Battlegrounds - Another Battle Royale game

You should drop by the Discord when you guys are going to be playing. Usually someone hanging around looking for a game. :)

Oh nice job.

My results have gone down the toilet since I decided to tackle my big weakness, the shooting parts, head on. Now I always jump into hotspots and look for fights. I was getting a little down about how bad I was doing, but just got four kills in one game, before I had to leave for dinner.

I played a couple games and could barely aim my gun at people, so I switched to this plan for the rest of the night.

At least I’m competent now even if I won’t be out-dueling the Twitch pros anytime soon.

The Battlegrounds section of the Steam Market is interesting to me.

Keys from the gamescom crate are sold on the market at a $0.4 to $0.6 premium to the $2.5 keys you can buy directly through steam. A first I thought the market was revealing the true exchange rate of the USD to SteamBux to be 1.2, but then I remembered you buy keys directly using SteamBux anyway, so why is there a premium at all?

Price speculators must be making alot of SteamBux from this market as well. There is a very discernible trend where as soon as the week resets (which resets the crate prices/availability in-game) the price of a crate drops sharply from the flood of supply, and then through the week it slowly climbs back up as supply dries up.

With the gamescom crates there is also an obvious prediction that may or may not come true: that as soon as they stop being available to buy in-game their price will increase on the market. This makes sense if demand continues to be high, and the price is already strongly climbing over the last few days, yet I can think of three reasons why this may not happen:

  • Demand is high now because people want the cosmetic items in the crates. For existing players you would expect demand for these crates would decline over time as the amount of items they have collected from them increases. Of course, if new players keep joining the game after gamescom is over that is fresh demand to buttress the market.
  • There is a fixed price of $2.5 attached to the opening of any of these crates because they require a key. If the demand for a random piece of loot from this crate ever drops below $2.5 (in total not just for the crate itself), then the price of the crates will fall to zero.
  • The price might be artificially high now because speculators are expecting further increase in the future and buying up the crates. If this is true, it’s a bubble, and unlike bubbles in the real world this one has a hard date for popping: when they become unavailable in-game. If speculators don’t see the price increase after it becomes unavailable, then they won’t keep buying them up expecting future gains, if anything they’ll start dumping their crates on the market to free up SteamBux liquidity for other ventures.

That had been the trend - there was a sharp drop of almost 50 cents on the 13th for example - but this week the prices stayed almost exactly flat through Sunday and then immediately started rising up again.

crate

Either fewer crates came into the market at crate-price-refresh, or ~$1.50 is the current natural floor for the crates.

They briefly went above $3 again last night.

I got a duo-dinner last night which helped buy a new crate which had the yellow track top in it. That’s currently about $11 on the market. This game keeps on giving. If I get one more skirt I can buy a Vive.

Does anyone know what determines how much damage the circle does to you? I see great players spend most of the game outside the circle, but I seem to die instantly.

Once the circle has ended and a new circle begins to close in, the damage goes into turbo mode. You can spend most of the early game outside of the circle, when it gets to the end it’s hellishly painful

Will average players eventually get a win in this game after 10-20 hours or have some people played for 100s of hours without one?

Just getting a feel for what I’m in for.

I’ve only won once, and that was a custom squads game. I’ve played less than 100 matches, though. I probably do about 10-15% top 10 finishes.

The game is fun either way, honestly.

Ok cool, 1 in 100 is about what I figured.

From the stats previously, I’d say that a lot people will be able to get a solo win in around 100 games? That was about right for me when I was still fresh and learning.

I feel like now that I’ve played more and there’s fpp servers my chances have gone way up, but there’s also no stats or matchmaking for fpp yet either.

In duos or squads it will often depend on who you are playing with, communication and play style of the group.

My first win of any type took 206 games. Not that I was counting.

In the 70 games since then I’ve “hit for the cycle” - one solo win, one solo first-person, one duo and one squad. I’m old with molasses for reflexes, so everyone should be fine really.

Useful visual guide for how the blue zone damage progresses / how long you can wait until using a first aid kit:

https://i.redd.it/i1qeb52z8b2z.png

That’s handy. I’ll have to look for the match timer.

In that game I posted above, I had a super long run in the 3 DPS circle. Used at least 4 first aid kits at about that time. Probably why no one saw me. I must have died to the 5 DPS one.

That’s true for the gamescom crate, but from what I can remember the survivor and wanderer crates keep doing the same thing at the start of each week (including a couple of days ago). I suspect that people are starting to hoard their gamescom crates for the hoped rise once they are unavailable. If true, that would keep supply low enough and demand high enough to not crash the price at the start of each week.

Congrats on your high value sales, it must feel good. I can remember once the real money auction house in Diablo 3 came online I sold a legendary that I wasn’t even using for twice the price of the original outlay of the game, that was a good day. Small chips relative to total income, but the fact that these windfalls comes from an object obtained from playing a game (which is fun!) makes it all the sweeter.

Hah. I’m so locked into the gamescom crates that I forgot the other ones existed. You’re right; the Wanderer crate, (which is the more expensive of the other two), had its regular Sunday price drop as the BP price refresh happened.

Even if you pick up the crates on Sunday you should hold fire on selling them for just a couple days. Waiting 'till Wednesday to sell will get you another 40-50 cents a crate for these.

Thanks, that’s great! So it’s based solely upon time, that’s what I wasn’t sure about.

Is there any point selling crates if you know you’re going to earn a bunch more, just wait until you get lucky and open something sweet.

Comfortably my favourite moment from the opening day of the tournament yesterday.

He then died again from falling in game 3

If you want to up that number hide and avoid conflict for most of the match. Cowering in a bathroom is a winning strategy in this game.