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PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds PC Update Makes Changes to Pre-Game Lobby to Increase Performance

Slightly less chaos before the real fight.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

Bluehole Studio released a patch for the PC version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds this week that aims to increase the game’s performance by changing how players meet before a match begins.

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Before the patch, the pre-game lobby consisted of all 100 players spawning into a small section of a map. Players were free to run around, shoot weapons, or be generally obnoxious if voice chat was turned on. The recent update changed the one starting location into multiple areas.

“Lots of interaction among multiple players in such a small area had a high impact on the servers,” Bluehole Studios wrote in the update notes. “To solve this, we have introduced multiple areas where players gather before the match start.”

Additionally, the developer removed all weapons from the starting island. “As a result, the performance, both server and client-side, has improved,” noted the studio.

Bluehole Studio also announced that it will be testing a new anti-cheat measure on the test servers at a later date. The security solution is currently still in development, but the studio wants to “start gathering some data regarding it’s stability and compatibility.”

Cheaters have become a huge problem for the popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, with the number of bans reaching up to six digits in a single weekend. BattlEye, the game’s anti-cheat service, reported the total number of bans was 1.5 million by the end of 2017, nine months since the game launched in Steam Early Access last March.

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Tom Meyer

Follow on Twitter @tomeyerz for musings on video games and things that confound him.

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