Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds Has a Promising Future in eSports
Alexandru “SOLIDFPS” Cotiga of American eSports organization Cloud9 recently talked about the future of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) within eSports. The game’s developers want to push the game into the field, and bigger prize pools are now appearing in PUBG competitions.
PUBG is still new, and its rapid rise in popularity means that any changes it makes to its design will be done under the scrutiny of thousands of fans. But although its competitive scene is still developing, SOLIDFPS believes that current issues have tangible solutions.
Cotiga touches on how events have dealt with circles. While early tournaments used the game’s default settings, it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t fun to watch.
“If you saw how competitive play was, say, six months ago, it was basically just like the circles that close really fast, right,” he said. “And so the whole meta was just grab cars, and every circle if you’re not in the centre, go to the centre, and that was that. It was kind of frustrating, kind of boring, and everyone relied on the circle.”
But now, events utilize slower circles, making it nearly impossible for teams to die in the early stages. This places more focus on fighting.
Cotiga also touches on the invitational formatting of events, which is an issue for PUBG.
“I think that if you do an Invitational, it has to be entirely based on player performance at previous events and online tournaments,” he said. “If you do open qualifiers, or any sort of qualification system, there needs to be far more slots to actually fight for. I think that, when you do a mix, it’s sort of like, kind of almost unfair a little bit. Trying to compete against all of the best NA teams that didn’t get invited and only have two spots to play for kind of sucks.”
Despite these issues, Cotiga believes that they can be fixed, paving the way for the game’s promising future in eSports.