload issue due to dense character population or excessive actions played.

Improvement for Low-spec PCs

• We've seen cases where the game can't be played due to performance issues on various PCs. To minimize such problems, we will make improvements to automatically adjust the degree of optimization based on CPU use so the game performance can be stable on low-spec PCs as well. Also, we are currently working to reduce the cost of animation processing on the machines with low CPU cores.

Stability Improvement

• We still have instances where players experience intermittent crash issues in the lobby, in-game, on the loading screen, etc. Our dev team is working to improve these issues by enhancing internal verification processes and further utilizing crash reports.

Fix Client Crash Issues in a Timely Manner

• Client crash issues occur mainly due to memory loss and we're strengthening our check process when builds are created
  
  • Remove memory being unnecessarily used through continuous memory filing
    
  • Optimize art resources being used more than needed
    
  • Optimize content loading methods in general through code refactoring
    
  • Prevent memory leakage through live profiling
    
    • This should prevent issues that stem from extended play

Enhance Build Verification Process

• Introduce an automatic verification tool while enhancing manual verification methods
  
• Introduce various check-up system to monitor program's health

• Tool for checking memory leakage
  
• ITool for checking memory usage
  
• ITool for detecting memory damage which detects crashes caused by unintended access to memory
  
• Hitch checks
  
• CPU/GPU state checks

• Create a testing environment with 100 users using AI
  
  • Performance tests are already run when there are 100 players in a match, but player count and results can vary.
    
  • By utilizing bots, we can run large scale tests similar to the actual gameplay environment as often as we want

DDoS
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks affect the majority of popular online games at some point. When the game server experiences DDoS attacks, all users on that server go through connection errors such as network delay, high ping, and packet loss. DDos attacks greatly increased since November 2019 and became a very serious problem in February 2020. To address this, our teams have introduced additional external solutions, while developing our own DDoS defenses. Thanks to this, most DDoS attacks are being blocked successfully. We will share our measures taken against DDoS in more detail in a separate post.

Packet Loss
After some of the external DDos solutions were applied, we began to receive a higher amount of packet loss reports from NA and EU players. We've mitigated this quite a bit, but some of these issues still remain. Since various errors can contribute to this, we're working on cause analysis and route optimization to further reduce this packet loss and improve the overall network environment.
In Closing

We understand that when we do not communicate with you, your natural instincts are to assume that we don’t care about these issues. We’re working very hard to improve not only our communication, but also the issues we described in this letter.

We’ve got a lot of great content planned for this year, and we want you to be able to enjoy it without wondering when your next crash or issue is going to be. I’ve said quite a bit already for one letter, so we’re going to release further communication on other issues at a later date. Also, thank you for your patience while we got this letter out. We felt it was worth a little extra time to fully articulate what we've been working on and what our upcoming priorities are.

The PUBG Dev team is aware of the importance of providing a stable environment and thank you for your continued patience and feedback.

Thank you and stay safe.

- Taeseok Jang, PUBG Executive Producer

Hello PUBG Esports fans,

To support global esports during this time of physical distancing, PUBG Corporation is cancelling the PUBG Global Series while simultaneously introducing the PUBG Continental Series online competition.

Since February 2020, when the decision was made to indefinitely postpone the first chapter of PGS 2020, PGS Berlin, we’ve worked to find a solution that’s healthy and safe for fans, staff, and players around the world. The first conclusion: it is difficult to host live tournament events due to COVID-19 concerns, and we therefore must cancel the three PGS events including the Berlin stop. The next point of agreement is that the teams and players who’ve participated in the 2020 campaign so far deserve recognition and compensation for their competitive spirit.

Upon cancellation of PGS Berlin, 21 teams had qualified for the event with additional teams in the middle of qualifying. This is how those teams will be recognized and compensated.

Teams qualified for PGS Berlin
The 21 teams around the world that qualified for PGS Berlin will be provided with $20,000 each.


Chinese teams participating in the ongoing PGS Berlin Qualifier (PCL)

• PUBG Champions League (PCL) is currently on-going. The top five teams from PCL will be rewarded with $20,000 each.

Teams from Americas region which has postponed PGS Berlin qualifier

• In the case of the Americas region, the $120,000 allocated for the top six seeds will be distributed to the 16 teams that made it to the final qualifier.

Resuming PUBG esports 2020 with PUBG Continental Series (PCS)

• To continue esports growth this year, PUBG is implementing an online regional tournament structure called the PUBG Continental Series (PCS) to honor the teams who have competed with passion so far in 2020 and the fans who support them.

In May, June, and August, online events in the PUBG Continental Series will be held across four regions, with a total of $2,400,000 being rewarded across all events. The four regions include:

• Asia - which consists of Korea, Japan, China, and Chinese Taipei
  
• Asia Pacific- which consists of Southeast Asia and Oceania
  
• Europe
  
• North America

The PCS Charity Showdown, scheduled for May, are regional charity invitational events that we are offering due the current COVID-19 challenges. While the total combined winning for these regional tournaments are $800,000, each tournament will have a prize pot and donation fund of $200,000.

• $100,000 will be distributed to participating teams based on their performance.
  
• The remaining $100,000 will be donated to a charity of the winning team’s choice under the names of all participating teams from the regional tournament

The four PCS regional tournaments - ASIA, APAC, NA, and EUROPE - to be held in June and August will provide an opportunity for teams to prove that they are the best in their region. Once again, the total prize pool for the official PCS tournaments is $800,000, with $200,000 going to each regional tournament.

To add to the excitement of PCS, Pick’em Challenge is returning to provide more diverse rewards and entertainment to fans and additional benefits to participating teams. Additional details about the PUBG Continental Series will be coming soon.

This year, we have been working to enhance our esports programs by providing sustainability for teams, strengthening the fandom, growing the ecosystem with our partners, and improving the competition structure and profit-sharing model. Though we cannot host the PGS events as initially planned, we would like to emphasize that our commitment towards our goals is unwavering. We’re excited to share more about our upcoming events, in addition to future plans, at a later date. Until then, thank you and we appreciate your support for PUBG esports.

April 29 - Additional Update:

• Fixed an issue where players can enter a vehicle while shooting full auto and continue shooting without having to aim out of the vehicle (including in the BRDM).
  
• Fixed an issue when leaning right using weapons with a let-mounted Canted Sight, which made it difficult for players to see you shooting from the corner of objects.
  
  • You can no-longer lean slightly to the right when using a Canted Sight on a weapon where it’s mounted to the left of the weapon.
• Fixed an issue when in certain situations, ADSing in the back of a Motor Glider could cause the player model to stand up in an awkward position.
  
• Fixed an issue where players could move without making noise in specific situations while cooking a throwable.
  
• Fixed an issue with input not being focused to the item quantity modifier box when Ctrl + Drag looting items.
  
• Fixed tool-tip for mission ‘Travel by Boat or Aquarail’ which was miswritten as ‘Jump in the water and swim 300m in total’.
  
• Fixed an issue with the Skol Kar98k texture not displaying in the Survivor Pass.
  
• Fixed an issue with the Skol Kar98k reload animation where the chambered bullet wasn’t visible.
  
• Fixed an issue where players could move to unintended locations and shoot through terrain/walls in Prison on Erangel and some locations on Vikendi.

April 22 - Additional Update:

• Fixed multiple situations where players would take unintended damage while riding a Train
  
• Fixed an issue where players received damaged after jumping into each other
  
• Fixed an issue on Karakin where the visual state of a destructible wall or floor could look different from player to player.
  
• Fixed an issue where players could vault to an unintended location within the gym at Pecado on Miarmar
  
• Fixed an issue where bullets could pass through certain walls at very long-range due to a change in LOD
  
• Fixed an issue which caused auto fire mode to change to single after throwing a grenade in Team Deathmatch.
  
• Fixed an issue which caused a water splashing sound to play when exiting a boat, Aquarail or BRDM on land
  
• Fixed an issue which could cause multiple map waypoints from the same player to remain visible

April 20 - Additional Update:

• Sticky Bomb now makes an arming sound as it's thrown
  
• Fixed an issue which prevented Sticky Bombs from dealing damage when multiple were stacked on top of each other

April 16 - Additional Update:

• Improved FPS hitching issues by improving the memory allocation logic in addition to further improvements for some specific PC configurations
  
• Fixed occasional client crashing issue when scrubbing replay timelines

-


When we launched Karakin back in Season 6, Vikendi was put on a short hiatus. During that time, we’ve put a lot of work into making PUBG’s frosty Battleground something new and special. Once we were close to finished, we gathered a little more feedback and made adjustments after the PUBG Partner test last month. Now we’re happy to announce that Vikendi is ready to be brought back into the fight in Update 7.1!

Vikendi has had quite a few changes since you saw it last. We’ve updated terrain, adjusted snow levels (and then readjusted them based on your test feedback), changed cities and landmarks, added a multi-track railway system to help navigate the island, and even converted the quaint Dino Park into Dinoland, the Prehistoric Park of the Future!

For those who want to embrace the culture of Vikendi, Survivor Pass: Cold Front is also available with new missions, rewards, and glimpses into the island’s ill-fated past. There’s also plenty of Dinoland merch available in the pass and we know some of you are just dying to play bullet tag while dressed as the lovable Alex the T-Rex. All in all, there are over 100 rewards to unlock, so pick up the pass and make Dinoland the new happiest place on Earth.

There’s more to see in Update 7.1, so take a look below for the full patch notes and we’ll see you on Vikendi!




Better than ever, with updated landmarks, trains and a slight change in season.

• Trains have been added and can be found moving along multiple tracks across Vikendi
  
  • There is a major train line that extends along the perimeter of Vikendi, with 6 connected tracks towards the inland areas of the island
    
  • Trains stop temporarily at train stations across the map
• Reduced snow cover
  
  • Snow cover is reduced more on the Southern areas of the island
• Snowbikes and Snowmobiles have been removed
  
  • Motorcycle and Motorcycle with sidecar will spawn instead, being more versatile vehicles for the updated terrain
• Weather will be either Clear or Snowy
  
  • Moonlight has been removed for now, but will return with visual improvements at a later date
• General map optimizations have been made
  
• You can play the updated Vikendi in custom matches
  
• A new Cargo Depot has been added

• Dino Park has been replaced by the bigger, more spectacular Dinoland

• Abbey has been relocated to Mount Kreznik

• Volnova now has much more cover

• Tovar and Movatra have been removed

To ensure players in all regions are able to have a healthy matchmaking experience, with quick matchmaking times wherever possible, map selection options for each region do vary. Wherever possible, we want players to have the choice of selecting which map they want to play, but our priority is ensuring healthy matchmaking times.

AS, KR/JP, KAKAO, SEA, EU, RU: Full map selection, you can select Vikendi or any other map individually.

NA: Vikendi will be playable via the featured map option, with all other maps being in a separate random map queue. We expect to have Vikendi available as a featured map for 1-2 weeks, but will monitor queue times closely and will return to full random matchmaking earlier if queue times begin to suffer.

OC/LATAM: Vikendi has been added to the random map pool, alongside all other maps.


Survivor Pass: Cold Front is your ticket to all the cool new outfits in Season 7. With costumes ranging from Dinoland employee apparel and mascot costumes to other themed looks, there’s something for everyone. Players can also once again unlock community rewards by working together, so be on the lookout for data discs!

Community Missions

• All players can contribute to the community gauge to unlock videos and receive community skin rewards
  
• 1 video, 4 skins can be unlocked by accomplishing the community missions
  
• To complete, Loot event items in public (normal) matches
  
• As before, the community mission gauge is filled as such:
  
  • Disc piece: 1 point
    
  • Broken disc: 2 points
    
  • Old DVD: 3 points
• On the Community Mission tab, you can see your personal contribution score and will earn XP towards your Survivor Pass
  
  • 2000 XP per 50 points contributed

Season Missions

• There are three tracks of Season Missions
  
• Each track will be released monthly in April, May and June
  
• Tracks that are locked will show the time left before they are unlocked

Progression Mission

• Players can earn large amounts of XPs when completing Progression Missions
  
• Tracks 1 and 2 are available to all players and contain a set of 8 missions each that increase in difficulty
  
• Track 3 is open for Premium Pass holders and contains a set of 10 missions that increase in difficulty
  
• Milestones are completed when a set goal is achieved related to daily, weekly, and challenge missions.
  
• Example: Complete total number of 50 missions

Challenge Mission

• These are ‘Survival’ Themed challenge missions
  
• Challenge Missions are composed of 16 total missions. Every 4 missions completed will grant a Utility belt and Backpack skin as a reward

The Survival Title System is being shelved this update, in preparation for a new system making its way in-game in a future update alongside our new Competitive Mode.

Fear not, you can still view all your accrued statistics in the Season tab and if you’re eligible for rewards from Season 6 of the Survival Title System, you’ll receive them once this update hits live servers.

• Overview and Leaderboard tabs of the Season menu have been removed
  
• A new Leaderboard will arrive with the introduction of Competitive Mode in a future update

We know weapon choice is important to you, but there is also the problem of there eventually being just too much choice, especially when a certain few weapons remain the most popular picks over everything else. We want to keep adding new weapons to the game but at some point finding the exact gun you want would suffer and as the overall list grows, maintaining balance between everything would also become more difficult. Because of this eventuality, we’ve decided to test out the idea of shared stat weapons. For all intents and purposes, the Mosin-Nagant is a Kar98k. The stats, attachments, ammunition, etc. are all directly copied from the Kar98k, but the Mosin will feature its own look and sound. The Mosin-Nagant Sniper Rifle has been added to Vikendi and Erangel, but not in the same way as we have other weapons.

The hope here is to be able to give more weapon diversity without diminishing the availability of the weapons you love to use, but we know a choice like this might be met with mixed feelings. Are more weapons in the game a good thing, even if some of them share stats, or should we be more selective with what we put in and make sure all weapons are unique? The Mosin is coded as its own weapon, so we could always adjust its stats in the future to make it unique, but we’d like to at least test out this idea first.

We’d love your take on this, so please let us know your thoughts.

The changes below were implemented to live servers on April 9 during maintenance.

• Greatly reduced instances of hitching during gameplay. We will continue to make further optimizations where possible
  
• Optimized the drop mesh of weapons and attachments in the world to reduce memory usage
  
• Reverted new blood effects to version used prior to Update 5.3 due to unresolved crashing issues
  
  • Reverted blood effects include:
    
  • Overall visual changes
    
  • Environmental blood splatter
    
  • More distinct blood splatters for head and neck shots

The original intention of the blood effect improvements were to provide similar visual effects across all color modes and enable players to get quick information during combat situations from their shots and surrounding environments.

However, we have confirmed an issue with game stability from the updated blood effect features. While we’re happy with the blood effect changes, providing smooth and stable gameplay is our number one priority. Therefore, we’ve made the hard decision to roll back the blood effects to the old effects from before Patch 5.3.

We will update you once we are ready to deploy the improved blood effects again. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this decision.

• Matchmaking can now be cancelled while browsing other menus
  
• Slight changes have been made to button placement and visuals

• Network Debug UI has been cleaned up to be less intrusive while playing
  
  • The debug information is now enabled by default and can be disabled in the Gameplay tab of the Settings
• Network indicator icons have been removed
  
• TDM match results will now show players who’ve recently left the match
  
• Quantity button now works correctly when converting Blue Coupons to BP

Other Changes:

• Slight visual changes to Arcade matchmaking UI to be more consistent with public matches
  
• TDM UI has been improved
  
• Eliminated decimal points from the scores for better readability
  
• Panzerfaust and Mosin-Nagant have been added to Training Mode
  
• Tommy Gun’s icon has been updated to reflect the recently added rails
  
• Fixed an issue which prevented Sticky Bombs from dealing damage when multiple were stacked on top of each other
  
• Sticky Bomb now makes an arming sound as it's thrown

New skins have been added

• Dinoland T-shirts (Available April 22 until July 22)
  
• Labor Day skins (Available April 29 until May 27)
  
• Flying Chicken Neck Pillow
  
  • “Baby Bear” Sleep Mask
    
  • Sleep Mask

Gameplay

• Crouching/standing repeatedly while ADS could cause the animation transition to stutter
  
• No ADS transition animation while using the Canted Sight
  
• Players could clip through walls/ceilings of buildings by vaulting or using ledge-grab
  
  • This issue was fixed with weekly maintenance April 9
• Player’s view would momentarily be obstructed by any large backpack while ADS in a Motor Glider
  
• Players could ADS briefly after entering the BRDM
  
• When reviving in FPP the camera would sometimes be in the incorrect position
  
• Healing/boosting prevented the passenger of a buggy from turning correctly
  
• While prone in TPP players could ADS to unintended angles without their lower body rotating
  
• Players could unintentionally use AR/DMR/SR in the Motorcycle’s rear seat
  
• Characters would lean to the left while driving a Motorcycle after breaking destructable fences
  
• Player’s camera would detach from the character after reloading a weapon while ADS in a Motor Glider
  
• While holding throwables, in certain situations they could fall to the ground and emit effects for that player, without the grenade actually being used
  
• Flare Gun could float mid-air while looking at the sky and pressing the ‘Inspect’ key
  
• When a Molotov was shot mid-air flames wouldn’t propagate on the ground beneath the point of explosion
  
• Throwable trajectory line wouldn’t line up with the direction the character was facing while in a vehicle
  
• Player’s body could contort while aiming with a melee weapons while in a vehicles passenger seat
  
• Tommy Gun’s rear sight would disappear in certain situations
  
• Fixed multiple situations where players would take unintended damage while riding a Train
  
• Fixed an issue where players received damaged after jumping into each other
  
• Fixed an issue on Karakin where the visual state of a destructible wall or floor could look different from player to player.
  
• Fixed an issue where players could vault to an unintended location within the gym at Pecado on Miarmar
  
• Fixed an issue where bullets could pass through certain walls at very long-range due to a change in LOD
  
• Fixed an issue which caused auto fire mode to change to single after throwing a grenade in Team Deathmatch

Sound

• Footsteps would be muffled after exiting a Motor Glider
  
• UMP45 gunshots could be heard further away than intended
  
• Bullet ricochet sounds weren’t being played
  
• Fixed an issue which caused a water splashing sound to play when exiting a boat, Aquarail or BRDM on land

UI/UX

• Blank items could sometimes be displayed in the inventory UI
  
• Current Season menu in the Career tab wouldn’t display this season’s data
  
• Some BP items would appear to be purchasable when you have insufficient BP to make the purchase
  
• Red Dot & Holo Sight didn’t mention Tommy Gun under “Attachable Weapons”
  
• Team UI didn’t display properly in observer mode while observing a player after they’d crashed
  
• When using a Flare Gun the Special Care Package UI wouldn’t light up green in certain situations
  
• Fixed an issue which could cause multiple map waypoints from the same player to remain visible

Weapon Mastery

• DBS stats weren’t being recorded
  
• Win94 kills were being recorded under the DBS

Skin & Items

• Sunswiped Sports Jacket was clipping with other items

Note: Replays from previous updates are no-longer playable, as the replay system has been updated.

We're thrilled so many of you are enjoying our special Fantasy BR event mode. In order to make sure everyone has enough time to earn all of the rewards, we've decided to extend the event an additional week. Thank you for all your feedback and have fun on the Dragon's Isle!

Fantasy Battle Royale now available until April 12th 11:59 PM PDT / April 13, 0700 UTC. Be sure to claim your rewards within 48 hours of event completion.


And now for something completely different...


Greetings Internet Warriors!

April Fools’ Day is a long-celebrated tradition in the gaming world. Whether through silly videos, fake patch notes, or even full blown in-game events, it’s the time of year where teams can go a little crazy and try something completely different— and it doesn’t get much more different for us than Fantasy Battle Royale.

First off, we understand that times are difficult right now due to the impact of COVID-19 around the world and that some companies have chosen to forego April Fools activities this year. In a time when people are keeping themselves safe and indoors, we believe that video games offer a diversion from solitude and a way to be social while still staying safely apart. For these reasons, we’ve chosen to go forward with our planned event in hopes that it offers a little bit of lighthearted fun during this necessary isolation.

We’ve also ensured that all rewards associated with this event can be earned, with no purchases required, to prevent people from missing out on them if they have to choose more necessary things to spend their money on during this time. The first set of rewards are earned through special event missions, either directly or purchased with the “gold” that the missions give. These rewards can also be purchased in the regular shop if you have some extra income and choose not to participate in the event. The other set of rewards can only be purchased with BP and there will be an option to convert your extra “gold” into BP to help acquire these. Taking care of yourselves and your loved ones is the most important thing right now, so making sure that all of the Fantasy Battle Royale rewards could be earned was a priority for us.

So what exactly is this event? Fantasy Battle Royale is an optional event mode that lets you choose from one of four fantasy classes to take on the Battlegrounds in a completely different way. Creating a true fantasy mode would require more resources than we wanted, so we made a couple… alternate choices in how we represent the fantasy in Fantasy Battle Royale. By utilizing existing PUBG mechanics in fun and crazy new ways, we came up with (what we consider) a funny mode that didn’t have to waste important development resources for a week-long joke.

Even a silly event mode has its uses, though. Fantasy BR has given us the opportunity to test a few new ideas in a real (but fantasy) (but still real) environment. A big part of Battle Royale is survival and we’ve been curious what crafting on the Battlegrounds might look like. Fantasy BR gave us the perfect opportunity to try out a crafting system and as such, the vast majority of the loot you’ll find in Fantasy BR consists of crafting components used to improve the items you begin with. Utilizing fantasy classes, such as the Paladin, had the added bonus of finally letting us test a certain shield we teased out to you all a little too soon.

Now, none of this means that these test features are going to appear in normal PUBG matches tomorrow, or ever for that matter, but it does finally give us a good way to get them out to you and gather your feedback so we can decide whether or not to develop them further.

We wanted to mention all this up front because it’s important for us that you know Fantasy BR wasn’t some giant use of our development resources. It is mostly some creative new art on top of a few bits of code to change how things that already exist in PUBG work. We know that what we spend our time on is important to you, especially while some persistent issues remain unfixed right now.

We also know that we're late on delivering the Community Letter we promised you that talks about those issues, but plan to have that out within the next week or so. All in all, we’re happy we can test potential future content and give you something silly on a day that’s all about fun, with minimal impact on the more pressing issues we’re actively working on.

So, put on your robe and wizard hat, because this is Fantasy Battle Royale and things are about to get… well, weird.



Fantasy Battle Royale will be available as an event mode for a limited time from April 1st, 00:00 PDT ~ April 12th, 11:59 PM /  April 13, 0700 UTC.

To play, click on the Fantasy Battle Royale banner in main lobby to enter the special Fantasy BR lobby.

Basic Rules

• Fantasy BR takes place on the Dragon’s Isle (Erangel)
  
• TPP only, 20 Squads of 4 (maximum of 80 players per match)
  
• Fantasy BR does not support 1 man or 3 man squad but will automatically find suitable companions for you
  
• Friendly fire is disabled (unless we’re talking the mendingstar and heal bomb, which are the friendliest fire of all)
  
• Fantasy BR does not grant XP rewards but BP is earned based on your total gameplay time
  
• Fantasy BR matches don’t count towards the Survivor Pass. However, there are separate Fantasy BR exclusive missions
  
  • Complete Fantasy BR exclusive missions to earn special Fantasy BR mode rewards
    
  • Please refer to the 'Fantasy Battle Royale Exclusive Systems' section for more details

• After matchmaking completes, players will be asked to select a class to play before flying to the Dragon’s Isle
  
  • The Class select screen is automatically shown and may be brought back up using the F8 key
    
  • There are no class limits, so get creative with your party! (Just remember you’ll be sharing loot if you double, triple, or quadruple up on classes!)
• First circle will be displayed before you jump
  
  • Blue Zone will move faster and deal more damage in Fantasy BR than in normal matches! Be careful!

"I would like to RAGE"

The fearsome Barbarian is a melee combatant with high HP who uses his rage to increase his movement speed. Swinging his Kick Ash Longsword in a wide arc in front of them, they gain additional movement speed with each successful attack on an enemy.

Barbarians also produce Mega Energy Drinks, which can be used to recover large amounts of HP over time. Although he doesn’t have any other special attacks or skills, his fast movement speed makes him the best suited to chase down squishy opponents and show them the business end of his weapon.


"They’re taking the Hobbits to Erangel!"

The Ranger is a long-ranged sniper equipped with the deadly 'Dragonslayer' crossbow, capable of firing multiple shots in succession. With a long range and high attack damage, she is a formidable opponent, other than her rather low amount of HP.

Ranger’s utilize stealth to emit no movement sounds, making them the perfect sneak attack class. The Ranger brings utility to the fight as well with their Flash Powder grenades that temporarily blinds enemies and decreases the damage allies receive.


“What manner of man are you that can summon up fire without flint or tinder?”

Wizards are heavy damage dealers who rain down fire on groups of enemies at once. Whether firing 2 consecutive blasts from their wands, dropping a powerful Fireball spell, or calling meteor showers from the sky, Wizards always have something fiery and explosive to pull out of their arsenal.

Keep your allies close though, as the Wizard has the lowest HP of any class and make a delightful squishing sound that Barbarians find irresistible.


“I can do this all day.”

The Paladin is the key healing class in Fantasy Battle Royale. Healing allies with their Mendingstar and blocking incoming attacks with their Brooklyn Shield, the Paladin is right at home protecting the weak.

The Paladin’s Mendingstar serves two functions; healing allies it strikes or dealing damage to and slowing down enemies. The Paladin’s Shield Charge can also knock away enemies who get too close to his party.

Paladins also regularly produce First Aid Kits that can be given to allies or toss a 'Heal Bomb' to create an AoE healing zone, but be warned that this zone can also heal enemies!

One slight hitch though, maybe it’s because of their heavy armor or the fact that they have no free hands, but Paladins cannot ledge grab and may have to find more creative ways to keep up with their team.

Ye Olde Chicken Dinner

• Just like traditional Battle Royale, the last surviving squad is the winner

Items

• Fantasy BR has its own set of world spawn items, which mostly include crafting materials
  
• No weapons, ammo, throwables, boosts, or equipment will spawn
  
  • Bandages will still spawn in the world

Vehicles

• Only the Noble Steed (motorcycle) and Dragon Wagon (UAZ) spawn in Fantasy BR
  
• Vehicles are slower and have lower durability than in normal BR to keep fights more focused on class warfare

Care Packages

• Care Packages are dropped more often in Fantasy BR and are be marked on the map for all players
  
• Care Packages can contain the Zircon, a powerful gem used to upgrade your gear to Lv.5
  
• Using the interaction key (F) on Care Packages grants a temporary invincibility buff
  
  • The Buff lasts for 30 seconds, making you immune to all damage

Character Equipment

In Fantasy Battle Royale, players start the game with a class-specific weapon, necklace, and ring equipped. These items are exclusive to your character and cannot be dropped or traded.

Some classes have ammo and special skills that they can use. These are automatically refilled in specific intervals depending on the levels of your equipment. There is a cap to how many of each you can hold, so make sure to use em if you got em!

Item Crafting

• Picking up crafting materials allows you to upgrade your weapon and gear
  
  • Use the right mouse button on components in the inventory screen to start crafting

• Class Weapons, Necklaces, and Rings can be upgraded to Lv.4 using class-specific gems found throughout the world
  
  • Loot crystals can be dropped for your teammates, so grab everything you see!
• To raise your equipment to Lv.5, you will need to find a Zircon
  
  • The Zircon is a crystal that spawns very rarely across the map.
    
  • Care Packages will always contain a Zircon

Fantasy BR Exclusive Missions and Store

• There are new Fantasy Battle Royale Missions to complete, which earn you costume set pieces or a special event currency called Gold
  
• A total of 8 costume sets can be earned or purchased during this event, 2 costume sets per class
  
  • The first set of skins is earned by completing missions and spending your Gold in the Fantasy Battle Royale store
    
    • Alternatively, these sets may be purchased in the normal in-game store for $9.99/set if you who do not wish to earn them
  • The second set of skins can be purchased in the normal in-game store using BP
    
  • All unlocked Fantasy Battle Royale skins are permanent and can be used in normal PUBG games!

That’s the basic rundown! We sincerely hope you enjoy Fantasy Battle Royale. It’s silly, short lived, and certainly not for everyone, but for those who appreciate such things, the happiest of April Fools’ Days to you all!

- PUBG Dev team

*No unicorns were harmed in the making of this game mode*

Dear Community,

On March 23rd, PUBG is officially 3 years old! We want to start off by thanking you for all your support over the last 3 years. 2019 was in a lot of ways a year of taking risks for us. Reworking a beloved map like Erangel required a lot of love and care to get right, but we’re pleased that many of you are happy with the result. We also introduced our smallest map to date, Karakin, which brought a new intensity to PUBG’s brand of Battle Royale.

To help navigate these new and reworked maps, we improved our movements systems to allow for climbing and ledge grabs, greatly increasing the tactical options available to players. And speaking of tactical, 2019’s Weapon Mastery system allowed you to track your progress with the extensive PUBG arsenal for Weapon Charms and bragging points.

While there was plenty new, we saw 2019 as a year of building a foundation for PUBG. Going forward, we want to continue to improve upon what’s made PUBG so popular these last 3 years. This will include map reworks, new maps, new weapons & mechanics, additional game options such as Arcade’s Team Deathmatch, and of course quality of life improvements & bug fixes for some of your most pressing issues.

The first of those reworks has already been talked about! Thanks to the help of our PUBG Partners, you all got a first look at the updated Vikendi. We’re pouring over your data and feedback from the test to get it polished up before the train leaves the station. We want each new and reworked map to bring an entirely new experience to you all with fun and exciting new mechanics, so a big thank you to everyone in our community who tested it out and sent in your feedback.

Community is the backbone of any online game and as such celebrating our 3rd year also means celebrating you. This is why we recently ran our first ever Community Skin Design Contest in which members of the PUBG Community from all around the world submitted their own skin designs to be voted on by you.

The winners of this contest had their designs created and they will be available to all PC and Console players for free during this celebration. Details on the winners can be found below!

PUBG has come a long way since March of 2017 and we fully understand that there is still much to do, but it is because of all of you that we’ve been able to take our little game and grow it into one of the biggest games of all time. We know an achievement like this comes with a big responsibility to you all and we’re working hard this year to do better.

We hope to share these efforts and our plans for 2020 soon but for now let us thank you once again for being a part of this incredible journey. From all of us here at PUBG to all of you around the world, happy 3rd anniversary!

-The PUBG Team

• Winners of Global Skin Contest are included in the 3rd Anniversary Item Box!
  
  • Hoodie skin by @KARAAGEKUN_KEI from JP
    
  • M416 Skin by @DY_BUDDY from CN
    
  • Parachute skin by @SEB34627111 from EMEA]/list]
  PC Distribution Period
  
  • Mar 23rd (Mon) 0900 KST ~ April 23rd 0900 KST
    
  • 3rd Anniversary Skin Set can be purchased in the in-game store for FREE
    
  • (Don't forget to collect your items before the gift period ends!)

Pick up the all new Panzerfaust and bring an explosive new party to Karakin or grab one of the newly rebalanced guns to try out. The UMP45, Tommy Gun, and M249 have all received some changes. The M249 and DBS have been taken out of Care Packages and can now be found among normal loot on all Battlegrounds.

There are also several quality of life improvements, including much requested changes to remove invincibility in Team Deathmatch once you fire a weapon. We've also taken a step to mitigate the hitching issues some players were experiencing.

There's plenty more to go over, so check out the full patch notes here for more details.