YMMV / PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

• Broken Base:
  • The decision to introduce a microtransaction-based "loot box" system to the game before it left Early Access caused a significant outcry amongst fans, with many feeling cheated that promises of "no microtransactions until release" were broken, while others say that the system solely having cosmetic items makes it optional and meaningless.
  • Another debate was whether or not PUBG was allowed a GOTY nomination for The Game Awards since it was still in early access at the time.
  • The introduction of story elements, which were mocked in some places for trying to put a Darker and Edgier spin on a game most well-known for wacky hijinks. (Gaming website Rock Paper Shotgun even gently mocked it when PlayerUnknown himself, Brendan Greene, said he thought their nickname for the game, "Plunkbat", was "trying to be edgy". On the contrary, RPS favours "Plunkbat" because it's an inherently funny word and also claims the game's plot is actually a stag party that's gone horribly, horribly wrong.)
  • The fact that the free-to-play mobile version is getting more content, usually Denser and Wackier, and how the mobile version eventually got a full-fledged sequel.
• Casual-Competitive Conflict:
  • To avoid this conflict in PC, PUBG has a special mode for competitive matches which adjusts the circles (getting rid of the red zone) and loot spawn (no more flare guns). However, this leads to the question if the competitive scene could alienate casual players.
  • Played Straight on mobile, where competitive matches are essentially the same as casual ones. More competitive players often play in the more realistic First-Person Perspective, but to appeal to the more casual fanbase, PUBG Mobile esports is played in Third-Person Perspective.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: In the mid-to-late game, you're almost guaranteed to find someone running around with the M416 assault rifle, thanks to its controllable recoil, high fire rate, and ease of use.
• Contested Sequel: PUBG New State, well liked by some for feeling somewhat fresh and taking less storage space, but some other take issue with drab atmosphere, drought of content, and reliance on paid loot boxes for its exclusive cosmetics.
• Dueling Games: Against Fortnite's battle royale mode.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Several variations of the the game's acronym: "Pub-Gee", "Pub-Guh", "PUGB" (yep, pronounced [pug-bee]), "Plunkbat" or simply "Battlegrounds". Also often referred to as "Battle Royale: The Game", "Battleunknown's Playergrounds", "Unknown Player's Grounds of Battle", "Brendan Greene's Murder Island", etc.
  • Scattered all across the map are small storage huts, while only containing a drop or two, that are often used as cover for people either caught out in a wide field or, very infrequently, camping spots for ambushes. Due to the callouts of several popular streamers, those huts are often referred to many players as "FUCCBOI Sheds" or other variations of "Camper Sheds".
  • The frying pan is commonly called "butt-pan" because it drapes over the player's lower back and provides a little protection against attacks from the rear. In fact, players value it for its defensive capabilities far more than its intended use as a melee weapon. Another common name for it is "Level 4 Armor".
  • Campers who scope out the bridges, especially the two leading from the southern island of Erangel, are referred to commonly as "Bridge Trolls."
  • Due to the Mexican-inspired feel of Miramar, the wall bordering the north side of the map has been cheekily named "Trump's Wall".
  • Similar to the FUCCBOI Sheds mentioned above, Erangel also has a large amount of small, two-story structures nicknamed "Wizard Towers". Much like the sheds, these are usually used for camping, and the fact that it has a large view on the second floor makes it a haven for snipers.
• Funny Moments: If you win a match (no easy feat, given that up to 99 other people are trying to do the same thing), the game greets you with the now-iconic "WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER!" One interpretation is that 100 people are fighting for a chicken dinner.
• Game-Breaker: Crate weapons are meant to be this on purpose, but some guns wind up this way just by accident.
  • The AWM does an insane 132 base damage and is the only gun in the game that can One-Hit Kill a level 3 helmet. It not only is a crate weapon, but it takes its own unique ammo type that only drops with it in crates, so shoot it sparingly, because if you run out, it becomes just a waste of inventory space and you'll either have to ditch it or fight for a few more crates and hope you're lucky enough that another one dropped.
  • The Groza's incredibly fast firing speed basically reduces anything unlucky enough to be put in front of it to the consistency of chunky salsa. The catch? It has a huge damage dropoff and won't accept a compensator, so if someone decides to stand back and snipe you, you might as well kiss it goodbye.
  • The Mk 14 EBR is like the VSS on steroids; a fast-firing sniper rifle that can even go full-auto for use in close quarters. If you connect with someone more than once, they're dead; the key word is if, though, because the recoil is so huge and takes so long to reset that it's not a guarantee you'll hit anything.
  • The M16A4 is not a crate weapon like the ones above, but during its "reign of terror" near the end of early access, could easily be compared to one. It had incredibly low bullet drop for a standard assault rifle and high armor penetration; these two stats managed to turn the commonly-found rifle into a pseudo-sniper. Stories of getting kills from 300 meters, 400 meters, and even farther with one was not uncommon and many players even refused to pick up actual sniper rifles if they had an M16 because it was just as good. Bluehole finally Nerfed the weapon by removing its ability to take 8x scopes and later dropping the damage output with distance. It worked so well there are now some concerns it's going toward the other end of the spectrum.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The game threw off its early access tag on December 21, 2017 with the release of version 1.0, but there are still a litany of rather critical bugs/glitches unfixed. This most critical of these are bugs/glitches as a direct result of map geometry and objects being handled client-side. Specifically, if the assets fail to load for a player, they simply do not exist for the player. Slightly less critical are the general unreliability of both the killcam and replay functions.
  • Client-side Geometry Issues
    • Is someone shooting from inside a rock or similar piece of hard cover? It's highly likely that rock did not load for the shooter and they're, unknowingly or otherwise, standing in the middle of geometry that they can't see because it didn't load for them. Conversely, you can't return fire because the rock exists for you, so your shots get stopped dead. The only other people who CAN fight back are those who also had that rock fail to load for them.
    • Were you hiding deep inside a building and got killed from an impossible angle? Take for example: You're in a windowless room with only one door that's not even facing the side that the gunfire is coming from. Well newsflash for you: The building did not load for the shooter, so not only were you completely visible to them, the walls and other pieces of hard structure also did not exist for them.
    • Were you hiding deep inside a building and got run over by a vehicle that seemingly drove right through the exterior and interior walls? Yep, another case of building not loading for the person who turned you into roadkill. Interestingly enough, that vehicle was carrying a passenger that had properly loaded geometry on their own client, so it was just as unbelievable to them as it would've been to the victim. They also were not affected in anyway when the vehicle they were riding in just phased through walls.
  • Killcam and Replay Issues
    • The killcam and replay systems are notoriously buggy and unreliable, making it hard to determine if questionable kills were the result of cheating.
    • So you saved killcam footage and want to play it back in-game. Well what's going to happen is that 9/10 times, each viewing of the footage will yield wildly different results from one another, and that's not all, those results may be completely divorced from what actually happened.
    • On a similar note, you want to check out a replay of one of your matches, and in particular one of your kills in order to make a highlight. Let's say that you killed an enemy at about medium-long range. What will happen 9 times out of 10 when you try to watch your replay? You'll see yourself shooting at your own feet and somehow killing the enemy that's far away from you. This particular bit of behavior makes it nigh-impossible to determine whether or not someone it cheating.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • The game, made by an Irish lead developer assisted by a Korean developer, is popular worldwide, especially in Japan, where shooters and PC gaming in general weren't a mainstream genre and platform there. Also China, where in response to the many issues, Tencent took over, made a mobile version that was, feature-wise, better, and made it even more popular worldwide due to highly increased accessibility.
  • The game, particularly Mobile, despite having its popularity in the West waning around 2018 due to Fortnite stealing the thunder, performs strongly in South and Southeast Asian countries, with India, Indonesia, and Thailand having some of the game’s biggest playerbases. This has been attributed to the fact that Battlegrounds is available on the Google Play Store while Fortnite isn’t, allowing Battlegrounds to gain an edge in regions where Android devices eclipse iOS ones in popularity. The infamy of Epic Games Store worldwide also helps with the popularity of PUBG in the aforementioned regions.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The bulletproof frying pan. This was originally intended to have enough collision resistance to be used as a melee weapon, and to maybe swat away grenades, and being bulletproof was an error. No one wants it to be fixed, because a bulletproof frying pan is just too much fun.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: As mentioned multiple times, Bluehole accused Fortnite of ripping off PUBG since a lot of that game’s elements are similar to this one's. Come the release of Sanhok, and PUBG introduced the event pass that works very similar to Fortnite’s where you level up tiers to get cosmetic items.
• Hype Backlash: Although the game is still very popular and has received much praise for popularizing the "battle royale" genre, players are more critical of the game for its unpolished gameplay and lack of new content.
• Like You Would Really Do It: While it definitely caused backlash as mentioned previously, people didn't really think PUBG Corp was going to go through with the lawsuit against Epic Games. Thankfully, the lawsuit got dropped.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The message the winning player sees, "Winner winner chicken dinner!", has become a meme, with people making a chicken dinner the thing everyone is fighting for.
  • "X people are dropped onto a Y", usually used as a joke to describe other things.
  • "CHINA NUMBER ONE" for the prevalence of Chinese players. Rather funnily, it's a reversal of (and a reaction to) H1Z1's meme of "TAIWAN NUMBER ONE".
  • "E-SPORTS READY" - a mockery of the studio's decision to host an official e-sports event for a game that isn't even out of early access during Gamescom 2017, which predictably ran into bugs, glitches, cheap tactics, and unfortunate poor camera work during the first few days of said event.
  • One lesser meme around the time Bluehole "denounced" Fortnite and "contemplating further action" was that they would also sue the author of Battle Royale and the government of Panem.
    • On top of that, people mocking the statement that "Previous shooter games did not include the use of a frying pan…" with images of frying pans from Left 4 Dead 2 or Team Fortress 2 which beat PUBG by eight and nine years respectively.
  • The bridge is known for having a lot of unfortunate incidents happen on it, including PewDiePie saying a racist slur on a livestream whilst on it, which pretty much killed the bridge's reputation right away. Any picture or video of the bridge is now automatically associated to PewDiePie and what he did on it.
• More Popular Spin Off: Globally, PUBG Mobile has a larger fanbase than the base PC game since it's free-to-play, has user-friendly mechanics like respawning and non-verbal pinging, runs well on most smartphones, and has tie-ins with mainstream properties like MonsterVerse, Resident Evil, The Walking Dead, and Arcane, among many. As of 2022, Lightspeed Studios, the developer, attempted to catch the same thunder with adapting Apex Legends into mobile platforms.
• Nightmare Fuel: The game lets you experience what it's like to be on both sides of Hunting the Most Dangerous Game, typically at multiple points within the same match, and it is a recipe for paranoia. Thanks to both the game's emphasis on realism and the enormous size of its maps, hearing a gunshot will immediately leave you wondering where those shots came from, whether or not the person who made them can see you and shoot you, and if so, whether or not you're in any position to hit them back. What's more, many of the game's weapons have ranges of hundreds of meters and optics to make the best use of them, so you're not necessarily safe even if you can't see your enemy unaided. Conversely, if it's quiet nearby, you never know if you're alone or if there are other players around watching you, waiting to take that perfect shot. It ratchets up as the game goes on and players are herded together by the shrinking circle. On the other hand, this makes it all the more cathartic when the shoe is on the other foot and you've got another player in your sights without them knowing it.
• Older Than They Think: "Winner winner, chicken dinner" is an old saying that was born from Las Vegas casinos, where a standard bet cost about as much ($2) as a chicken dinner at the buffet table, and had previously been popularized by the movie 21. This game re-popularized it and caused it to become indelibly associated with victory in a battle royale.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • More often than not you'll be left wondering where the hell did that shot come from... if you don't get your head blown off with the first shot.
  • In squad-based matches, all alive players, including downed players, count as alive. While the chat does say when someone downs or kills someone else, it doesn't indicate what teams the two players are on or how many of their team is alive or downed. You may be stuck alone in a small circle with five alive and you won't know if they are all on separate teams or all on one team. Or, you may be in a circle alone with eight players and not realize that it's two teams of four players with three knocked down a piece.
• Polished Port:
  • PUBG Mobile, made by Lightspeed & Quantum, a developer commissioned by Tencent, is faithful to the source material and adds a lot of new features such as threat compass, level up (to unlock in game currency and matchmaking), more unlockables, and a few additional game modes. It's also free-to-play and averts Bribing Your Way to Victory hard. Finally, it runs well on mid-to-high-end smartphones, and Tencent even releases a preconfigured Android emulator specifically to play this game on PC!^note Fair warning, though: don't use Google Play if you intend to play on PC due to the emulator app not supporting cloud save. Facebook and Twitter login to save and load account in the same manner as cloud save still can be used, though.
  • Despite a noticeable downgrade in visuals, the PlayStation 4 version runs and plays well. In turn, this leads to...
  • "PUBG Lite", another PC version with downgraded graphics to accommodate budget gamers and with more localized servers.
• Porting Disaster: At release, performance was mediocre on the Xbox One X, and flat-out awful on the two earlier models of the console. Patches have since brought performance on the One X up to being generally quite solid once matches have actually gotten underway, but performance on the older models remains pretty poor.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • The VSS Vintorez was widely seen as a terrible crate weapon, due to its anemic 9 mm rounds and its insane bullet drop which basically rendered it useless at any distance farther than 100 meters. When it was removed from the crate and started dropping in the world, players quickly warmed up to it: the same qualities that make it a liability in the late game proved to be very useful near the start, as its built-in 4x scope, large ammo reserve, and silence (second to only the Crossbow) made it great at spotting out enemies in populated areas, then getting rid of them before they knew what hit them.
  • When it was introduced, the SKS was widely seen as useless compared to the Kar98k and the crate snipers, having terrible accuracy and poor damage for its rarity. After its firing speed was increased, a lot started using it more and more; turns out that while it's still fairly useless with no attachments, a kitted SKS is a nightmare that can shred whole squads if not taken care of quickly.
  • The Thompson was even more hated than the VSS when it dropped in crates, as SMGs are early game guns and players go for crates hoping to get powerful late-game weapons. Many even thought it was an intentional Joke Item, as PlayerUnknown has gone on record saying that the gun was included in the game because he just likes it. When it finally got removed from the crates, the hatred died down as it basically fulfilled the same role of early game close-quarters killer as any other SMG.
  • The Winchester Model 1894 (Win94) was often ignored because of its long reload time. However, after a Season 5 update added a built-in scope, its effectiveness at range became apparent and it soon became a common secondary weapon.
  • Vehicles don't exactly react kindly to geometry that is anything besides flat roads. Even small bumps can send them sailing through the air if you're driving too fast, and a sudden collision of any sort, even brushing a rock, means that odds are the whole damn thing is going up in flames with you in it. Technically, this could be considered realistic, but there are plenty of cases of the vehicles exploding or just flying off at the slightest notion into oblivion. In particularly uneven terrain, they're nothing more than metal deathtraps and pure Schmuck Bait because the physics hate them so much. In such a case, this can even be game-ending by no fault of your own if you drop too far outside of the safe zone, happen to find a vehicle, and then have to deal with the terrain in a mad dash for survival.
  • The event pass introduced with the release of Sanhok can be seen as this, since a lot of its challenges don’t seem to give you the credit properly or are pretty vague on the conditions (such as what mode you need to complete the challenges on). This Reddit post goes into more detail. Since then, patches were made to fix these issues.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • As a case of never bring a knife to a gun-fight, melee weapons quickly become underwhelming beyond the start of the game, even though they deal a lot of damage. Each weapon has only one forward attack animation, making it easy for any opponent to move out of range. Additionally, this means even a player with a simple pistol can easily kill you, as you practically have to walk right into their line of fire to get a hit in. Lag issues make this even worse, as the only time you're going to have to conceivably use one is at the start of the game in a high-density area, where the servers are most likely to lag. Good luck trying to kill that guy with your crowbar when he's teleporting around and it's impossible to even catch him! The only weapon that avoids this is the frying pan, and that's mainly because of its passive benefit as a shield than its use as a proper weapon.
  • The Crossbow. While it is incredibly powerful, it can naturally only fit one bolt at the time and has a very slow reloading animation. It's a high risk / high reward weapon, as you can easily kill a player with a well-placed shot, but will leave yourself completely open if you miss. In a game where all other ranged weapons are firearms, that usually means you're dead. One positive of the crossbow, however, is that it is completely silent, so even if you miss the other player might not even notice you.
  • Pistols are jack-of-all-trades weapons that do not excel at anything in particular and are among the most common weapon spawns. Since submachine guns and assault rifles are superior in close combat and rifles for long-distance fighting, a pistol is usually only a last resort Emergency Weapon. (Good thing it has its own dedicated weapon slot.) And it's not just their damage, either. Their iron sights are so bad that most players have to hipfire just so they can even see who they're trying to kill, and their sight attachment will only take red dots, which most players find far more useful on any other gun. General player advice is to immediately drop the pistol as soon as you find a "real" gun in order to conserve more carrying space for ammo and healing items. The Glock-18 is the only one that gets any respect, and that's for being the only pistol that can fire full-auto, not because of its damage or anything of that sort.
  • A January 2018 update completely Nerfed shotguns. While the playerbase's opinion of them before was fairly positive and balanced, after the update they were viewed as complete jokes that couldn't even one-shot someone from point-blank range if they had any kind of armor or helmet on, even the pathetic level 1 equipment. Before the update, their higher damage output made them viable to choose over SMGs for a close-range weapon, but now, it means almost anyone will go for the SMG instead if given the option.
  • The Mini-14 has almost never been viewed positively despite being in the game for almost half its existence. At first, it was seen as a pretty okay gun, being a bridge between rifles and snipers with lower damage but faster firing speed and lower bullet drop. The problem was, the M16, despite being an "ordinary" assault rifle, outclassed it in almost every statistic, so players had no reason to actually pick it up over the M16. After the M16's reign of terror was ended by a Nerf, the Mini was rather bafflingly given one as well, which turned it into a complete joke. It's commonly never picked up, as it's considered the "worst of both worlds" between snipers and assault rifles, combining the inability to fire full-auto, which makes it useless at close range, and rarity of attachments, which leads to a lot more time looking for them, of snipers with the significantly lower damage output at range of assault rifles, which makes it impossible to duel other snipers despite nominally being one.
• Spiritual Adaptation: PlayerUnknown himself has said that the film adaptation of Battle Royale was a major influence on the game. Honest Game Trailers apparently agreed, saying that the only thing stopping it from being a full-blown Battle Royale video game was the lack of joke weapons and Takeshi Kitano. It's also been frequently compared to The Hunger Games, understandable given that that book has itself been compared to Battle Royale on many occasions.
• That One Level:
  • While the game is dangerous enough, there is one place on Erangel that is almost always designated for carnage: Sosnovka Military Base. The southernmost island of the map houses a massive military base, chock full of dozens upon dozens of mid-to-high-tier weaponry, items, and armor. Dropping there is usually a death sentence, however, due to three factors. One, everyone else is aware of this, meaning that there's almost a guarantee someone else will be there, if not whole teams. Two, the sheer size of the place means that getting everything is impossible, and that someone else could find better stuff than you and easily come kill you. Three, due to being in the southernmost part of the map, if the Play Area is far away it's essentially a death sentence, rendering all the looting you did All for Nothing unless you get very lucky and manage to find a (rare) vehicle in the first few minutes.
  • Erangel and Miramar both have high-risk, high-reward spots where it's guaranteed that you will find more than a few people out to kill you. The School in Erangel and Pecado in Miramar are both smack dab in the middle of the map. It's no coincidence that they're both frequently visited.
  • Ironically, the Miramar counterpart to the Sosnovka Military Base, Campo Militar, is scarcely visited because it's too damn far, all the way in its own corner of an already massive map.
  • Airdrops will turn any place on the map into this. The drop contains one of several incredibly high-powered weapons... but to get it, you'll have to fight off several other players who had the same idea to go for it as you. And even if you're the last one standing, there's always the possibility that someone with a sniper rifle was watching the crate and is just waiting to pick you off once you think it's safe to get it.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: After PUBG Mobile added gun loadout to Team Deathmatch, many players said this ruined the game's balance and just copied the concept from Call of Duty: Mobile.

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