PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, has taken personal item trading offline. In a blog post update from PUBG Corp., they explain that they made this decision because of abuse from third-party marketplace websites. Players were going to other websites and bypassing official methods of exchanging items. They don’t have a fix yet and will thus be stopping personal item trading until they come up with a solution.
Market trading is PUBG’s other form of item trading. This means that players trade through the Steam market system and within the walls of Valve’s oversight. It is online for now since it is not currently being misused by its users.
Money also stays within Steam here and going outside of this method on other websites to trade items for cash isn’t what PUBG Corp. wants. Third-party sites are less safe and cuts Valve and the developer out of the transaction. It’s easy to see why they’d want to put a stop to this, especially since these sites don’t have a great reputation and can be quite predatory.
But that’s not this week’s only PUBG news. PUBG’s War Mode starts again today and ends on May 6th at 7 PM PST. War Mode pits 10 five-person squads against each other while they all race to get more kills and knocks. Players respawn in this mode and the safe zone doesn’t shrink, which makes it a little different than the game’s standard battle royale mode.
The Xbox One version also saw a patch yesterday, although its less about adding things and more about fixing them. Patch 13 is mainly about “optimization and performance improvements” from the PUBG test server. Crash updates, optimizations, and bug fixes are not the most exciting updates. But given how shaky the Xbox One version is compared to its PC counterpart, any sort of update is good, even if the game shouldn’t have launched like that in the first place.