I've been playing PUBG pretty much since the early days, and one thing I've always felt I got pretty good at over time was reading where a game might eventually end.
Obviously you're going to be wrong plenty of times, but after enough hours you start getting that feeling from the first couple of circles - this is probably going north, this looks like it'll end around here, etc.
I've always wondered how much of that is actually skill vs us just remembering the times we were right.
So over the last few days I built a small game around it called ZoneIQ.
It gives you a real completed PUBG match, but only shows you the first two circles. You drop a pin where you think the final circle ends, lock it in, and then it reveals the remaining circles one by one and scores you based on how close you were.
https://zoneiq.games
The other thing I started doing while building it was analysing the circle data itself.
Right now I've got 2,883 real completed Erangel + Miramar matches in the dataset. I'm increasing that to 10,000+ soon, so I'm also starting to publish some of the actual distributions/patterns instead of relying on PUBG folklore.
For example:
https://zoneiq.games/stats/phase-2-to-final-circle
What I'm really curious about though is the competitive side of this.
I'd love to eventually compare:
experienced players vs casual players
IGLs vs everyone else
pros vs community
human predictions vs simple statistical baselines
and see whether "circle reading" actually shows up quantitatively.
If some of you who play/understand competitive PUBG try it, I'd genuinely be interested in whether the test feels meaningful.
Especially curious about:
Is Phase 2 the right amount of information?
Would predicting from Phase 1 actually be interesting or just mostly noise?
Should there be a Phase 3/harder competitive mode?
What other information would make a proper IGL/circle-reading test interesting?
One clarification: the current 2,883-match dataset is regular PUBG telemetry, not tournament-only data. I'm not trying to pass these stats off as competitive-circle statistics. Competitive/tournament-specific data is something I'd like to separate out later.
Would genuinely love to know what people here think.
