'PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' news: 'Stream sniping' ban mechanic and lag cause players to review bomb the game

Promotional photo of "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" on Steam. Steam website

A legion of unknown players is now giving low review scores to "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" (PUBG), as the developers of the game initiate a crackdown on players who snipe streamers using their in-game stream videos.

At the time of writing, the "PUBG's" Steam page now has a mixed player rating, with only 52 percent of all the recent reviews giving the game a favorable rating. This score has gone down a long way from the game's positive rating just a week ago. The histogram rating chart of the game on Steam shows that the back in Sept. 23, the game still had an overwhelmingly positive score from a majority of the players, with its negative reviews spiking only since Sept. 29.

This so-called "review bombing" is reportedly being done by the players in response to two developer implementations. The first one bans players who engage in "stream sniping," or the act of watching streamers play the game and pinpointing their exact locations, making them easier to kill. A lot of banned players on the game's Steam page have explained that they did not engage in the act and were just falsely accused by the streamer.

Players giving "PUBG" negative reviews due to this believe that this banning policy is hurting the gameplay since the bans are allegedly being implemented simply based on the accusations of game streamers, regardless of the credibility.

Another problem the review bombers have is the server lag issue for Chinese players. Bluehole, Inc., the game's developers were supposedly capitalizing on this complication by introducing "official" paid proxies to Chinese players in order to reduce in-game network lag. Apparently, what enraged the players is that the paid proxy is about the same price as the game itself and only gave them access to the game for about four months.

Bluehole, Inc. has yet to comment on the issues or raise a compromise for both.

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