PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has announced that they will be altering the professional rules in tournaments beginning in 2019. Social media has placed their input on these changes, and it has seemingly been both positive and negative. Below I discuss the two main changes that are coming.
PUBG wants to keep professional tournaments to players who are 18 years of age or older. In some ways, this makes sense. Some tournaments involve monetary input before you can play. In many states here in the USA, that is considered gambling. It seems as though PUBG is merely trying to cover their tail when it comes to giving payouts. Many professional teams also do not want to deal with “underage” players for multiple reasons including legality. In many areas, you must be 18 to be considered an adult. This means that organizations cannot offer contracts without parental consent, which most do not want to deal with.
This is very unfortunate for players who are under that age cutoff though. Players under the age of 18 who have spent the past year perfecting their skills will be highly disappointed. The teams who do accept younger age players will see the downfall of parts of their team. They cannot go into professional competitions anymore with those players which will lead to team rearrangements. I think we can all agree changing teammates is never ideal when you have been seeing success in one way or another.
Again, this is seeing very mixed reactions from the PUBG community. The new rule is saying that only one member of your squad can be from a different region than the one your team claims to be. Numerous teams that we see competing currently have members from all over the world. For example, some North American teams have competitors that are citizens of European countries. This means that these professional teams will have to seek out new players, or potentially assist their members in obtaining legal citizenship somewhere else. The second option seems crazy, but we may just see top tier teams making that option a reality. This rule creates a somewhat similar problem as the 18 years of age rule discussed previously. Many teams will have to rearrange their members, and that’s just the reality of it.
On the positive side of this rule, non-LAN events will run smoother. I have personally seen numerous teams get kicked from a lobby because they are EU competing for an NA organization. Having teams be from one location or another will help eliminate server lag. While EU teams could still compete in NA tournaments and vice versa, there will be fewer jumbled teams where half of your players have major desync issues and the other half don’t. Practicing on one server that works for all of your members will also help your team out. We see many teams in other games such as Rainbow Six Siege where their players are all from the same region. It makes sense if you are going to try and compete in LAN events as well. Travel is easier and less expensive.
The PUBG community is not sure what to do with the new rules yet, and I can see why. There are large positive and negatives to each new rule. Overall, it comes down to the specific teams and whether they will affect someone personally or not. We will probably see even more roster changes than we already have, possibly even some merging of separate teams. Only time will tell how the new professional rules impact the PUBG tournaments.
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