PUBG is Officially Getting Map Selection

After months and months months of players asking for a map selection tool in the popularly gritty world of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the dev team has finally listened! The new feature isn't live yet, but the crew over at Bluehole have officially made the announcement and detailed how it will work. Pretty simple, but they wanted to address popular concerns and answer a few questions!

They opened up their latest update on Steam saying, "Map selection is something that players all over the world have continuously asked for. We take your feedback extremely seriously, but we also want to be thoughtful about how we implement changes to PUBG. And we knew that map selection posed a couple of problems we needed to seriously consider."

Then the team answered a few questions about how it will work, region affects, and more:

The first problem: Would adding map selection cause serious increases in matchmaking times for the various servers and modes?

For us, this was the most troubling issue, and it required a lot of discussion and serious research. We analyzed tens of millions of matches and sorted the data by server, mode, and time to make sure map selection wouldn't break the game for anyone. We wanted to make sure that we could create a solution that worked for every region's players, even the ones with a naturally low server population.

The second problem: Players in different regions have different preferences and playstyles, so how could we make map selection work for all of them?

To solve this, we couldn't just rely on one source of feedback (like Reddit). We gathered feedback from all around the world, and what we learned led us to scrap and rework our designs for map selection several times.

Ultimately, we created a version of map selection that we think is unlikely to cause issues for matchmaking. That said, we'll still have to keep a close eye on it, since it could become problematic as new maps continue to be added.

You can even see how the selector will work with the below image:

The UI of this feature may be different when implemented in the actual game, but here's the basic explanation of how it works:

- You can select the maps you want to play with a click.
- If you don't want to play a map, simply unselect it.
- If you've selected more than one map, the game will randomly pick one for you each time you start a match.

The feature is almost ready to implement and as soon as it is, it will move into the test servers before going live for all on PC.