Yeah, I leave voice chat on. I’ll mute it occasionally if people are being too annoying in the pre-game, but every so often it tips you off in game. People sometimes don’t realize they’re transmitting and give up their position, or sometimes you can hear strategy talk between members of a squad. The South American servers seem pretty well behaved.
Played some squad games with Gukamatz and 2 other friends tonight. When this group had played previously we won 2 out of 3 games one night, and then tonight we had 2 2nd place finishes and a win. The 2nd place finishes were super close - down to the last two people and if we had landed just one more shot in each of them we’d have won. We also won the game before then with a different friend of mine, so we had a 1,2,1,2 span in there that was literally 2 bullets away from being four wins in a row. I may possibly have failed to record a game or two, but my records show that with that group we’ve got 4 wins and 3 2nd place finishes out of 10 games. Which is weird, because none of us are especially good.
Found a site that puts your stats in perspective by telling you what percentile they fall into, along with leaderboards which can be a little. I can’t find myself on some of the leaderboards I should be on, but in others it works (for example, I have the 175th longest kill in all of asia solo at 840m, that one works, but I don’t show up on the Asia average survival time leaderboards where I should.) If I can maintain my average survival time for a few more games in the SA server to meet the minimum sample size, I would be the #1 solo player on the region.
Found out that I apparently move more than almost anyone - I’m in the 97th percentile in terms of how much ground I cover per match, which I wouldn’t have guessed.
Tried a solo game on the Asia server, landing on the rooftop of apartments SE of school. Two people landed right next to me (one got to the roof slightly before me). I ran for the shotgun, they ran for the rifles… turned around… and then looked at me like they didn’t know what their fire key was. Popped em both, one, two, bang. So yeah, something isn’t quite right with those Asia server players.
Set a personal record for kills - 9. I’d probably be able to get more if I played a super aggressive style like a lot of the streamers but the opportunity for 9 kills doesn’t come up often for me.
My partner died as we careened into a bunch of enemies out of the field with little health left and then I racked up 8 kills in the final minutes to pull out a win anyway. Video.
I had a (NA) game today where I landed near someone and grabbed a pistol and an SCAR. Found him and fired off the 30 SCAR rounds I had, then crept in close and killed him in a face to face with the pistol. He was active the whole time and I think even fired a few rounds with his pistol. But when I looted him he had two rifles, the pistol and lots of ammo so don’t ask me why he hadn’t done more.
More amusing was later that game. I was crouching the doorway of a shed and some random dude out of nowhere wormed past me on his stomach. Popped him in the back of the head as he passed. I would have meleed him for the laughed but I don’t trust melee attacks downward since they usually seem to miss.
There was a leaderboard reset today. They’re going to do them monthly until release to tweak the formula for their ranking system.
I assume this also means that the matchmaking rating was also reset, not just the leaderboard/stats, so if you play today you’ll play against a random variety of players rather than those with similar ratings. But… if you do well in a few to start with, since there aren’t many people ahead of you on the leaderboards at this stage, you’ll shoot straight to the top.
The 4th monthly update drops soon. It includes first person mode (solo and duo on NA/EU to start), a bunch of tweaks and fixes, and most importantly, car horns.
Played another game on the AS server today where someone landed near me, picked up some stuff, then just stood in place. Might’ve disconnected, but I’m also wondering if the AS server is full of bots. One of my friends pointed out that the clothing items can be sold for real money on the Steam marketplace, so wouldn’t surprise me if the old WoW gold farmers were here too.
I’m interested to see how first-person mode plays. Glad to see that patch note there that they removed the wobbling whenever you pick something up (which made FPS mode unplayable for me, even apart from the disadvantage it gave). I’ve also seen comments elsewhere that the camera was misplaced in relation to the player’s body, so they’ll fix that too.
The new crates are dropping and the rare stuff is selling for ridiculous prices. $425 for the denim hot pants and $625 for the purple mini-skirt. You can always just got pantless if you’re that hard up to see your character’s gams
I wasn’t sure what the math was on opening crates in order to sell the items so I just turned all my saved RP into crates and made $26 selling the crates. So I’m $4 short of the game being free. Maybe I made a mistake and it’s easy money, but I won’t be around today to do the math and I’m worried the crate prices will bottom out while I wait.
People buying cosmetics on day 1 are really stupid. The market will flood soon enough and what’s $400 now will be $40 in 2 days. Even if you somehow think it’s worth $40 to have a certain cosmetic item, certainly it’s dumb to pay 10x the cost to have it 2 days early.
The game is apparently currently broken. They pushed the current patch to the test server yesterday, and from that they knew it was broken, but they foisted it upon us anyway instead of waiting so they could get microtransactions out on time. And now of course they can’t simply revert to a working version because that would undo the microtransactions.
They are burning through a whole lot of community faith and appreciation very rapidly.
I’m not just referring to the 12 hours. They’re taking a lot of flak for adding the RNG gambling microtransaction system especially since they specifically promised they wouldn’t do that in early access. They’re also catering to whiney streamers who get people banned under accusations of stream sniping when the streamers don’t even take precaution against it. And other PR blunders - like PlayerUnknown’s twitter account liking tweets about how everyone who doesn’t like gambling microtransactions is mentally ill. They’re working hard on changing their image from consumer friendly to consumer unfriendly.
Breaking their game knowingly in order to keep up their greed schedule with the microtransactions is a pretty big deal. They know the community is extremely wary of them, so for them to say “oh lol woops we went ahead and pushed a game-breaking patch because we needed to get those gambling crates out there” after all the negative feedback is a huge fuck you to the community.
I like how people kept defending the locked crates with “But that’s to raise prize money for the tournament!”. Enter game and it says “A portion of proceeds will go to charity and tournament prizes”.
The patch seems really awful to me. I played US and AS servers, first person and third last night and all felt laggy or de-synced.
I like that the game rewards various playstyles. From the videos, SeniorBeef would would wreck me in a straight up shooter, but I can still go deep into a PUBG match through a little strategic play. I don’t track my own stats, but the boards show me as hitting the top 10 3/6 times since the reset. (Two failures were horrible drop/circle combinations where I dropped on one extreme of the island and the circle was on the other side. The other was a #11 finish.) I’ve yet to get my second #1 (got one my second day and never since). I think about my most recent #2 and how I could have played it differently at the end and kick myself for not taking better options. (Don’t forget grenades! Circle the tree the other direction!)
Another strength is the lack of barrier to play. You don’t have to learn how to spec/build a character, like in a MOBA or MMORPG. Anybody can start playing, jump out of the plane, and have a fighting chance. Knowing the map helps find some gear, but even bad drop areas will have something to fight with. (Even a pistol like the 1911 is deadly if you can set up an ambush.)
It also rewards so many gameplay styles that it’s hard to play wrong. I like tense games where I go deep but don’t necessarily engage a lot of players. I love a good ambush where I can shoot the guy in the back as he comes down the stairs or where I can snipe the doorway as he exists the building. Others drop into highly popular cities and are fighting from the instant they touch down. The circle is a suggestion, and taking time to explore outside the circle isn’t certain doom, only a stressor. Even the starting island is lootable if you’re willing to take the time/damage to get there.
They’re saying they’ve patched the lag/banding/jumping issue. It was a bit dumb that they pushed it. They probably should have delayed the patch a day, which was apparently all it took to fix things, but I’m hoping things are smooth and buttery next time I log in.
So first person has been out for a week. There are a lot of things that are better for it - you can’t just hide behind cover and see people who can’t see you, which is obviously a pretty huge deal - but the world scaling is awful for it.
They clearly had no design plans to have it in from the start, because you basically feel like a supernaturally fast toddler running around with your camera height 2.5 feet off the ground. The players are tiny - which is also true of third person but because the camera is a few feet above your head it ends up feeling fairly normal beacuse your camera is where a head would normally be. But that means that the person you’re watching run around is 3 feet tall, and when you put the camera at that perspective it’s very distracting. The world scale is weird and inconsistent - it’s not too incongruous when looking in third person but becomes super obvious in first.
There are a lot of things to be said for the positive changes in gameplay that result in first person, but it makes me uncomfortable and almost nauseous to run around as a turbo chucky doll or drive the buggy with my head a foot off the ground. You can increase the FOV a bit which helps… but I think I’m going to wait until they maybe come up with some solutions to that.
Just increasing the player model size would create its own problems, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be the better solution since at least it could feel less ridiculous.
They expanded first person to work in squads and on the Asian server.
The game has been harder than expected since the leaderboard reset. I know that it would take the leaderboards some time to stratify - so if you played your first game in a mode/server after 3 weeks, you’d be playing worse people than if you played it after 1 day, simply because the better players have had time to climb up out of the beginner rank. But even so, I waited a week to play on the Asian servers and I’m not getting the bottom end 25 people dying to the blue field players I got when I first started playing there.
I wonder if they changed something about the way matchmaking is done, or maybe they lowered the baseline matchmaking rating you start with, so that you have to actually lose a bunch of games badly before you sink to playing people that bad rather than starting out there.
That said, over the last 2 days I’ve won 3 out of the 6 squad games I’ve played (with 2 more top 5s) and 3 out of 6 duo games. Not all Asia - some of those wins were on Australia. I’m doing a world tour.
In that last duo win, me and my friend were forced out into an open field by the 5th circle. We saw some guys in the only buildings in the circle pop out briefly, we took a few pot shots at them and they ran inside. They had a huge advantage here - they could peek out the window while we were completely exposed on open ground… but instead they ran into the bathroom to cower in the corner. We approached the house, and then this.
