Competitive PUBG: Lines
It has been a while since my last post: a long and exhausting, but amazing, year. I won’t go over the journey, how I got benched from Dignitas to achieving the best performance for an APAC team at PGC with FURY. I’d just like to point out how incredible it has been to work with FURY, and I’ll be forever grateful for this opportunity.
Unfortunately, I now have to slowly step out of competitive PUBG and get back to a “normal” life. I still plan to continue as a hobby and help upcoming teams to catch up and compete to be the best in their regions. And with the same mindset, I wanted to get back to writing.
I’ve acquired so much knowledge I want to share with the community with the intention to help any competitive player/team and provide tools to get better. I don’t believe there is one right way to play PUBG, but what I’ll explain are what I consider to be universal principles.
Today’s article will be about lines.
The first time I’ve ever considered the principles of the lines has been late 20, early 21 along with HoneyBadger. Throughout the year, I’ve been refining my use of lines in coaching to make it a highly efficient tool, and that’s what we’ll talk about today.
Lines
The all lines principle is based on the following reasoning: in order to achieve consistency, every team needs a way to gather information, safely and efficiently. This information will be used to identify opportunities, pick one, then plan and execute the chosen option. In other words, lines allow you to:
- Have easy access to information (volume and quality),
- Determine a game plan, a sequence of positions you’ll be going through,
- Force favorable fights through advantages,
- Build CQCs through terrain features,
In other words, set yourself and remain a proactive team through your games.
Processes
Ok, Znooper, I’m sold on the principle of the line, where do I start?
- Twire’s tool: team’s rotation analyzer. Pick an ending area, pick teams playing similar loot spots than yours across competitive regions (ex: Los Leones — Look at FURY and Newhappy, South Georgo — Look at TSM and Heroic). From there, you’ll see they usually go through the same positions, which are usually high grounds.
- Use maps and any drawing software to write down these main rotations, and use different colors if there are major differences from one team to another (I wouldn’t recommend looking at teams known for playing a very positional playstyle).
- You can also add your own experience, what you’re often doing and has proved to be consistent and efficient.
You can find above what we’ve prepared with FURY for the first day of Rank Decision at PGC. We had to play NAVI’s and OATH’s spots, given we didn’t want to contest Newhappy, and found out a lot of resources fairly easily to help us have plans for positions we weren’t familiar with (especially Minas).
As time goes on, and once you’re comfortable with the big picture, you can dig into every part of the map and end up with more refined lines (both macro lines for C1 and C2, and more precise lines for the mid-game):
Here is what we had with FURY for SW circles on Miramar for PCS 5. These lines were also determined according to the teams we were playing against and their defaults (full document).
Once you’re confident with the lines you’ve identified, it comes down to grinding and achieving consistency and comfort such as, whenever you’re going into a fight, not only you should have an information advantage, but also an experience advantage. You’ve played this area of the map an important amount of time, you know every terrain feature, you know how to approach a situation (LOS, angles, ridges), and eventually, you can close a fight before it even started through proper positioning and anticipation.
Conclusion
Even if I’ve mentioned earlier in this article all the benefits of reasoning in terms of lines and didn’t get back to any of these in the article, I’ll get back to it in the following articles as it goes along with other principles/ideas I’ll be going through. I have a core group of ideas I really stand by and try to pass on to people I’m working with. In the end, the puzzle eventually assembles such as each idea consolidates each other, and the whole approach makes a lot more sense than the sum of individual concepts.
Feel free to reach out if you need help understanding lines and setting up fundamentals for yourself and/or for your team, I’ll be really happy to share my knowledge.
Maxime
