Playerunknown's Battlegrounds keeps fixes rolling

While the makers of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds work away on undoing some of its more enduring technical problems, fixes are still coming for the more immediate stuff. This past week saw the launch of an update aimed at reducing lag problems on the North American servers by fixing an issue which stopped their matchmaking from filtering people by ping - which turned out to have combined nastily with a bug which set the default region to North America so many people elsewhere in the world unknowingly joined in and made everything worse. A string of other bugs and bad things have been fixed across the week too.

It's been a busy week so let's roll on through a timeline of fixes.

Over the weekend, PUBG Corp say they released a hotfix targetting "an issue preventing ping-based matchmaking in NA" - which presumably contributed to its recent terrible desynchronisation problems. "The problem was exacerbated in part by a bug that set the default region to NA for all players (which caused many players to queue up for NA without realising it)," they add.

Ah. Yes. So North American servers were matching laggy people with low-ping stags & hens, and accidentally railroading folks onto servers where they would find their own game laggy and cause lag issues for other players too. That's a nasty combo there.

On Monday the 9th, another hotfix hit after "it was discovered that planned server optimisations for Sanhok hadn't been properly applied." Whoops.

The official named patch of this week was Update #17.1, which hit the servers on Thursday after the customary stretch in testing. It's mostly a collection of fixes, headlined by a nasty bug which stopped players from reviving squadmates. PUBG Corp were uncharacteristically candid about that one, saying it was intended to stop a long-known cheat.

"This bug was unfortunately introduced because of new code related to revivals that helps us better detect certain cheats," they explained. "We generally don't mention changes of this nature in the patch notes because we don't want to give away too much information to cheaters."

But what's a patch without a hotfix? So a few hours later on Thursday, another wee patch followed to fix bugs stopping some from chaining bandages and making cosmetics weird.

That's it. That's your update for the weekend. As you head out on stag & hen parties this weekend, know that some things have been fixed and some things still need fixing. As PUBG Corp conceded on Tuesday:

"Our goal is to always work to give you a better battle royale experience. To do that, we know that we have to ship more performance improvements and additional bug fixes. We agree with the criticisms of the game that many of you have made recently, including comments that our efforts need to be more effective and that the game still needs more improvement. We greatly appreciate this feedback and we know that all of it comes from a place of support and love for [Plunkbat].

"Right now we're developing new plans to resolve various problems facing [Plunkbat], prioritising server performance, client-side performance, anti-cheat, and bugs."

Oh! Bugs! Do pack bug spray if you're off to Paradise Resort for your last free night.