PUBG Corp. is launching an extended effort to « fix PUBG, » a phrase the developers say they’ve been hearing from fans for some time. There is now an official plan to make the game feel more like a finished, polished product on both the PC and Xbox One
PUBG Corp. is launching an extended effort to “fix PUBG,” a phrase the developers say they’ve heard from fans for some time. There is now an official plan to make the game feel more like a finished, polished product on both the PC and Xbox One, which is great news for players who have long complained about its often inconsistent feel.
“Our dev team is gearing up for battle,” PUBG Corp. stated on the official page . “Our mission: Destroy bugs, deliver long-needed quality-of-life features, and take PUBG to the next level by shipping fundamental performance improvements. Throughout this campaign we’ll share specifics about what we’re working on and the expected time it’ll take to address the issues.”
There is a long list of issues in PUBG that they’re trying to fix across the next three months, but this initiative seems to bring a new sense of urgency and clarity to the mission of making the game run better.
Here are six of the most important things to know about this program, and what you can expect in terms of improvements and fixes in the next few months.
The program is scheduled to last three months, starting in August. In fact, some of the improvements listed on the page have already been implemented. No specific dates have been given, but you can get a general idea of when things are going to be worked on by visiting the page and looking at the timeline.
Tick rate is a way of describing how often a game’s server is updated with new information about what’s going on. The higher the tick rate, the smoother the game is going to be as you play online. PUBG’s server currently lowers the tick rate when a large number of people are close together, which leads to the following issues:
A higher tick rate will help improve the game’s “feel,” which seems to be one of the main goals of this campaign. There are also plans to optimize the game’s early moments in the airplane to lead to a smoother experience as players jump into battle.
The team calls it improving desync, but I think my description works better. Here’s a description of what’s happening, from the official page:
In PUBG, whether or not a player’s shot successfully hits an opponent is determined by the attacker’s client. If a shot is successful from the attacker’s side, the target takes a hit. However, if the attacker’s ping is high or the server tick rate is low, the attacker’s shot can be wrongly counted as a hit even after the target hides behind cover (since the target will still be visible on the attacker’s screen).
PUBG Corp. is taking steps to avoid matching players with higher pings to players with lower pings, and improved server tick rate in general is going to help with this issue.
Cheaters have been a major issue in PUBG for awhile now, and PUBG Corp. seems to be taking it seriously. It’s also stated that much progress has already been made.
“Following a series of bans and improved anti-cheat efforts, the ratio of suspected cheaters has decreased by more than 80 percent since Q1 of this year,” the team said. “We plan to continue enforcing aggressive anti-cheat initiatives to further bring down this ratio throughout the campaign.”
There will soon be a system that will notify you if your report results in a ban within 15 days, and information about the hardware of known cheaters will be collected in order to make the bans stick. Intriguingly, there’s also a legal aspect to this push.
“We’re closely working with legal authorities as they investigate and take legal action against cheat developers, distributors, and resellers,” the official page explains . “We plan to share more news on these efforts.”
PUBG Corp. describes the issue thusly:
The average FPS for players has seen improvements since Q1 2018, yielding an average 60 FPS on minimum system requirements and 80 FPS on recommended systems. The problem is that FPS would intermittently drop under 60 about every 10 seconds on average, which significantly harms your experience.
Until now, we have been concentrating on increasing the average FPS rate, which we have been able to achieve. From this point onward, we will be working on fixing sudden frame drops, otherwise known as hitching.
This is great news, and should go a long way toward making PUBG feel consistent throughout the match. Hitching is one of the more obvious ways the game can feel unfinished or unoptimized.
PUBG Corp. has described a few updates to the Xbox One version of the game that have already been completed as of today.
We optimized the performance of Xbox PUBG during certain critical gameplay moments (e.g., multiple players falling into the same region, directly skydiving into a big city, zoning into a smaller area as the bluezone closes in, and various close-ranged combat situations). Optimized character movement, invisible characters and vehicles, invisible effects, freefall and parachute motions, vehicles, and level streaming for these critical moments. Reduced network delay as well to enhance performance.
Memory usage has also reportedly been optimized, and the team is reporting that crashes now occur in less than two percent of games.
