PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has an idler problem. That much is certain. How bad the problem actually is seems to be in the eye of the beholder
Idlers are players who drop into games, only to sit around doing nothing in hopes of slowly accumulating Battle Points, PUBG‘s in-game currency. Ever since the game added rare cosmetic loot that can fetch a pretty penny on Steam’s community marketplace, their numbers have been on the rise. These days, it isn’t uncommon to see four or five of them in any given match, though I’ve heard stories of that number ballooning all the way up to 12.
Now, PUBG is a 100-player game, so you might never encounter an AFK patty cake circle even if there is one in your match, but it’s still annoying to realise five to 10 per cent of the players you’re up against aren’t even playing. It kills tension and diminishes your accomplishments.
The good news is, PUBG developer Bluehole has acknowledged that idlers are an issue, and it’s planning to do something about them. But the particulars of how it will accomplish this are, like so many combatants parachuting into an island slaughterfest, still up in the air.
“We are aware of that happening,” producer Chang-Han Kim told PC Gamer, “and we have the team working to analyse what’s actually going on there. But from what we are aware of right now, we know that the portion of players that are AFK-ing just to earn BP isn’t that high.”
He added that the team will “definitely” address the issue, but they’re still not sure whether that will mean shifting the balance of BP earned to more heavily prioritise action over inaction, or whether the team will more directly try to prevent people from going AFK for long periods of time.
Regardless of what the dev team ends up deciding to do, it sounds like idlers won’t be getting the boot and/or frying pan for a little while yet.
Comments
15 responses to “Battlegrounds Devs Aren’t Sure How They Will Combat AFK Farmers”
– Check if someone hasn’t moved in X minutes
– Check if they were auto-ejected from the plane
– Check if they have moved X distance from their landing point
– Check if they have picked up anything at all
If the implemented check fails – Don’t award BP. Oh look, problem solved.
Yeah I was thinking similar.
How lame would you have to be to actually do this?
Easy enough to set up a macro to defeat most of those checks.
Sure – Except battleye would detect it and flag you for a ban anyway.
Nothing could easily detect a macro that randomly mouse your mouse or presses WASD.
There are macro’s live right now that automatically compensate for recoil for every weapon. Macros are very hard to detect
There are literally thousands of way to skin this cat. You can even have a sub quest routine to only award BP after x conditions are met;
Walk x time not in a straight line,
Pick up x number of items,
chat, with voice or text,
enter a building,
etc…
I’m sure there is something every player does while playing the game, even campers can’t camp unless they have a weapon of sorts. They’d even have big data on what the play style was over every other game that player has played, if they never move in any game, flag the account and deny BP until they are active.
Removing all microtransactions. And devaluing loot box items would do it.
It is literally the simplest fix in the world: Remove the “automatically deploy parachute” component. AFK players fall to their deaths – problem solved.
That actually wouldn’t work at all for the problem they’re trying to deal with.
It’d be fairly simple for the point farmers, not the randoms who just went AFK for some reason, to set something up to hit the parachute deploy key for them.
Well they can’t use any sort of bot or macro system. Battleye would detect it.
Okay so take away auto-deploy parachute and create a counter – if a player doesn’t bail out of the plane and falls to their death twice in a row, they’re not allowed to queue until the 2nd match is complete
remove ability to sell items.
award no bp.
every 10 kills or winning a match gives a case.
I think what we’re missing here is that the game is not finished. It crashes. If this happens while you are in the plane, you can still rejoin when you re-load the game. If you’re in a squad this gives you a chance to re-join your buddies (DayZ style) rather than wait for them to finish their game. It gives you a second chance.
Had a great game recently due to this – eventually caught up with my squad 15 mins later. I mean, we were killed shortly after, but that’s PUBG.
Jus’ sayin’.
head a really basic one witch already have the tools to do, after 3 deaths under a min, put a popup on there screen and ask them if there human it would stop any auto system from working.