Back in its release in late 2017, PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, or PUBG as its more often referred to, swiftly became one of the most dominant titles in the Battle Royale genres. Nowadays, it’s generally considered to have been unseated by the likes of Fortnite and Apex, the latter of which is also rapidly fading into obscurity.
But despite relative obscurity and mixed reviews, PUBG is still alive and kicking. Recently, however, the game had had a rough run, with issues of stability, cheating, and even DDoSing having a massive impact on the playability of the title. In response to these issues, the developers of the title, PUBG Corporation, have come out to add some transparency and plans to the discussion.
Recent Issues & What We're Doing About Themhttps://t.co/JVU1X9zIVe
— PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS Support (@PUBG_Support) February 27, 2020
“We know the last few months have had some ongoing issues impacting gameplay and wanted to take a moment to address everything,” the announcement began. “We know the below issues have been extremely frustrating to deal with and we’re sorry they’ve persisted for so long.”
The announcement begins with a statement on cheating, discussing how combating cheaters (players who use aimbots and other such hacks) is one of the highest priorities. The team is utilizing multiple internal teams and even external resources to find new solutions to deal with the issue, promising to share more information later in March.
Aside from cheating, the announcement states that dealing with FPS and stability issues is the absolute top priority. They claim to be conducting “multi-faceted tests and analysis in an attempt to identify and resolve the issues causing this performance loss and causing game crashes.” These can be difficult to reproduce as players have all sorts of hardware in their PCs, but utilizing the replay files and system data has helped fix plenty of issues, though the work never ends.
Speaking on DDoS attacks, the Corporation discusses how the dev team has been increasing 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.” They assert that they’ve reduced the impact by 85%, though they do not give what metric that refers to.
They also discuss matchmaking issues with the Team Deathmatch Arcade game mode, speaking on deploying a hotfix to the issue affecting uneven teams, which has resolved the problem. Issues related to matchmaking times currently remain and they’re working to fix it as soon as possible.
It’s alarming that there are so many massive issues surrounding a title as big as PUBG, and it makes one wonder why they have such a vast array of problems that other developers seem to have figured out. Still, they’re working diligently to fix the problem and provide a better experience for their players, and they’re making great progress towards that goal.
