PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS News

Hello players!

One of the most important elements of Battle Royale is survival, and being the last survivor standing means growing through experience. However, many of you have stated that PUBG also needs to promote the fierce competition between players as they play and win games, and a ruleset to amplify that competitive spirit. For those players, we're happy to introduce the Ranked Ruleset.

A ruleset like this needs feedback though, so like our previous skill-based rating test, we're looking to PUBG LABS to gather your feedback as quickly and efficiently as possible.

During this LABS test, we'll be analyzing the data and your feedback to better understand what our players are enjoying and will adjust the ruleset accordingly before we take it live.

Now, let's take a look at the details of the Ranked Ruleset and when you can get in and try it out!



Test Goals & Expectations

The Ranked Ruleset test aims to merge the strengths of both public and esport ruleset settings to build a new ruleset specifically made for competitive play. We hope this adds some additional tools for players to be competitive without it being too jarring for players coming from normals.

The Ranked Ruleset test will be available in both FPP and TPP mode and maps will be chosen randomly from Erangel, Miramar and Sanhok. The number of players will be reduced to 64 as well.

Other changes of the ruleset are as below.

Loot Spawn Adjustment

For an environment like this to thrive, players need access to the right tools to be competitive. Therefore, the item spawn rate on all 3 maps has been set higher than that of normal Battle Royale games. In addition, the spawn rate of preferred items such as primary weapons, Level 2 equipment, 4x scopes, and First Aid Kits have been increased to make for a more competitive environment. Players will still have to loot several areas in order to be fully equipped, but should be going into firefights with at least a start on their final loadout.

Blue Zone Balance Adjustment

To help keep the fight moving with fewer players, the Blue Zone will also have a few changes from normal games. The first safe zones will be similar to that of public matches, but the tempo will grow faster as the game continues to force more confrontations as the player count drops. The goal of these settings is to allow players to test their skills in a more tense environment than in traditional public matches.

Other Adjustments

The starting plane's flight path is more likely to fly closer to the first safe area.

Vehicle spawns are same as the normal games, but the Motor Glider is temporarily disabled until we can put more thought into if it is right for competitive game play. Your feedback here would be welcomed as well!

Red Zones have been adjusted to act as an additional threat for out of position players and are much more likely to occur at the edge of the safe zone.

We've decided to keep Flare Guns in for now as they provide a strategic choice between Care Packages and the BRDM-2. If this item sways competitive games too heavily, we'll look to adjust or remove the Flare Guns.

For this test, players will unfortunately not gain BP or Survivor Pass XP for Ranked Ruleset matches due to them being in LABS.
Test Schedule

The Ranked Ruleset will be available in the LABS section of the menu during the dates listed below. For easy access, we've added a LABS banner above the start button!

Start: March 6th - 16:00 KST / March 6th - 0700 UTC
End: March 9th - 16:00 KST / March 9th - 0700 UTC



Feedback

Feedback from this test will help us determine if it is right for our upcoming Competitive Mode or whether we need to make some adjustments, so be sure to share your thoughts on what you do and do not like. While we’re not quite ready to dive into the specifics of the upcoming Competitive Mode, keep an eye out for another announcement with more details in the coming months.

Thanks for playing!

- PUBG

Hello Players!

At the beginning of Season 6, we announced that Vikendi was going on a little vacation while we debuted Karakin. Since then, we've given some of Vikendi's landmarks a revamp, modifying terrain, towns, weather, updating Dinopark, and adding new trains that travel around the map! We want to hear what you think about the changes and also collect your feedback early while we apply the final coats of paint to our icy Battleground, so we're giving you the opportunity to playtest the new map early with help from our official PUBG Partners!

• New railroads and trains have been added across Vikendi
  
• A large portion of Vikendi's snow has been removed or reduced
  
• Dinopark has been expanded to Dinoland
  
• Modified towns and terrain.
  
  • Dinoland
    
  • Abbey relocated to Mount Kreznic
    
  • Removed: Tovar, Movatra
    

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


We're giving PUBG Partners the first chance to test out the updated map with their community. Our partners will have exclusive access to the updated Vikendi in custom matches on the PUBG Test Server and will be hosting games for you all to jump into and try. Best of all, player and partner feedback collected during the test period will be delivered directly to the devs, so make your voice heard and let us know what you think!

Mar 6th (Fri) 1600 KST / 0800 CET/ Mar 5th (Thu) 2300 PST ~ Mar 9th (Mon) 1600 KST / 0800 CET / Mar 8th (Sun) 2300 PST

1. Log in to the PUBG Test Server
   
2. Join your favorite PUBG Partner's custom match
   
3. Play the updated map and send in your feedback
   

This is your chance to help shape the map, so please do not hesitate to let us know what works, what doesn't, any bugs you find, and whatever else you'd like to see! We're looking forward to hearing your impressions.

See you on new Vikendi!

--The PUBG Team

Hello players,

We know the last few months have had some ongoing issues impacting gameplay and wanted to take a moment to address everything. We know the below issues have been extremely frustrating to deal with and we're sorry they've persisted for so long.

First of all, we want to give a brief statement on cheating. Combating cheaters is one of our highest priorities and we're utilizing multiple internal teams and external resources to find new solutions for this problem. We’ll be sharing more information regarding these efforts in our upcoming Community Letter and 2020 Roadmap post in early March.

Now let's talk about some of the issues, why they've remained such a problem, and what we're doing about it.

Poor Performance (FPS), FPS Stuttering/Freezing & Crashing Issues

We've received lots of feedback regarding performance issues, including FPS drops, stuttering, and crashing and despite these efforts, we've found that performance issues and crashes have been increasing since the January update.

Our development team is conducting ongoing multi-faceted tests and analysis in an attempt to identify and resolve the issues causing this performance loss and causing game crashes. The difficult part is that some of these issues are impacting specific hardware, or happen in unique situations which are difficult to reproduce. To improve performance issues, which have to track down the specific cause, which often means needing to reproduce the specific steps leading to the issue. We want to thank all of you who have sent in your replay files and system data to help us as we try to identify the cause.

If you are experiencing performance drops, FPS stutter, or game crashes, please contact our support team at www.pubg.com/support and share whatever information you can regarding your PC hardware and any other information you believe is relevant.

This is a top priority for us right now and we thank those of you who are affected for your patience.

DDoS Attacks Against our Game Servers

As many online games are forced to deal with from time to time, our servers have been the target of intermittent DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks. When a game server is under attack by DDoS attacks, all players who are in the server almost certainly face connection issues such as network delays, a significant ping increase, and severe packet loss. Unfortunately, our servers have been increasingly targeted for these attacks. Last November, the intensity of the attacks increased to a level we hadn’t experienced before, which increased again in February.

Our dev team has been increasing our DDoS defense solutions, working with various server infrastructure providers and analyzing their effectiveness in order to protect our game servers and provide a more stable service. At the same time, we're working on our own defense system specifically designed to protect PUBG's game servers.

While testing various DDoS defense solutions from external infrastructure providers, server locations were often located far away from standard locations, which resulted in increased ping and other network issues for some players. Additionally, many players have suffered constant packet loss issues due to the experimental DDoS defense solutions deployed by these providers. We know that we could have been much more open in communicating these reasons with you, but did not want to contaminate tests and results by letting the attackers know we were doing this testing. Regardless, our sincere apologies to players who experienced ongoing connectivity issues during this time.

The good news is, our recently developed internal solution has reduced the impact of DDoS attacks by nearly 85%. This is and will remain an ongoing issue, but our dev team will also continue to work on and implement additional measures to mitigate the impact of DDoS attacks when they occur.

DDoS server attacks are a serious crime and we've been gathering all information we can to take legal action against the perpetrators.

Arcade - Team Deathmatch Matchmaking Issues [Mostly Resolved]

Team Deathmatch is PUBG’s first "Arcade" game mode and we've been thrilled to see such a great response so far. Unfortunately, we found some issues with TDM matchmaking that caused players to have extended matchmaking times or sometimes not be matched at all. Additionally, another issue was identified that sometimes caused teams to have more than 8 players, with less than 8 on the other team.

The team in charge of this mode analyzed the cause of these issues after they were reported and worked to deploy a hotfix to the issue affecting team size, which is now resolved. The issues related to matchmaking times currently remain and while we've improved the situation with some back-end improvements, we're actively working on a permanent solution.

While we continue work on this, if you experience any of the above problems, please let us know through our community channels or PUBG.com/support.

Disabled Custom Match Presets

We've received reports that custom match presets are not functioning properly since the last patch.
This issue was an unfortunate side effect of improvements being made to back-end custom match code. We've taken action to resolve existing saved presets, but it will take time to fix this issue entirely. The good news is that saving and loading new presets now works correctly. Our apologies for those affected by this issue.

Unrelated to custom matches, we've resolved other recent issues such as player stats not being applied properly, inability to create FACEIT matches, and players falling through the ground at a specific location on Karakin.

In Closing

We understand there are many other high-priority issues impacting gameplay. One of our primary goals this year is to be more transparent with what we're working on, so we wanted to get this letter out to you to address some of the more notable issues we've faced recently.

Rest assured, we’ll continue to work on the unresolved issues and will do our best to be more open with details on these subjects moving forward.

Thank you

As many of you know, Australia has been devastated by bushfires that began all the way back in September. While the New South Wales Fire Agency has now declared the fires contained, the impact they have had on the people and wildlife of Australia has been immense. An estimated 33 people and 1 billion animals were killed by the fires, with many more affected.

While we’re happy to see the fires contained, there’s an incredible amount of damage left in their wake. To help Australia through this difficult time, PUBG Corporation is raising funds through the limited time sale of the Australia Fire Relief - Pan skin. The skin, which features original art by community artist @swatercolour, will be sold for $2.99 with 100% of the profits from each sale going to help Australia.

The Australia Fire Relief - Pan will be available on PC and Console.

• PC: 19th February - 18th March - $2.99
  
• Console: TBA
  
  • The sale of this item on console has been postponed, as Update 6.2 has been delayed. The new sales schedule will be announced in the near future via a separate announcement.

After the sale ends, we will send all funds raised via a lump sum donation to a chosen charity.

For those who purchase the pan, we thank you for your contribution to this effort. If the pan is not for you, we encourage you to research the disaster relief efforts and donate directly to a charity of your choosing. It will take some time for Australia and its environment to recover from a disaster of this scale, but we are thankful to be in a position where we can help in some way and are grateful to have fans like you willing to contribute to such a worthy cause.

Thank you,

- The PUBG Team

Dive into the mayhem of the all new Team Deathmatch game mode, the first in a series of alternative ways to play PUBG that are coming to our new Arcade section of the menu. We’ll add and rotate new game modes as time goes on, but for now you can enjoy the FPS classic 8v8 frag fest.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Battle Royale is getting a bit of a change up as well with some much requested alterations to how frag grenades and other throwables work. There’s a lot here but the main changes are that frag grenades weigh more and their damage is now reduced by your vest. To see all the changes, be sure to check out the Update 6.2 Patch Notes.

We’ve also got loot changes, including the fan favorite G36C and MP5K guns, coming to Karakin, a visual update to the Blue Zone to help you see better, some improvements to blood effects at a distance, and the new parachute follow mode that ensures you always land near your chosen squad mate.

All this and more in Update 6.2, now live! For full details, you can check out patch notes here.