Earlier today we reported that first-person servers for Battlegrounds were going to be restricted to Asian and North American servers. That just changed.
After stating that the current player base was too small in OCE to warrant the first-person servers, the PUBG Development and Community Team issued a statement on their Dev Blog earlier this afternoon.
Players,
We are pleased to announce that first-person only servers for DUO will now be available for players in Oceania. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Please note that you may experience longer matchmaking time or find it difficult to quickly join a new game from 1:00 am to 12:00 pm ACST.
We, however, hope that adding FPP DUO to the OCE servers will boost the Oceanic player base and encourage more players to try FPP. We will continue to monitor regional data and add FPP to more game modes in the future once we know it won’t have a negative impact on the entire player base for a long period of time within a day.
Thank you for being patient with us and sharing your feedback with us.
Here are just a couple of the fan reactions on Twitter.
On behalf of the OC community, thank you for listening to our feedback and tackling this issue head on. Fantastic work!
— PUBG Oceania (@PUBGOCE) September 6, 2017
BENDING THE KNEE BOYS
— Kyle (@Kairuxo) September 6, 2017
Thankyou for explaining the numbers and how you’re making these decisions. Looking forward to further open communication.
— Agent Dark Booty (@agentdb01) September 6, 2017
There is still no word on when OCE will get access first-person squad and single player modes. In the meantime, go grab a mate and try for that chicken dinner.
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