PLAYERUNKNOWNS BATTLEGROUNDS

Yea if haven't already do so and look us up and we'll get you invited to the GWJ channel

Well, I gave this a shot, and it became the first ever game I've gotten a Steam refund for.

The game's performance is absolutely unacceptable. I've already put up with DayZ once, but even DayZ doesn't run like that anymore. And after ARK, I'm not doing the "oh the performance optimization patch will come any day now" thing again.

I'll check back in when the game goes into release state.

*Legion* wrote:

Well, I gave this a shot, and it became the first ever game I've gotten a Steam refund for.

The game's performance is absolutely unacceptable. I've already put up with DayZ once, but even DayZ doesn't run like that anymore. And after ARK, I'm not doing the "oh the performance optimization patch will come any day now" thing again.

I'll check back in when the game goes into release state.

The only time I have performance issues was during pregame free for all thing and the fly in. The actual gameplay has been running fine for me, and my PC is decent but nothing spectacular

We're probably working from very different definitions of "runs fine". Which is fine. For me, this game falls clearly below mine.

Runs 60fps+ plus 90% of the time for me after I set everything to medium. In it's current state it's very CPU hungry.

Yeah, you have to turn things down. It runs just fine at Medium. I have a 6700k and a 1070.

Optimization is high on the priority list, so it'll get better. Right now, it's solid enough to play and have fun. It's never going to be BF/CoD-level of graphics, so if that is "acceptable" for you, then you're not gonna be able to enjoy any Battle Royale game.

*shrug* It's early release and not even close to their optimization pass. So not sure of the expectation.

Definitely runs better than H1Z1. You say DayZ got better, but not for me. Granted I didn't play the last 2 or updates for it.

ranalin wrote:

You say DayZ got better, but not for me. Granted I didn't play the last 2 or updates for it.

Well yeah, then you haven't played on the entirely new rendering engine.

I played Battlegrounds on Very Low. I have a 144hz monitor and try to target above 60fps as a bare minimum baseline. Hence dropping detail to nothing with the intent on turning things up as I go.

What I found is cities could drop things into the 30s even on Very Low settings across the board. And the result was framerate which would swing wildly. Driving at 100fps one second and 30fps the next was brutally jarring. The moment-to-moment experience was bad, even though the numbers would average out OK (not great, but OK).

For a game with that relative level of visual fidelity, the performance was just not acceptable for a $30 purchase. Will it get better later? Maybe. Again, got burned by ARK expecting that to happen. But with a 4.4ghz oc'd Ivy Bridge and an RX 480, plummeting framerates on Very Low are just not something I'm spending $30 on. If optimizations actually do materialize, then I can repurchase it later. But I am done with holding onto Early Access titles that do not live up to my baseline performance requirements.

*Legion* wrote:
ranalin wrote:

You say DayZ got better, but not for me. Granted I didn't play the last 2 or updates for it.

Well yeah, then you haven't played on the entirely new rendering engine.

I played Battlegrounds on Very Low. I have a 144hz monitor and try to target above 60fps as a bare minimum baseline. Hence dropping detail to nothing with the intent on turning things up as I go.

What I found is cities could drop things into the 30s even on Very Low settings across the board. And the result was framerate which would swing wildly. Driving at 100fps one second and 30fps the next was brutally jarring. The moment-to-moment experience was bad, even though the numbers would average out OK (not great, but OK).

For a game with that relative level of visual fidelity, the performance was just not acceptable for a $30 purchase. Will it get better later? Maybe. Again, got burned by ARK expecting that to happen. But with a 4.4ghz oc'd Ivy Bridge and an RX 480, plummeting framerates on Very Low are just not something I'm spending $30 on. If optimizations actually do materialize, then I can repurchase it later. But I am done with holding onto Early Access titles that do not live up to my baseline performance requirements.

1070 and a i7-6700 @ 4.0 and with settings set to medium (which is a habit for me in these kind of games) and shadow and shrubbery settings at low i only dip below 60 on a couple of larger cities and it's high 40s to 50s. That also seems to be along the same lines most streamers are seeing too.

I do understand the hesitation for early access games. That said i've done dozen or more early access games now and this is probably the best state i've seen one in at the start.

So most of my RL friends were away at a bachelor party this weekend so I had a lot of time Thursday - Sunday and logged a gross probably 20 - 24 hours this weekend (although steam says like 50 because I idle at menu a lot).

As far as optimization. I am running i7-6700k and 1080. On ultra I was running 40-50 FPS. On Medium i'm staying at a pretty stable 70ish. Now is that is not great, I run RB6 siege on max at 144 FPS stable. However, I don't think it can be compared to Ark which I was also near top of line (970 not 980) and had setting turned to down to low/medium get like 30 FPS stable early on.

So as most have learned if you are going to "win" or do well in a game you want to travel as far from plane as possible generally. To get away and give yourself time to loot. If you are a new player I would recommend this for 1-3 games right away to get use to looting, learn movement, system etc. However, I would highly recommend once you have those few things down you spend 3-15 rounds purposefully landing in highly populated areas on purpose. This is so you can learn the basics of the gun mechanics and fighting in this game. When you die early in those games with lower loot it will give you a lot more "gun fighting" experience a lot quicker. You can easily make it to top 30-20 without firing a shot and sometimes even top 10. However, if you want a chance to win once you get to that point it is a lot faster to learn those mechanics in short city rounds.

Loot (not confirmed but pretty well educated)

From what I can determine from my playtime and watching some streams. Lvl 3 loot, SKS, Scar, kar etc. can 100% spawn anywhere. However, there are certainly locations where it seems to be more likely. Most make sense and military locations. Now, these locations are more highly visited so usually I only go when I float far, get a car and then still have to drive. However, here are some of the best high end loot places I have found. Sadly most are on east. West has a few good spots but more for quantity of loot than high chance of high lvl.

Novorepnoye - Or as I call it South East Crates
Compound/Crater - Around G2/L6 on map
Bunker - Around F5/L7 (has 4 entrances)
Police building in Yasnaya Polyana
Mytta Power

Level 3 helmet is huge. It is the only helmet that helps if you get shot in the face region. Other helmets only block top of head and back of head. Kar 1 shot head shots even through level 1 or 2 helmet but not lvl 3.

3 solo wins and 1 duo so far. Solo I make top 10 large percent of time but need to work on my head shots.

We call the Compound the 'Estate', but try to stay away from the crater. Every time i've been there it's been a sh*t show and not enough options to get out alive.

Other spots to remember is garage and typical car spawn locations.

I call crater compound also. I use to avoid it but have started going in duo's when plane is in west. You can grab car drive there and clear it rather quickly. We do none of the small buildings just clear the 5 "barns/garages" whatever you want to call them and the one large building.

I call estate but did not put it on list. I don't go there a lot but when I have seems to have a good quantity of loot but more standard spawns.

Good quantity but normal loot spots I go are,

Ruins (near water world)
Crates North West
Apartments in multiple locations (the ones near school I never go to)
Hospital in West
Any city.

Oh and High quality loot I'd add in Military base but I never go there.

in my first few rounds i've been doing the jumping as far away as i can from everybody thing. nice to have a few rounds to get used to dealing with inventory quick etc.

i left the graphics on default, which i just realized set it to ultra on everything. i'm running a i5-6600k @ 3.5 and gtx1030 and it seems to be doing ok but i'm kinda new to these types of games. i'll knock the settings down and see if it does better.

Agree with everything Escher said. Esp the bit about purposefully fighting early on to get used to the game's shooting mechanics. They're pretty solid but can be finicky sometimes.

To add a few things (after 20 hours or so this weekend):

- Always remember the path the plane originally flew. Assume that most players will be scattered along that path. Use that information to plot out the most likely routes the circle that people will take. Ex. if the plane flew North to South and the first circle is on the far east of the map, you can assume people will be approaching it from the NW, W, and SW. Try to approach the circle from the NE, S, and SE to minimize encounters.

- Try not to run towards the circle straight on. Use the blue circle as a protection for your flank and slowly approach the inner circle as you run around the blue circle edge. Sometimes you don't have enough time and have to just YOLO run, but it's not ideal.

- Practice juggling scopes. If you watch good streamers, they'll constantly be switching from a Holo/Red Dot to a 4x/8x as they approach firefights. Use Red Dot/Holo for close range and 4x/8x for long range. Once you get the hang of it, it's really easy to do (right click to quickly attach).

- Shoot tires on cars unless it's close enough to hit the driver/passengers. Tires blow in 2 hits from most guns and even a single tire blown will make the vehicle undriveable.

- If you have 2 rifles, keep one on Auto (B is the default key for fire rate) and one on Single. Single for your long range and Auto for close range. Easier to switch guns than fire rates when you're in the middle of a fight (also you won't have to worry about reloading/magazine size this way).

sortimat wrote:

i left the graphics on default, which i just realized set it to ultra on everything. i'm running a i5-6600k @ 3.5 and gtx1030 and it seems to be doing ok but i'm kinda new to these types of games. i'll knock the settings down and see if it does better.

Do note this all depends on how much you care a FPS. I personally prefer 60FPS+. However, plenty of gamers would prefer Ultra at 40 FPS than Medium at 60FPS. You do you. Now for competitive reasons lower quality and high FPS is better. However, if you are gaming for fun do what looks best to you.

escher77 wrote:
sortimat wrote:

i left the graphics on default, which i just realized set it to ultra on everything. i'm running a i5-6600k @ 3.5 and gtx1030 and it seems to be doing ok but i'm kinda new to these types of games. i'll knock the settings down and see if it does better.

Do note this all depends on how much you care a FPS. I personally prefer 60FPS+. However, plenty of gamers would prefer Ultra at 40 FPS than Medium at 60FPS. You do you. Now for competitive reasons lower quality and high FPS is better. However, if you are gaming for fun do what looks best to you.

at this point i need all the help i can get, so i'll try the higher FPS for a bit.

Thanks for the tips. Do you guys meet up on Curse or Discord to squad up?

Curse (now called Twitch Voice). One of the lead developers is a GWJer, so we have loyalty.

Also, Curse is better IMO.

Cool, thanks.

I forgot to mention the "scare crap out of you" moments in this game. I played maybe a little over an hour but the times I died scared the crap out of me if I didn't see it coming. I can imagine what the person felt or did when I came across one guy looting a crate inside a house, coming up behind him and slaying him from behind with a shotgun. I just hope for his sake that he didn't have the volume up.

FYI - be careful if you have a controller attached to your pc in this game. it seems to flip out when the controller disconnects even if you're not using it in battlegrounds. best case it'll put up a "please reconnect controller" message which even if you turn the controller on again right away will still take like 10 sec to sort out. worst case i've had it just straight crash the game.

sortimat wrote:

FYI - be careful if you have a controller attached to your pc in this game. it seems to flip out when the controller disconnects even if you're not using it in battlegrounds. best case it'll put up a "please reconnect controller" message which even if you turn the controller on again right away will still take like 10 sec to sort out. worst case i've had it just straight crash the game.

Same thing happened to me over the weekend.

YIkes, good heads up. IIRC, controller support was high on their list and imminent. Hopefully that will fix things.

I prefer Discord over Curse for shooters, and made my case about it awhile ago. I just go with the flow now. Plus for most folks here are already connected to Curse and prefer it so makes it easier to get people connected.

I think I am in the group now.

I am ... so bad at this game. And love it so much.

Aetius wrote:

I am ... so bad at this game. And love it so much. :)

Ha, ditto!

I really need to learn all the landmarks that are called out, but I can't seem to find any map with locations marked. Surprising.

OMG

TL;DR: Do not play in Borderless Windowed mode

So my Steam refund had not processed yet, and I had played only 45 minutes of the 2 hour time limit for a refund, so I figured, what the hell, I'll launch it again and see if it still runs like crap.

And it did, even as the frame counter said 60fps+. Just these wild swings in performance depending where I was facing, even though the frame counter didn't necessarily reflect them. I just sat in a house, spinning in a circle, observing smooth - STUTTER - smooth - STUTTER over and over as I diddled with settings.

Finally, I noticed that where it said "Fullscreen", it actually said "Fullscreen (Windowed)". Um, OK.

Turn that to only fullscreen, and suddenly the inexplicable stuttering essentially vanishes.

Why borderless mode performs so terribly, who knows. I've run both Siege and Overwatch in both borderless and fullscreen with no discernible difference in performance, and usually stick with borderless for them.

But with this one, borderless is murder. I don't know if it's like that for everyone, or is some specific combination of 144hz, AMD GPU, FreeSync, and triple monitors to blame, but it's there. (I had tried disabling FreeSync to no avail, but those other three are kind of non-negotiable).

What's odd is that I had not set it to borderless myself. That's why I missed it until this last try.

Borderless is nice with triple monitor for being able to go to menu and mouse out of the game's monitor to poke Discord, etc. on the side monitors without fully tabbing out, but it's just a nice-to-have, not a deal breaker.

So, I cancelled the pending refund. The game still doesn't perform quite to where I'd be happy with it, but it's a lot closer to where it needs to be with the veil of stutters lifted.

Interesting, the AKM is the best single shot rifle unmodded pretty much, not what I expected. The M4 and SCAR have more mod slots so it would be interesting to see their numbers fully modded.

I also really want to know if there's any damage drop-off for each weapon. It doesn't seem like there is much, if any, based on personal experience.