Esports
The PUBG Invitational at Gamescom was a great start for the game, but if it wants to beat the biggest esports out there, we need some tweaks still.
Last week the unthinkable happened. Dota 2 was knocked off the top of the most popular game on Steam chart. But it wasn’t fellow esport CS:GO that managed to do it, and it wasn’t some hot new AAA game release, no, it was PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Dota 2 could only muster up 838,519 people playing at the same time, while PUBG managed to blow it out of the water by securing 877,844 players.
While PUBG managed to beat Dota in the concurrent players metric, its creators were also laying the groundwork to try and steal Valve’s esports crown as well. Some of the best PUBG players in the world were trying their hand in the PUBG Invitational at Gamescom when the lead changed in the concurrent players standings. $350,000 was up for grabs at what was the first real major LAN competition specifically designed for PUBG.
The event, along with impressive viewing numbers and of course the massive player base, proved that there is a lot going for PUBG as an esport. For a first attempt at a specially designed LAN event the Invitational was a solid effort from all involved – but it was far from perfect. The other metrics may be swinging in PUBG’s favour, but it still has a long way to go to beat Dota when it comes to quality of life features that make a game more than just a game, but a spectacle. With just a few tweaks and changes, developers Bluehole could have an esports mega hit on their hands.
Make a competitive ruleset
The PUBG community was outraged after the first day of the Invitational. While many players had chosen to play risky and try to rack up the kills, others decided to play safe. Tediously so. One of those players was eventual winner, Kyo-min "EVERMORE" Koo, a former pro Overwatch player. Instead of looking for fights he actively avoided them, going back to the starting island to loot, and then standing in the blue zone and taking damage so that he was away from other players. He would use healing items to stay alive and then fight at the last possible moment. This was enough to win the solo competition.
As you might expect, this didn’t exactly make for great viewing and a lot of people were riled. While you can’t really fault EVERMORE – all he really did was use the game’s systems to his advantage to win a load of cash – you do have to question how this can be solved, and the solution is a competitive rule set.
You can’t implement rules that say you can’t hide in the blue, but you can change settings that make it harder to do so, or that incentivise playing more aggressively. It will probably take awhile to figure out, but Bluehole and ESL need to create a set of rules and game settings that become standard for all PUBG competitions, and make sure that these will make for entertaining viewing.
Decide if competitive PUBG is first or third person
First person modes have only recently been added to PUBG, and even now they aren't available in all regions, but they have split the community. Some maintain that third person is the way to go, while others have only played in (frankly terrifying) first person since the new servers launched. The Invitational featured three third person events, and one first person, the organisers hedging their bets to the confusion of newcomers.
There are of course pros and cons to both systems, and the pro players seem to be as undecided as everyone else, but there either needs to be a decision made as to which mode is the one used in competition, or a commitment by Bluehole and the likes of ESL that both modes will be supported equally. This will allow pros to specialise in the one mode they need to and not waste time in others. Doing both is of course the favoured option, but if pros do specialise and one has more money or events than the other, then things will skew very quickly.
Continue to improve the broadcast production
Clearly, there’s no easy way to broadcast a game that can have up to 100 players on a map at any one time. That’s 100 different viewpoints to keep up with, all spread out over a huge map – there’s no way any system will be able to capture everything. Even CS:GO hasn’t managed to perfect that yet, with only ten players in a game.
However, at the Invitational there was a lot of promise to the broadcast. The team had access to every player's PoV and could switch directly to their feed on the fly. There was also a feed for the map and a few free cams to show more than one player at once. It sounds like a really great set up, but it still needs refinement.
There were times when the action would cut away from a player just as they were about to get into a fight, for instance; there were times when the casters would ask for something and it would take a good 15 seconds to happen; there were times when we were shown some truly bizarre feeds where players were literally doing nothing. It certainly won’t be easy to figure out a good way to keep everything going, but a little improvement is needed here (more production editors who play the game, perhaps), otherwise those that don’t play the game may struggle to keep up.
Add a tournament feature into the game
If there’s one thing that the Invitational made us realise, it's that we want to be able to play in an environment like that. The pace of the game was very different to what you see these same players do on stream, and it seemed like a blast to play. However, unless you have access to a custom server, there’s no way to play in tournament matches. The best way to fix this, and as a by-product allow players to be noticed, is to implement a tournament system that allows online competitions to be simply organised within the game itself. Even something like the Battle Cup in Dota 2 would be a good start. This allows players that want to compete a chance to do so in a realistic competition environment, while those that just want to lie on the floor in the grass and wait in standard matchmaking. That way, Bluehole and the studio’s fans can have their cake and eat it – or should that be chicken dinner?
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