PUBG Testing Blue Zone Balance, Other Combat Improvements

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) may be out of Early Access on Steam for PC players, but there is still a lot of work needing to be done on the incredibly popular battle royale title. One of those concerns for the dev team includes that dreaded blue circle of doom that stands between players and that coveted chicken dinner.

The PUBG crew took to their Steam listing to discuss some of the future goals for the online game. Cheating came up once more, with over 1.5 million accounted bans to their name, while combat issuers and the blue zone also came up.

“We recently discovered a new pattern of cheats in action. This week, we performed a thorough gameplay data review of 10 million players and completed analysis of tens of millions of data logs. Through this exercise, we were able to identify over 100,000 instances of the new pattern related to use of cheat and now we have confirmed that it was clearly an attempt of compromising our game. These players will be permanently banned in a single wave. This is an example of additional measures we will be taking on top of the basic detection systems in place. We will continue to check the data logs like this even if it means the anti-cheat team has to filter through hundreds of billions of data logs manually.

In addition, we are looking into adopting a new solution to detect and ban more cheaters and we have been continuously strengthening our security systems. We have also liaised with investigative authorities in some countries to take legal actions against developers and distributors of cheats. We are determined to take strong measures against them going forward.”

The death cam has been a huge help when identifying issues, including how to identify cheaters in-game. As far as the blue zone, this is the first step the crew is taking to rebalancing the combat seen in the world of PUBG and they have outlined a few key points they are looking to hit:

• Slightly decreased the waiting time of the blue zones in mid-to-late phase of a match
• Slightly decreased the shrinking speed of the blue zones in mid-to-late phase (In this phase, blue zones will now move at a slower speed and the travel time of blue zones has slightly increased due to this change)
• Slightly increased the damage per second of the last blue zone

The above changes are currently being tested and once the appropriate feedback is given, they are looking to implement the adjustments in full.

PUBG is available now for Xbox One and PC players.