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PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Changes Chaotic Pregame Lobbies To Help Performance
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is all about putting 100 people on an island for a no-holds barred fight. It turns out that having all 100 of those people in one tiny area was not itself a good idea.
For those unfamiliar, pregame lobbies would put all the players in a match in a small area with firearms and let them just do whatever while the match loaded. Players could swim, punch each other, shoot guns to test them, or engage in conga lines if they felt the need and cooperative spirit. Now, the developers are changing that up to help game performance.
The new pregame lobbies separate things up, isolating smaller numbers of players in different parts of the island without having everyone out at once and completely removes firearms. According to PUBG Corp., this should improve the network performance during an actual match.
"Lots of interaction among multiple players in such a small area had a high impact on the servers," states a blog post about the update. "To solve this, we have introduced multiple areas where players gather before the match start."
PUBG Corp. is also introducing a new anti-cheat method, which can destabilize the game on PC when starting it up during its testing phase, so be aware of that.
[Source: Battlegrounds Blog]
Our Take
While putting people into pockets makes sense, removing firearms kind of sucks. I have died because I grabbed an unfamiliar gun and wasn't aware how it was going to perform when I shot it and the lobby helped try things out. Oh well, hopefully the network improvement is worth it.
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