PUBG players outraged at the new $10 Event Pass

[Cal Jeffrey]

Bottom line: The newest form of micro transactions comes int he form of the "game pass." For a fee it gives players cosmetic rewards for completing "quests." PUBG recently added such a system and it's not going over too well with players.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has seen a spike in negative reviews on Steam. Review bombing is not uncommon on Steam, and often there is something behind the influx of negativity other than just groups of people trying to be malicious. In this case, it seems that players are none too happy about PUBG’s launching of its “Event Pass” last week.

Fortnite has had its Battle Pass for a while now. It is essentially a progression system where for a $10 fee, players can receive cosmetic items for completing specific tasks within the game. It is not essential to play with a Battle Pass, as none of the rewards give advantages to players. It is just a way for Epic to make a little dough on its free-to-play game and for players to get something for their efforts.

Not wanting to miss out on the action, PUBG decided that it needed something similar, so it created a $10 Event Pass and players are mad about it. It is not so much that it is something that the players do not want. In fact, many in the community longed a progression system. The problem here is that PUBG is not a free-to-play game like Fortnite. Many feel that since Battlegrounds is not F2P, it should not be charging them for a progression system.

Additionally, Event Pass launched loaded with bugs. Couple this with a buggy Early Access launch and continuing problems with cheaters, and players feel it is too much for the developers to be asking for even more money.

One Redditor summed the community’s passions up succinctly saying, “We have supported this game since early access. PUBG has made over $730 million... Yet, it’s still not optimized, cheaters are rampant, crates are locked behind keys. Even after charging $30 for the game, they now introduce this $9.99 Event Pass. If this were free to play, none of us would care.”

Other players have taken the time to detail their complaints on the new system including a requirement that players survive at least five minutes after the plane takes off to register an achievement. If you’ve played any Battle Royale game, you’ll know that surviving five minutes is an accomplishment in and of itself.

Developers say that they are looking into the bugs, but as to the $9.99 fee for the Event Pass, it is probably there to stay.

“Yep been seeing the reports,” communications leader PUBG_Riggles acknowledged. “Team is working on fixes and retroactive XP granting. It'll probably be a messy process because it's our first time doing something like this but we'll make sure to take care of you guys.”

A PUBG representative told Kotaku that patch notes for fixes to the Event Pass system should be up by the middle of this week.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/75262-pubg-players-do-not-like-new-10-event.html

 

[Misagt]

I guess a billion isn't enough to make a stable game.

 

[tipstir]

STO is F2P and P2P.. Why can't this game be that way too. I am not paying for any online game that still Beta they're all beta. Bugs in all the coding.. They just hope the continuous patches fix the complicated code game. Like this game here. Looks like fun but code glitches are more present..

 

[Evernessince]

I guess a billion isn't enough to make a stable game.

BTH though they were paying EPIC to optimize their game and help with the game engine. Kind of fishy that EPIC came out with Fortnite shortly after.

 

[texasrattler]

Something happened between Pubg and Epic, public just isn't being told what. Which lead to Epic adding a mode to their medicore game that is now a smash hit. But it would have never took off if it wasn't for Pubg.
Pubg is a great concept, it was simply done buy a incompetent dev. Clearly Greene who is mainly a gamer should have never been involved in the game since he knows nothing about how to make a FPS. On top of that Bluehole had never done a FPS game and it's become clear now that they can't make one.

The game has so many issues 7 months after 1.0 and no fixes insight. New content that is just as buggy as the original game, are you freaking kidding me? It's a mess.

Then they not only charge to unlock crates (that alone needs to be changed) but have the balls to charge players for a Event Pass when the game isn't even close to resembling any sort of completion/optimization.

It's time for people to wake up and walk away from the game. It had so many chances and has basically failed at every one of those chances. LET IT GO.
Maybe it will get the fixes it needs but not if they can keep making money off of people. Greed wont stop, ask Activision. LET THE GAME DIE.
Another game will come along and do what players want. We will all still deal with some of the issues but games done by PROPER DEVS will be OPTIMIZED.

 

[kapital98]

To be fair to Bluehole, it may have existing problem but it made far more money than most prior games. It was a smash hit but probably won't have the staying power of Counterstrike or League of Legends. That's not bad. It's just the way it is.

Fortnite's success is super fishy but they have tapped into the "F2P" model that is so addicting. I don't know a single serious "F2P" gamer who hasn't put down at least $30 for their game of choice. Most people end up spending closer to WoW like amounts. Except, because it's not a monthly subscription or lump sum, they think they are going to save money by playing F2P.

 

[Puiu]

I guess a billion isn't enough to make a stable game.

BTH though they were paying EPIC to optimize their game and help with the game engine. Kind of fishy that EPIC came out with Fortnite shortly after.

Epic is optimising the engine and removing engine related bugs. PUBG devs are the ones that have to get rid of the bugs in their game and optimise their own rendering pipeline. that's 100% on them.

They could start by building their own original assets with the help of some good designers that can make them look good while reducing the poly count.

 

[Evernessince]

Epic is optimising the engine and removing engine related bugs. PUBG devs are the ones that have to get rid of the bugs in their game and optimise their own rendering pipeline. that's 100% on them.

Is that based on what you know or based on what you assume? If you can provide a link that delineates those details I wouldn't mind seeing it.

AFAIK, the only thing made public was that they were paying EPIC to help them. The specific details have not been made public. FYI, they are using the Unreal engine for PUBG so any support for the rendering pipeline, which is done by the engine, should be supported by EPIC.

I can understand a variance in performance but the difference between Fortnite and PUBG's performance is a bit too much. Some of that definitely falls on EPIC.

 

[Puiu]

Is that based on what you know or based on what you assume? If you can provide a link that delineates those details I wouldn't mind seeing it.

AFAIK, the only thing made public was that they were paying EPIC to help them. The specific details have not been made public. FYI, they are using the Unreal engine for PUBG so any support for the rendering pipeline, which is done by the engine, should be supported by EPIC.

I can understand a variance in performance but the difference between Fortnite and PUBG's performance is a bit too much. Some of that definitely falls on EPIC.

Ah yes, they might indeed help them in the same vein as how Nvidia and AMD help devs optimise for their hardware. But I don't think Epic sent them a team of devs to help develop the game and fix bugs in the features they created. Let's not forget that they also have the console versions to optimise and fix and I think Epic had a bigger role there than with the PC version after the Xbox launch. (and yes, it is my own speculation, but I do believe it's fairly close to the truth)

 

[captaincranky]

Well kidz, the first bag of heroin is usually free.... After that, you're hooked.....and It'll cost ya dearly.

It's a real similar thing to video game addiction. You know. you start to get the jitters after you've been away for a couple of days, then you get out your credit card, and start looking for a dealer. Whoops, I meant "computer terminal".

 

[ghostf1re]

Something happened between Pubg and Epic, public just isn't being told what. Which lead to Epic adding a mode to their medicore game that is now a smash hit. But it would have never took off if it wasn't for Pubg.
Pubg is a great concept, it was simply done buy a incompetent dev. Clearly Greene who is mainly a gamer should have never been involved in the game since he knows nothing about how to make a FPS. On top of that Bluehole had never done a FPS game and it's become clear now that they can't make one.

The game has so many issues 7 months after 1.0 and no fixes insight. New content that is just as buggy as the original game, are you freaking kidding me? It's a mess.

Then they not only charge to unlock crates (that alone needs to be changed) but have the balls to charge players for a Event Pass when the game isn't even close to resembling any sort of completion/optimization.

It's time for people to wake up and walk away from the game. It had so many chances and has basically failed at every one of those chances. LET IT GO.
Maybe it will get the fixes it needs but not if they can keep making money off of people. Greed wont stop, ask Activision. LET THE GAME DIE.
Another game will come along and do what players want. We will all still deal with some of the issues but games done by PROPER DEVS will be OPTIMIZED.

I pretty much agree with you. I've been mostly done with the game for about 4 months. The cheating and the bugs were most of my decision to stop playing the game, but I also simply stopped caring for it in general. I don't see the game lasting more than another year if it continues on the path it's on. Their new $10 pass is just another indication that this company either doesn't have a clue what they're doing or they simply just don't care.

One thing is for sure, their continued buggy launches is a pretty good indication they don't know what they're doing in terms of real development.