The folks at PUBG Corp. want to change the blue zone. They tried changing it earlier this month only to be met with a quick pushback from many in the community. The changes revolved around shortening the time between each blue zone phase while also making it slower.
Here were the big changes.
Soon after the new system went live, PUBG’s lead community manager jumped on Reddit to announce they were rolling back the changes.
“Your reactions to this change have been mixed, but we’ve ultimately decided to roll back this change and return to the drawing board. We feel there are some necessary changes we need to make to the blue zone, but we want those changes to be subtle in the spirit of finding the right balance.”
Most complaints revolved around how the changes affected the early game of each match. It’s hard to take advantage of new locations added across the edges of Miramar when the blue zone is nipping at your heels within a few minutes.
A few tweaks to the timing of Phase 2 and 3 would be a good place to start, but the developers are about to try a blue zone system that adjusts on the fly during a match.
Today, PUBG’s third map hits the Closed Experimental Server for a two-day test. A blog post details the changes coming to the blue zone:
“A new feature enables the bluezone to calculate and adjust its waiting time based on the number of players left alive.”
We don’t know exactly how big these changes will be, but it sounds like a system that could work well once all the kinks are worked out.
I do wonder if it will be all that different from the changes PUBG Corp. tried to implement last week, though. We’ve all been in games where a big chunk of the field gets wiped out before the first blue zone locks in.
It sounds like the devs want to improve the pacing of each match. Loot balancing would be another good place to look.
The reason why 30+ people get killed in the first few minutes of each match? They’re going to big cities or areas where high-end loot tends to spawn more often. Think Pecado and Hacienda (Miramar), and Military Base and Pochinki (Erangel). Tweaking loot spawns across the map would help a little bit. You should never go through multiple buildings without finding a gun. I’m not saying put a M4 and a 4x scope in every room, but loot spawns to need to be bumped up.
Plus, a lot of folks want to jump into the action. You’re not going to change that. That’s why a faster (timing) blue zone and better loot distribution across the maps are needed to get rid of the lulls we often see during the mid-game.
At least PUBG Corp. seems to be taking their time with the new blue zone feature. The last change was barely on test servers before the devs pushed it live. Now, the devs can gather plenty of community feedback and see how matches play out before deciding what to do next.
I took a glance at few matches I won recently over at pubg.op.gg. Winning matches last 29-34 minutes. Do you think they should be shorter? Or, do you like the pacing as it stands? I wouldn’t mind seeing matches shortened by 3-5 minutes. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Alex Chavers