Players can now honk car horns in Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, and that has completely divided the competitive shooter’s community.
Thursday’s update to Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) added car horns, which some players are using as a helpful addition to their in-game strategy. Others, however, are using (read: abusing) the car horns nonstop to amuse themselves and annoy or distract opponents.
Some people love the horns. Some people want to see them gone.
Here are some examples of people loving the horn and using it as a sort of battlecry:
That’s all good and fun, giving people a slight warning to their impending doom. Other players on the PUBG subreddit have said they’ve used car horns to distract opponents while an ally closes in from another angle, or communicate at a basic level to get someone to jump in.
Then there are the horn abusers, the players who hop into cars and drive around honking the horn incessantly, sometimes driving around buildings in circles with no goals outside of being a nuisance and having a laugh.
Here’s the kind of effect this horn abuse can have on a player. Warning: this is explicit.
Some popular streamers have complained that streamsnipers — players who watch streamers, find where they are in the match, and hunt them down — are now doing something dubbed streamhonking. These devious players find streamers and drive around them honking.
Here’s one popular streaming Dr. Disrespect parodying a streamhonker and then blowing one up (which honestly seems pretty cathartic).
Some players have taken to Reddit to call for the end of car horns, or at least an option to mute it. Redditor Andronaco wrote a post entitled “Remove or mute car horns option,” describing a hellscape where every match will contain at least one player or team who is honking nonstop.
The reason for the outrage against the horn-honkers is that PUBG puts a lot of emphasis on sound. Players often find other opponents by hearing gunshots or other actions and zeroing in on their location.
Although honkers make themselves pretty easy to spot and kill, they could draw unwanted attention toward you, or distract you from hearing other helpful sounds like footsteps.
Of course, there are some players who lean toward the more chaotic side of the alignment chart that love the streamhonkers and, in general, trolling others.
It seems that the horn fans are outnumbering the horn haters on the PUBG subreddit, but we’ll see if the tides turn two weeks down the line when the horn sound surely starts to get a little stale.
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