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PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has been hit with a storm of negative reviews on Steam, as Chinese players protest forced in-game advertisements that have begun to appear in the game’s menu. The ads are of a third-party gaming VPN, which is quite the sore spot for players in the region after many have complained of lag-ridden servers.
PUBG is fully localised in China, however servers local to the area often presents so much lag that players from the region feel forced to join more stable servers in Europe or North America. This in turn affects players local to those areas, who feel that the higher ping presents an unfair advantage and ruins their experience. And the domino effect continues.
Advertisements began to pop up when connected to PUBG in the Chinese region, pertaining to a VPN service that accelerates connection to international servers. Understandably, this has annoyed players across the area who feel that Bluehole, and now PUBG Corp., could do more to maintain local servers instead of advertising further cost to a game that they have already purchased and should be able to play.
Of course, Chinese players want their voices to be heard and given that review bombing is a technique that has worked in the past for the region, PUBG saw a slew of negative reviews flow in. Surprisingly, the 10,000 plus recent negative reviews are from players from all over the world that are joining in for various different reasons. Some are protesting “false bans” due to newly implemented stream sniping rules and others due to the persistent downtime PUBG has experienced as of late and is continuing to experience today.
PUBG Corp is set to introduce Squad First-Person Perspective Oceanic servers later this month, so I wouldn’t be surprised if attention was shifted to server infrastructure overall in the wake of these incidents.
KitGuru Says: It is worth pointing out that the game is in Early Access, but at this stage and for the price that Bluehole is charging, players should have access to a game that is at the very least playable. Have you experienced any bugs or grievances with the game?
The backlash I’m a witness to, although may differ from what the review bombs state, was from overprotection (IMO) of streamers by folks honking. So if you honk a vehicle horn its first of all a bad decision to give yourself away, but if there is a streamer nearby, even if you don’t know about, you can be banned as folks hunting down streamers will make noises to hunt them down while watching the stream. Personally think the games pretty awesome, however I think you should stream at your own risk. Its not worth a ban for someone to put themselves out there in a game.
I’m 100% against the stream sniping ban. If you’re going to stream, you should do so at your own risk IMO. If there was a way to correlate the IP Address of both gamer and streamer and block the gamers view of the stream while they are in the same instance that would be a much better way to regulate than banning the player from a game.
Its not those that actively seek out streamers that I’m even remotely against. Its those that simply use an in game feature of the car horn, even when they do not know a streamer is close, that are banned that I’m simply shaking my head over. Regardless of Car horn, explosives, gun shots, etc potential of someone streaming shouldn’t eliminate the majority from being able to make sounds in the game or face a ban for even the potential for trying to hunt down the streamer.
Beyond that, the game itself is awesome. There is nothing technical or feature ridden that I would not recommend this game for. But potentially being banned from the game from using a car horn is outright silly.
Agreed. They are banning before getting 100% proof.
If a popular stream sniper says “ban em, dan-o”, PUBG folks do whatever streamers tell them.
Article doesn’t even mention stream sniping bans, which is the real reason for the review bombing. Fail article.
i was so excited for this game when it came out and i have played it daily since release but i am kind of done with it now, The ‘steam sniping’ bans, constant lag/desync and downtime is inexcusable at this point even for an early access game, i kinda get the feeling that moving it to PUBG corp is going to be used as an excuse for why its taking longer to smooth the game out as they are going to have to do some mass recruitment.
If the Streamers don’t want to get Stream Sniped they can setup the stream with 3-5 seconds delay.
Improve the servers and add a lag restriction. Anything more than 100ms and you get booted. As for streaming, anything that reduces the odd culture of watching people play other games must be a good thing.
I think u wanted to write minutes, but anyway, streamers are a part of what this genre is today and PlayerUnknown wants to give something back to them by implementing these systems. It’s hard to judge how effective & accurate they’ve been and how many innocent players got affected, but don’t you think those breaking the rules should get punished in the end? I think it’s silly to let stream snipers run free and this game wants to deal with it.
My game keeps defaulting me in Asian servers even though I am in Ireland. (Europe, for the yanks)