PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

[Asid]

PUBG brings first-person servers to all game modes, leaderboards incoming


First-person servers change everything in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, so reckons Ian Birnbaum, however until now doing so meant playing exclusively in the game's Solo or Duo queues. Now, first-person servers are available in all game modes.

They're also now available worldwide, as developer Bluehole announced earlier on Twitter.

As you can see there, Bluehole suggests first-person leaderboards across all regions are en route, while this week's update has now been deployed to the Live Server.

In case you missed it yesterday, PUBG's Week 20 update addresses a number of bugs—not least one which occasionally disable voice chat on the Starting Island—introduces some optimisations, and lets dead players view their still-living teammates' markers on both the mini and world maps.

In light of PUBG's recent stream-sniping furore, Chris caught up with a selection of game devs, streamers, and stream-snipers who in turn shared their views of the practice. Here's an interesting snippet from that:

"'You have to keep in mind a few things,' says Kripp about Hearthstone snipers. 'I changed my username on Battle.net several times, even throughout [a long period of being stream-sniped], and I do often, not always, but almost every day I stream with a delay. Now the delay is fairly short, rarely do I have it over ten seconds, but if I have a five second delay one day and then the next day I have a twenty second delay, then you're just not going to be able to queue against me because you don't know when I'm queuing.'

"Even with those measures, Kripp has found the problem persists. 'I have been experiencing, in the last few months, even with my efforts, playing against the same players every night in some cases. I remember throughout almost a full month, like a quarter of my losses were to the same person. Right? The same guy queuing against me like every day or every second day. Just absolutely ridiculous.'"

[Asid]

Early Access Week 26 Update
PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS - Harusol



Players,

Today we look at what we have changed in our 26th weekly patch.

This patch will be deployed to the Test Servers on September 19th KST, and to the Live Servers if everything is stable.

Early Access – Week 26 – Patch Notes

UI/UX

•   Added the following feature to the Map Help section on the World Map: Marking your character's current position (Default key set to Insert)

Other

•   You may no longer modify ini files to set a key bind for multiple actions on the same key

Bug Fixes

•   Fixed a bug that enabled angled foregrip to attach to Tommy Gun
•   Fixed a graphic bug regarding building locations
•   Fixed an animation bug that appeared when a character used healing or boosting items in the driver's seat
•   Fixed a bug that did not cancel a player's reload if the character was knocked out during the reload
•   Fixed a bug where an uncooked grenade could explode if a character was knocked out while holding it
•   Fixed a graphic bug that would cause a black box texture to appear while scoped when Anti-Aliasing was set to Low or Very Low in the Settings

See you in-game,
The PUBG Development and Community Team

[Asid]

Update: Road to Launch, Patch Notes for This Week
PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS - Harusol



Players,

We only have 11 weeks until the end of 2017 and we know you have many questions about our development roadmap. To make sure we deliver PC 1.0 version and Xbox Game Preview by the end of this year, our development team is hard at work day and night. Today, we would like to share our plans on how we are preparing for PC 1.0 and Xbox Game Preview launch.
Many of you already know the new content and features that will be available in PC 1.0 version from reading media interviews and articles. Currently we have been using an internal build to develop and test new content and features including vaulting & climbing, desert map, new vehicles and 3D replay. We have been constantly working on optimization and stabilization as well. We will be able to share more about the roadmap soon, once the development has progressed further.

Road to Launch
Our development team is heavily focusing on developing the builds for PC 1.0 and Xbox Game Preview. For PC, we will be only focusing on doing our best to stabilize the launch build and we don’t have any plans to deploy patches to live servers except for this week. However, there will be features like vaulting and climbing which will have a huge impact on the game and need to be tested for at least a month. We will be running test servers at least three times in preparation for that.
Through these test servers, we would like to conduct large scale tests for the content and features that are not in the live build and create a foundation for a very stable official launch.

Test Server Operation Plan
1st phase: Focus on testing vaulting & climbing
2nd phase: More testing of vaulting & climbing, test other new content and features
3rd phase: All new content and features including the desert map
The content and features that will be in test servers need to be tested for at least 2 to 4 weeks. It will be very difficult for us to provide a stable service if we rush updates to live servers after short bursts of testing. As we would like to go through rigorous testing to prepare for official launch, we will not be updating new content to live servers and run test servers for a longer period of time instead.

You will be able to try out vaulting & climbing first in late October or early November. We will give you an update on test schedules later.

Leaderboard Update & FPP Servers
We have been working on leaderboard optimization to ensure their stable operation. It took us longer than expected to work on updating leaderboard systems so we need to delay the start of the new season to October 20th. We apologize for this change in the starting date for the new season. We will make an announcement on when the new season will begin later this week.
We added KR/JP servers and all modes were added to the servers. In addition, we will be adding First-Person Squad modes to SA, SEA and OCE. FPP Squad mode was played the most everywhere so we decided to add Squad mode first. FPP Squad will be added later this week after we update our leaderboard systems. We will continue to monitor player numbers and provide updates when necessary.

Patch Notes for This Week
This week we will deploy a small patch to live servers which will be the last before rolling out the test servers to prepare for official launch later. Test server will be up today – October 16th, 3am PDT / 12pm CEST / 7pm KST. If everything is stable, we will deploy a patch to live servers later.

Gameplay

•   Decreased the Starting Island item spawn levels in order to adjust the item balance on the Northeast side of Erangel

Bug Fixes

•   Eliminated the fire animation and effect that occured in the Starting Airplane when a player was on fire from a molotov cocktail
•   Fixed a bug that enabled a character to hold a main weapon and frying pan simultaneously
•   Fixed a spectator mode bug of flickering weapon UI icons

Lastly, we would like to thank all our players for the support since our Early Access launch on March 23rd this year. We cannot wait to see everyone try out vaulting and climbing for the first time in a few weeks. We hope to get a lot of feedback from you on vaulting and climbing. Please stay tuned for our announcement on test schedules.

See you in-game,
The PUBG Development and Community Team

[Asid]

Test Servers for PC 1.0 - Update #1
PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS - MephieKim
 




Players,

We’re excited to share that we will be running the test servers for PC 1.0 for the first time next week! We would like to invite our players to test vaulting & climbing and other existing features and systems we have modified. The test servers will be up for several days to allow everyone to try out the test build and give feedback.


Key changes:
•   Client and server optimization
•   Added vaulting & climbing
•   Changes in vehicle driving
•   Ballistics overhaul

We have made changes to some mechanics to make them more realistic and balanced. However, all changes are not final and we need your feedback after testing. In addition, this is only the first test build so there will be issues and bugs that have not been fixed yet. But we would like to assure you that we will do our best to address most of those issues when we release 1.0 unless there is a critical roadblock.

Patch notes will be posted early next week but we wanted to explain a little bit about vaulting & climbing today. Action & Gunplay Lead Pawel Smolewski has written a piece about the feature.


Vaulting & Climbing

Crossing and scaling obstacles may intermittently create many new tactical options available to the players. The standard jump feature can be used in standard situations, but there are many areas where it does not suffice. After all, PUBG features a play area of considerable proportions. In addition, objects located on the map differ greatly in shape and size. Such complexity can cause many problems for the players who need to rely on fast and effective means of jumping over (or on top of) boxes, containers, fences etc. For that reason we have decided to implement dynamic vaulting and climbing mechanics.

This feature enables in-game characters to quickly scale obstacles in front of them. Although we initially planned to allow crossing over structures which are up to 1 meter high, we have eventually decided to extend the functionality of the feature by increasing the limit to about 2.3 meters. Almost any static object that meets the dimension criteria can be scaled. Additionally, passing through openings in structures (such as windows) is possible as long as they are wide and tall enough. You may scale almost any static object which is short enough. Objects which are chest level high can be scaled with a weapon in hand. Taller structures that require pulling up to vault need to be performed with both hands free of any items (they will be holstered automatically when animation is played). Running towards the obstacle will generate momentum that will ensure faster motion. Performing the action from stationary position is also possible but the animation played will be slower, leaving players vulnerable for a longer period of time.

On the technical side the system consists of about 40 animations adjusted for different heights and situations. We internally use the term vaulting to describe the action that involves crossing over an obstacle while climbing refers to a motion that will cause the character to remain on top of it. By default control over vaulting and climbing is placed on the same key as jump and is context based. However, we do provide the players with a possibility of splitting the jump and vaulting actions to separate key-bindings in the controls section of in-game settings. When attempting to vault, the geometry of the objects in front of the character is scanned and an algorithm decides whether vaulting action can be performed and what type of animation can be used to get across or on top of it. Climbing will be preferred whenever there is enough space for the character to stand up. However, vaulting can be enforced by holding sprint button while moving – if the obstacle is thin enough, character will slide or cross over. Motion that involves pulling up can be cancelled before reaching the apex by starting to move in the opposite direction.

Due to the nature of this system, we expect possible issues, bugs and problems to occur. Ironing out this feature may take some more time, but we do hope you will have a lot of fun with it and make great use of it. We are eagerly awaiting your feedback and reports.


In the next few days, we will also touch on other important changes. Please stay tuned for more updates on the test server.

Regarding the use of cheats, we will be doing everything we can and use all resources available to detect and impose penalties on users who use cheats. Recently, we have implemented new measures to better identify and track their usage. We have designed reliable systems to do this more efficiently than before.

For a very long time, our development team has been analyzing data from a large pool of users who show abnormal gameplay behavior to build a system that helps us positively identify cheaters. We are now able to use the system to identify and ban these users more proactively. Using this system, we have already identified and banned about 20K additional users in only one day.

This is only a start. On top of BattlEye, we will use a monitoring system to strengthen our efforts to prevent use of cheats and impose penalties on them. We promise you that we will continue to do our best to quickly find and ban people who use cheats. We hope you will start to see an improvement going forward.

Thank you.
The PUBG Development and Community Team

[Rinix]

Ransomware unencrypts your files if you play PUBG for 1 hour, and in practice can unencrypt your files even sooner: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/pubg-ransomware-decrypts-your-files-if-you-play-playerunknowns-battlegrounds/