Sunday, April 10th 2022
Welcome back, survivors.
I am excited to announce Season 02 of the PUBG Lookup League! This season comes with a few rules changes, more positions on each leaderboard, and a shorter timeline. Let's dive in!
Scoring updates
Season one of the leaderboards was the first step towards a scoring system that works in public matches. It can be a challenging problem to solve with such a dynamic battlefield and bot characters in the mix. In this update, I am working to level the playing field against overly advantageous conditions, particularly as it relates to bots.
The scoring system awards points for placement and points for player kills. Bots do not count towards your kill points. This still proved to be somewhat problematic because placement points were still awarded at the full scale for matches that were majority bots. Matches with such high percentage of bots inherently made it more difficult to get player kill points but significantly easier to get placement points. For this reason, placement points will be reduced for high percentage bot matches.
Additionally, there are some maps in PUBG with unique characteristics that make earning placement points unfairly adventageous. While I believe these matches and maps should still have the ability to score and to earn kill points, the placement points will receive a points reduction to level the playing field.
The new scoring rules :
- Matches with 80% - 90% bots will earn 50% placement points.
- Matches with 90% or more bots will earn 33% placement points.
- Matches on the map Haven will earn 50% placement points.
I hope these updates are fair, easy to understand, and more closely represent the skill window needed to climb the leaderboards.
There are extensive details on the rules and scoring here.
Shorter timeline - the three week season
The timeline for Season 02 is April 10th to May 1st (three weeks). This may be changed for Season 03 and Season 04 but I'm excited about a shorter play period.
Badges and previous seasons
Now that we've closed out a full season of leaderboards, a lot of talk has come up about winner badges and long term rewards. This is something I'm working on that will play a bigger role in future seasons as well. I don't have all of the details narrowed down just yet but I would love your feedback. Here are some initial thoughts.
Badges
Over the next few days I will be rolling out badges for PUBG Lookup League participants. Badges won't be very elaborate as far as design (at least early on) and will need to be fluid in how they are displayed and awarded. Over time I would like a player's profile to eventually earn many badges over the course of multiple seasons. My plan, at the moment, is to have a badge for :
- PUBG Lookup League Participant
- Top 100
- Top 50
- Top 25
- Top 10
- Third place
- Second place
- First place
There's a nearly endless supply of ideas for how badges can be used, presented, and awarded to players... This will certainly change over time and nothing is set in stone. As always, I would love to hear your feedback.
Previous seasons
Previous season leaderboards will be available to view with an update that's coming out in the next day or so. This will allow all users to view the standings from old leaderboards. To do this, I need to make a number of updates and figure out the best place to display that information. That should be sorted out pretty soon, though.
Leaderboard rewards
This is something that has been in discussion for a while. I'll be as transparent as I can about this topic so that an open discussion can be had.
Rewards are a very sticky situation for me and PUBG Lookup. There are pros and cons associated with offering rewards for placement in the leaderboards and, so far, the cons outweigh the pros.
Benefits of rewards
- More people participate in the leaderboards. More competition, more bragging rights, more visibility.
- More traffic to pubglookup.com
- Players have something tangible to fight for
Negatives of rewards
- Offering a reward brings out the worst in some people. People trying to game the system is an inevitable side-effect of rewards.
- Rewards make the leaderboards much more serious, which is the opposite of why I built them in the first place.
- Customer service... I already get tons of messages from players asking things like "Why didn't this match count?", "When will this match process?", "Player X is farming bot wins.", "Why didn't I earn X points for this match?". These are all valid questions and I don't mind answering them... but at scale, it's just not possible. This is a one-man-show. I design the site, program the site, come up with new features, manage bugs, send out updates, etc. Everything you see is done by one person. Adding a significant amount of "customer service" requests would be a huge time-suck for me.
- The likelyhood of cheaters increases dramatically.
- Server strain. More players = more server load = more cost out of my pocket. Again, this is a one-man-show and I would be paying a lot of money to run the servers every month. Due to the nature of how these matches have to be processed now that bots exist, it's just not feasible without more money.
Long story short: I want these leaderboards to remain fair and fun. I haven't figured out how to offer rewards without compromising that.
Full disclosure - I do have individuals and organizations offering tangible rewards for players but I haven't accepted any at this time. I'm open to discussion.
That's all for now!
I have so much more to talk about but I'll have to save that for future announcements. Here's a quick list of some of the upcoming news.
- Private leaderboards
- Community owned leaderboards
- League Rankings
- League Divisions
- and more.
Get in touch with me
If you would like to get in touch with me, here are the best ways.
- Reach out to me on Twitter @pubglookup.
- Send me an email - support at pubglookup dot com
- Send a message from the contact form https://pubglookup.com/contact
- Join the PUBG Lookup Discord - https://discord.gg/9f9QhUwS
- Message me on Discord - pubglookup#5528