This is becoming an unfortunate trend for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Every day, at roughly the same time (evening for me), the PUBG servers begin to struggle under the huge weight of its own success. Then, inevitably, the Play Battlegrounds Twitter account lets everyone know they’re aware of the issues and are fixing it.
After the explosive success of PUBG, it comes as no surprise that the servers have been under stress lately, but what’s certainly surprising is that Bluehole has seemingly done nothing to fix this problem – at least from a gamer’s perspective.
The PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds subreddit tends to explode with every server downtime, with self-proclaimed engineers crawling out of the woodwork to give their two cents on what could and could not be done to fix this problem.
There are PUBG apologists and those who go on the offensive, calling out Bluehole for their lack of long-term solutions. Seekified, a commenter on the server status thread, states, “’Buying servers’ does not solve this kind of problem. They're running it on Amazon AWS, it's a very solid and widespread infrastructure platform. The problem here is that 1.6 million connections essentially amounts to a DDoS attack against not only the servers themselves but most of the networking hardware closest to the servers.”
This seems like a reasonable explanation, but then ImMufasa offers a counterpoint with, “AWS can handle it easily if Bluehole paid for a package that covers this much traffic. AWS hosts netflix, pubg is nothing compared to that.” So really, unless someone knows what’s going on server side, we’re all just throwing darts hoping to hit something.
While there’s a lot of discussion in the community about all of this, Bluehole are alarmingly silent, offering no explanation for why this daily occurrence is even happening, or what they’re doing to fix the issue long term. At most, they merely let their paying customers know they’re aware of the issue, and then they’ll inform us when it’s fixed, and quite frankly, regardless of whether this is in Early Access or not, it’s unacceptable.
At 1.6 million concurrent users, Steam’s highest player count ever, you’d think PUBG was popular enough to avoid this repeating problem.
