PUBG’s new map is perfect for players who are terrible at PUBG

Your first-person shooter skills from other games don’t translate to skill at PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. To get good at the the actual mechanics of firing the weapons of PUBG and hitting the player or vehicle you’re shooting at, you have to play a lot of PUBG.

At least, you had to play a lot of PUBG until the new map was released on the experimental server. Now you can get good at the game’s basic skills while spending fewer hours playing PUBG.

It’s all about density.

To improve at something, do it often

You pick up any new skill by trying to do that thing, being really bad at it, and then repeating your attempts over and over while hopefully improving. The only path to mastery in any discipline is practice, and practice takes time. You have to spend many hours being bad before you become slightly OK.

The problem is that rounds of PUBG played on the two existing maps include a lot of time spent skulking or hiding before you see another player, and those brief moments of contact tend to be over very quickly when you first begin to play.

You and the other player see each other, you realize your gun is set to single shot and not full auto, and by the time you fix that issue you’re already dead. Good position and superior gear only help to a certain degree; a great PUBG player will destroy an inexperienced player even when completely outgunned.

This means you had to play many rounds of PUBG to rack up even a few minutes of actual experience shooting at a live, thinking target that is also shooting back, while mastering the game’s large variety of weapons. You could practice for a bit before the match began, sure, but there is no other way to get experience with the game’s weapons. You can’t even run and hide during the match and plink away at static objects in the background; the sound of your gun will often bring other players scurrying to your position to take you out.

You could drop into a popular area of the map to make sure you encountered other players as quickly as possible, but that turns into a competition to see who can scurry to weapons the quickest or luck upon a powerful gun in the first building they enter. It’s only slightly helpful as a practice exercise

This makes the new, tiny map such a godsend to beginning players. It’s still possible to drop into a relatively obscure area, find a gun or two and try to manage contact with other players in a mindful way while also knowing you’re going to be in a gunfight within minutes. You’ll die, often and painfully, but the amount of helpful gunfights you’ll get into in even an hourlong playing sessions is dramatically higher than what you experience with the existing maps. You get to practice all the necessary PUBG skills to get better at the game in general, in a much more efficient way. It’s brilliant.

The new map is great for competition and players who want to show off what they can do, sure, but taking out so much of the stuff that happens between gunfights while still allowing the basic flow of the match is great for general practice. You still have to put in the time and effort to improve, but the time it takes to practice all the skills necessary to win will be decreased by the much shorter rounds, and denser clusters of action that this tiny map makes possible. And that’s a great thing.