If you wait until the end of the flight that unleashes 100 people onto a murderous island in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the game will automatically kick you out. At this point, you may look around and see that a handful of other bodies are floating to the ground with you, and fans of developer Bluehole’s last-person-standing shooter are worried that many of those idling Battle Royale participants are jumping into games with no intention of ever playing. But this is an issue that developer Rockstar has solved with its Battlegrounds-like Motor Wars.
Going AFK as a solo player in a 1 vs. 100 match of Battlegrounds isn’t that big of a deal, but it could begin to spoil the fun if more than three or four people are doing it at a time. And according to anecdotes from PC Gamer magazine, that is exactly what’s happening. People choose to do this because they can often get 30-to-50 Battle Points, the in-game currency, by outlasting the first couple dozen competitors. That currency racks up over time and enables players to afford loot crates that could have items like hot pants or skirts that are worth a lot of money on the Steam Market.
“We are aware of that happening,” producer Chang-Han Kim told PC Gamer magazine. “And we have the team working to analyze what’s actually going on there. But from what we are aware of right now, we know that the portion of players that are AFK-ing just to earn BP isn’t that high.”
While it analyzes player behavior, Bluehole could limit the number of deliberate AFKers by copying a mechanic from GTA Online that requires players to pull their parachutes manually. In PUBG, your chute automatically launches when you reach a certain altitude.
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But what if it didn’t:
My first round of GTA V ended the instant I hit the ground because I didn’t know my chute wouldn’t automatically deploy. So I ended up dying from a head-first plunge into the dirt. This is something that PUBG could mimic, and that would prevent players from hitting “Play” and walking away. To get any points, players would have to at least stick around to guide their characters safely to the earth.
That could introduce a whole slew of other problems, but I like the idea of AFKers plummeting to their deaths instead of earning hotpant bucks in the middle of nowhere.
