The last few months have been a bit bumpy in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, as evidenced by the tone of the Steam forums and subreddit, which are full of frustrated posts about crashes, stuttering and cheating. Some of the issues started with Season 6, but others go back to last year.
PUBG Corp has addressed these issues in an update detailing reasons for the issues and plans for fixes. The devs have already "mostly resolved" a team deathmatch issues in Arcade, but it looks like there is plenty more to do. Performance issues have been increasing since January and are ongoing, and apparently they've been hard to identify.
"The difficult part is that some of these issues are impacting specific hardware, or happen in unique situations which are difficult to reproduce," reads the update. "To improve performance issues, which have to track down the specific cause, which often means needing to reproduce the specific steps leading to the issue."
PUBG has also been the victim of an uptick in DDoS attacks. In November the frequency rose to the highest it had ever been, and it's risen again this month. In attempting to resolve the problem, PUBG Corp had to run some tests that resulted in even more performance issues.
"While testing various DDoS defense solutions from external infrastructure providers, server locations were often located far away from standard locations, which resulted in increased ping and other network issues for some players," it explains. "Additionally, many players have suffered constant packet loss issues due to the experimental DDoS defense solutions deployed by these providers."
It didn't want to let the attackers know what it was doing, which is why it kept players in the dark. At least there's a pay-off, as the impact of DDoS attacks is down by nearly 85 percent.
Players also reported that custom match presets haven't been working properly since the last patch, which was the result of improvements the team was making to the custom match code. The issue hasn't been resolved entirely, but existing saved presets should work now. It's also fixed some other custom match bugs.
As for the cheating, PUBG Corp will be providing more details about its plans in a community letter and roadmap post next month. Right now, it has multiple internal teams and "external resources" that it's using to combat cheating, and it's one of the studio's highest priorities.
If you're having some trouble, you can hit up PUBG's support team.
Despite a messy few months, PUBG remains one of the most popular games on Steam. According to SteamDB, the average concurrent player figure actually rose in November and December, though it's fallen this year. In 2018, it regularly saw peaks of over a million players, but it's been steadily declining. Still, a 300,000 player average is still pretty healthy.
