Playerunknown's Battlegrounds

The Game Room
81

There’s something screwy with the matchmaking, I think. They reset the leaderboards at the beginning of the month. That should be a clean slate for everyone - everyone is throwing into the same games at the same base skill level until the better players climb, the worse players fall, and the ladder shakes out again.

That means that the starting games on day 1 will be tougher than if you were to start at the bottom of the ladder a month into the season, simply because on day 1 it’s a mix of every skill level but after a month the good players have had time to seperate themselves so the people still playing at the starting leaderboard position haven’t climbed their way out.

For the first half of the month I’ve mostly played on NA/europe because I wanted to give the asia server a few weeks to shake out so that I could try to go for some record setting games when I first started playing them. Last year I finished the season ranked around 15,000th on the asian servers, which was top 2.5% (the Asian servers have like 2m+ active players, so that’s a pretty good number).

But I quickly found that I wasn’t playing the terrible Asian players of last season. The players I was playing against actually felt better than the European players I’d been playing against, and Europe has way, way tougher players than Asia. So it felt like I wasn’t getting beginner-tier matchmaking, it felt like I was starting where I left off (against the top 2.5% of Asians)

So does that mean it keeps a hidden MMR for matchmaking even after the leaderboards reset? It doesn’t really make sense to do that. Then leaderboard positions won’t make sense because everyone is facing a different tier of competition at the same leaderboard level. So, for instance, a new player with no hidden MMR might get top 10 in 5 of his first 10 games on Asia and go way up on the leaderboards. Whereas I, playing top 3% competition, do much worse and don’t move up the leaderboards much at all, even though I’m actually better than that guy and just don’t have the benefit of easy competition. Which means that our leaderboard positions are false - he shouldn’t be higher than me, but he is. You can’t have a leaderboard AND hidden MMR and have it make sense.

I’m like 180,000th place on the Asian ladder currently but the games feel tougher than when I was 15,000th place last season.

On the other hand, on Europe, where the players are supposed to be way better than Asia on average, but where I had no significant amount of games played last season (and hence no MMR on that region) I’m finishing top 10 regularly over my first games.

So even though I’m somewhere in the 150,000-200,000th place range in both Europe and Asia, it feels like I’m playing tough players on Asia and significantly easier players on Europe. Given that the average European is way better than the average Asian, it feels like I have some sort of hidden MMR that’s making me play top asians vs normal starting level competition on Europe.

82

Had a couple of interesting duo games today, one of which I think was actually my first encounter with a hacker, so maybe Martini Enfield had a point.

First was a game where I had, for the first time, the “walls don’t appear” bug: screenshot. I could see the door frames, furniture inside, and items, but not the walls or floors. Also, whenever I actually moved into the house, my character would start vibrating up and down, making it difficult to move (and impossible to heal as the movement would interrupt it, so it wasn’t purely visual). Another team came by and I was able to see them through the walls, though it wasn’t clear if I could shoot them (I fired at them, blood came out, but I might’ve been shooting through a window/door, or they might’ve not actually taken damage, not sure). It was only a few houses that were like this, most of them were perfectly normal.

Second game was the one where I think the other team was hacking. Had made it to about ~25 people left, mostly by avoiding other groups as we weren’t super well equipped. Had driven to a small group of buildings and holed up inside when my buddy and I hear a vehicle pull up. So I go to the stairwell and he crouches near one of the doors. The two enemies get out, announce their presence on the open mics (“Housekeeping!”), open the door and immediately blast my friend from outside my view. Then the second one came in another door, already looking at me and shoots me before I can shoot back. They both seemed to know exactly where we both were, and they moved into the house fine so I don’t think they glitched like I had the game earlier, but they also should’ve had no way of knowing where I was in the stairwell as there were no windows they could’ve seen me through. Probably shouldn’tve been able to see my bud either but I’m not 100% sure on the sightlines for him. Was pretty sketchy though (especially that they felt confident enough to announce their presence).

83

The non-rendering buildings apparently come from assets being loaded in too slowly, which can be fixed by using faster storage or maybe not having anything else going on in the computer.

We played another 2 asian squad games last night and won, bringing this season to 8 wins, a 3rd, 3rd, and 4th place finish.

We then played some North America squad games where we aren’t ranked just to do goofy stuff. Like one of our plans was to find 4 jeeps and bring them in to the final circle and try to run everyone over - when someone popped up to shoot one of us, someone else would try to run them down. Or to try to make a wall of vehicles on the bridge when the final circle was on the island. I had a game where we found an m249 and my goal was to stockpile as much ammo as we could and just blow up every vehicle - and somehow no vehicles ended up coming near us but I ended up getting 9 kills anyway just mowing people down with that thing. (Edit: I also punched a few AFK people to death at the start of the match)

But we couldn’t stop winning. Even the games we were goofing around in and trying to create funny moments while playing 3 handed we ended up winning anyway.

For some reason a bunch of asians come over to the north america server. Since we were just starting out on that server, we had a beginner tier rating. Actual american players tend to climb up out of that rating pretty fast, which leaves the asians who came over to NA near that rating. Based on the names it felt like 40-50% of the players in those NA games are asian.

But… I’m now top 2% in asian solos. Which means I face a lot of non-asians who came over to asian servers to dominate them and then rose up to the top.

Which means that I may be playing against more asians when I play low rank on the NA servers than I face when I play high rank in the asian servers.

Clip of the day

84

I’ve run into a few odd moments on the Asian servers which we’re playing on until 1st person gets to the Oceania servers. Had one player take out my entire squad with four quick single headshots from an M416 at about 400m. We all had L2 and L3 helmets and vests so I’m happy to call it dodgy.

Funny moment last night - I was playing a solo match, mainly trying out techniques for long-distance parachuting, and landed a long way from the flight-path but inside the first circle.

Didn’t see any other 'chutes nearby, happily looting away, no other footsteps, I open a door to leave the house and there is another player in identical gear to me (L3 helmet, L2 vest, M16 and pump shotgun, same colour clothing). It was like looking in a mirror :confused: . Luckily he was facing away from me so I was able to get over the sudden WTF moment and get a few shots off first but it was weird.

85

So the asian squads leaderboard has 2.7 million people. It’s the most heavily populated region in the game.

Guess out of those 2.7 million people has the longest average survival time per game?

Also #17 in win ratio at 62.5%.

I would also likely join 3 other people tied for first in top 10 rate, but someone sabotaged one of our games and took that away. Instead tied for 25th at 93.75%. I’m actually surprised the number of people who 100% in the top 10 is so low - it’s easy to top 10 in squads.

It’s not just me - I’ve got a rotating team of 6 other people we play with. None of them are on the leaderboards yet because no individual has hit the 15 game minimum yet, but we’ll start filling up that leaderboard before the month is through.

86

Last night, I got in a motorcylce with sidecar, got to a hillside just inside the circle, got behind a rock, and watched the road below me for a bit with by 4x scope and M416. Lo and behold, a buggy comes from behind but doesn’t notice me. He’s moving quickly and I don’t get a clean shot, so I hold my fire. No sense in giving up my position for a bad opportunity.

He parks at the bottom of the hillside and ducks below the curve where I can’t hit him. There’s no sign he knows I’m here, so I’m content to chill for 30 seconds until the circle closes.

Circle closes. We’re outside. He dashes to the buggy. The shot’s is still crap. don’t take it. He gets in the buggy. The engine starts.

I know he’s facing away and in a moving vehicle with the cab behind a bush, so we’re now in low success rate, low risk territory and I squeeze off a shot.

Only I had the rifle in auto. Two shots go off, and I get a headshot. Through a bush, into a moving vehicle, in the wrong fire mode.

Sometimes lucky stuff happens.

87

This game is growing at what seems to be to be an unprecedented rate. They just broke 500,000 for the first time 3 weeks ago. Now yesterday they broke 800,000 concurrent players. That’s a serious number and crazy growth.

88

This tweet where they show PUBG taking the #3 all time concurrent player base on steam with a little under 500k players was a month ago.

It hit 931k this weekend and will hit a million next weekend. The growth is ridiculous.

New season/leaderboard reset started yesterday, by the way. Think I may try to get high on the American server this time around, but it gets frustrating switching from winning regularly to winning 1/100 games.

89

Woohoo…sold a stupid shirt for 13.00 in the market place. :smiley:

90

I object to the microtransactions, especially the gambling sort, but I’ve sold a lot of crates since they allowed such a thing. I’ve made about $50, and I’m sitting on a few gamescom crates to see if they (illogically) go up in value after the supply drops up, so I should be up past $65 at least. It’s very silly that I’ve made more than twice the game’s cost back. So even though the gambling crate thing is bullshit, I guess at least you can partially share in on the exploitation.

91

I think that i’m playing in the same way that i just played when i did started… 450hours played ago… so, is more a game that i will not be a pro player and be rich!

92

I haven’t played much this month - I burned myself out by playing the shit out of last month, but I’ve started up again in the last few days. I won 2 solo games in a row which is the first time for that. I almost made it 3, but I came in 2nd place on the third game. Second place is so frustrating. I came in 2nd again 3 games after that, too, so it was 2 wins and 2 2nd places in 7 games.

I came to realize a couple weeks ago that bots were boosting the game’s player count. People would just join games and quit over and over again to earn a few BP which could turn into crates and then into real cash. You didn’t see these bots in third person because of the ranking system - since they never did anything, they’d quickly drop way low in the ranks and then only get matched with other bots. But in first person, there was no ranking system (up until about 2 weeks ago), which means they were just dropped into whatever lobby was open at the time. As a result, a full 30-50% of players in the matches on average were bots. At that point I suspected the explosive growth was due at least partially to bots.

But then they made some tweaks to make it harder for bots - you have to grab an item to get BP for the match, which means the old method of simply idling or quitting the game won’t work. Except they made one incredibly stupid exception to this rule: if you survive for 5 minutes, you get BP anyway. That just gives the bots a viable path to working again - now they can just have a script that drops them randomly at some point in the flight path and gives them a chance to go undiscovered for 5 minutes and still get credit. Why even create that exception? There’s no scenario in which a real player will be alive for 5 minutes without collecting anything, and even if there were, so what? It’s not a big deal if the 1 in 100,000 chance that it’s a real player goes without reward points for one round.

93

PUB G is an awesome game even in 1st or 3rd person but I heard of and watched another game called “Cuphead” I have not personally played it but from what i have seen if seems pretty tough. Cuphead is not like PUB G but it does have constant action more like an arcade game. Check it out and see what you think.

94

A lot has happened since my last post. The game launches officially in about 9 hours. They’ve had the 1.0 test build up for a while and it’s a significant improvement. The game is better optimized, higher frame rates, less input lag, and better feeling movement. The vault system works pretty well, although I’m not sure I like what vaulting does to building combat.

They’re releasing a new map - Miramar - on release. It’s significantly different from Erangel, being a mountainous desert region. Less cover, much more variety in buildings, more spread out points of interest, no clear center point of interest like the school or military base, it tends to disperse people more. I’ve only played a few rounds on it so I don’t have a big opinion yet, but it does seem to have a variety of more interesting final circles than the previous map does.

The game released for Xbox One a few weeks ago. It apparently runs like crap, even on XboneX. They don’t have any autoaim/aim assist for it, so all the gunfights look like Hellen Keller battling her clones. It’s pretty funny.

95

I’m fond of the new map. The variety in the buildings is a major plus. The vaulting was needed because crouch jumping is an abomination that should exist in no game for any reason. The feel of vaulting is about spot on. I haven’t seen the changes in building combat, but I think I’m playing at a very different level than Beef.

Item distribution in Miramar seems like there’s a lot of good but would be second tier on Erangel locations. Meaning that there are places where you can find a Mini14, 8x scope, Tier 3 armor, and M416, but there isn’t a place where you will find a great loadout every time. Those tended to be the places I dropped in Erangel, so that’s not much of a change in the game for me. This also means I’m not going to be facing the player that found all those items as reliably until late game.

There’s a ton more open ground, but snipers don’t carve me up as much as it feels that they did on Erangel. I don’t know if it’s a difference in the sight lines, the player base on the test servers, or just my misperception, but I don’t hate the openness as much as I thought I would.

96

I’m still digging the new map. It creates more memorable situations and stories than the other one, I think. There’s more variety in the sort of fights you find yourself in - some can be very long range due to the extensive amount of high ground, the towns and buildings are a lot more varied and interesting, and the varied terrain creates interesting tactical choices, often following little dips in the ground for flanking and cover. There are lots of interesting places for the final circle to occur over.

It’s probably harder to win because there aren’t obvious centralized places that everyone likes to drop as far as I can tell - no equivelant to the military base or school. Which means that 40 idiots don’t end up getting themselves killed in the first 4 minutes. Which means lots more dispursed danger and people are harder to predict people’s movement and gives a higher chance of smaller encounters. Maybe that’ll come with experience, but I think the map design will in general make it harder to play a safer playstyle.

Finding an 8x scope and parking yourself on top of a mountain is pretty fun. I dig long range shooting. Still trying to get the hang of the new drag/ballistics system.

Performance is really good, I’m often up over 100 FPS and rarely drop below 70. Input also feels more responsive and in general the game feels much more polished and responsive to play. Vaulting system works well, although I don’t like how it has basically just made it so that every building has 10 doors now.