The developers of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) yesterday confirmed that first-person only servers are now available to Oceanic players.
“We are pleased to announce that first-person only servers for DUO will now be available for players in Oceania,” a post on the game’s website reads. “Starting from 3 pm KST / 3:30 pm ACST today, players will be able to enjoy FPP DUO on OCE servers. For SOLO and SQUAD, we plan to introduce FPP at a later stage when we have an increased user pool on OCE servers in order to ensure a pleasant experience for all Oceanic players.”
Shoutout to South Australians with that timezone, eh?
“It has recently come to our attention that players in Oceania who enjoy first-person matches have been facing problems with high latency/ping as they had to resort to playing the game mode on Asia and NA servers. We apologize for how long it took us to address this issue,” the post continues. “One of our main concerns was the fact that it can affect the other group of players who do not play FPP. It has been proven by the data from other regions that we need at least 500 players for two game modes to ensure a reasonable matchmaking time. Currently, the number of concurrent users on OCE is sometimes lower than the threshold during certain times.”
PUBG‘s developers acknowledged that 20% of Oceanic players were on other region’s first-person servers due to a lack of their own.
“According to our data, about 20% of the entire Oceanic player base plays FPP on servers in other regions. Adding another game mode now can make it difficult to sustain matches at all times. Furthermore, we will add a new map when we move out of Early Access later this year. All of these factors would result in a divided player base for each of these modes and ultimately affect the time required for matchmaking, especially in those regions with a smaller player base.
“However, we have decided to introduce first-person only servers to DUO first to accommodate players who want to fully enjoy the first-person only experience.”
The servers are available now. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is available now in early access on Windows PC; an Xbox One launch is planned for later in the year.
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