It’s a day in the year 2017 so something is going down in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds that’s making a whole bunch of people angry. The game recently introduced foggy weather, restricting sight across much of the map when it’s active. As you can imagine, the more elite players would rather be able to see whatever they like, and thus found ways to eliminate the fog through file settings. That’s now a bannable offense.
Here’s what’s happening with the new Battlegrounds maps.
This hasn’t been received well. The issue comes from the fog being triggered by post-processing. To initially prevent its removal, Bluehole enforced some post-processing to always be on, hence the ini edits being required to kill it entirely. That also impacts performance – and in shooters, the hardcore are aiming for well over 200 fps to be at their prime. The forced settings also add a little bit of blurriness, which highly upvoted community posts also weren’t a fan of.
The ban wasn’t so much announced as discovered in a change to the FAQ, which now reads that “editing any game files to gain an unfair advantage is against the Rules of Conduct. This includes changing any game configuration files to result in changes that cannot be made via the in-game settings menu.” That isn’t a rule that’s exactly unique to PUBG, but generally access to files that can do that sort of thing for multiplayer is restricted or automatically ignored when online play is initiated. Nothing’s stopping you from changing Dust’s walls to be see-through, except the server checks for inconsistencies.
Clearly Bluehole don’t want fog to be something you can simply turn off, but they will need a better solution than forced post-processing to keep the community happy. Chances are the PlayerUnknown AMA later this week will have many an eager fan looking for answers.