PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has launched its very first Event Pass, the 30-day Sanhok Event Pass, and players are already incredibly frustrated. The Pass, which grants rewards to PUBG players for leveling up via daily time invested and the completion of challenges, has been shown to demand a level of commitment that can be described as excessive. Further, it may even be impossible to complete without paying for the Premium Pass.

Now that the Sanhok Event Pass is available in-game, players are able to measure exactly how much they need to accomplish in order to progress in the Pass. All challenges, as well as other sources of experience, are available to see and draw conclusions from. And the results are quite disappointing, especially for those who don't want to spend the $9.99 Event Pass price up front.

According to the math, in order to reach the highest rewards available to those without the Premium Pass, players have to invest as much as 2-8 hours in PUBG every single day between launch and the Pass' end. That means that by the time people are reading this article, one day will have passed and everyone who didn't complete their challenges won't be able to reach level 20 without paying the $9.99 price tag.

pubg sanhok event pass

Here's how the math works out. For non-paying players, there are only so many sources of experience every day. They break down into daily experience earned just by playing, daily experience earned through completing challenges, weekly experience earned through challenges, and "Normal" challenges that persist for the entire event.

  • Daily XP - 2400 (80 XP x 30 Days)
  • Daily Challenges - 3600 (120 XP x 30 Days)
  • Weekly Challenges - 400 (100 XP x 4 Weeks)
  • Normal Challenges - 1200 (300 XP x 4 Challenges)

All told, that's 7600 XP in total across 30 days, exactly enough for 19 level-ups -- from 1 to 20, each costing 400 XP. The funny thing is, it looks like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds isn't running the Sanhok Event Pass for 30 days. It's running it for 29. The countdown launched citing 24 hours and 28 days remaining, which suggests that it may entirely impossible to reach level 20.

Premium Event Pass buyers don't have it much easier, but their experience cap is much higher and their rewards much more exciting. Players will still have to complete between eight or nine out of ten challenges to reach level 30.

Just logging in to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds every day isn't a simple thing to do for a lot of people. And according to the early discussion, it takes anywhere between 2-8 hours of playing just to earn all of that day's experience. It's rather audacious ask of PUBG Corp.

In the meantime, a PUBG Corp. communications lead acknowledged a potential issue with experience gains on Reddit and later followed up with his findings:

"Pretty sure some of the later missions give more XP. Gonna go check and update this comment once I’m sure (will probably take a while because it's 4am in Korea). If you couldn’t actually get to level 20 then that’d be dumb and we’d change it.

UPDATE: It looks like there's already enough XP in the free missions to get to level 20, but our lead gameplay designer says he wants to make some changes next week to give players a little more wiggle room (to make it slightly easier to get to level 20). Updates will come next week. In the meantime, just do those missions!"

It's unlikely that "a little more wiggle room" will make the grind any less frustrating for players, but in all fairness, the Event Pass is still a new way to earn free content. Not every game offers free paths towards new content but unfortunately for PUBG, its biggest competitors do have battle pass systems. Oh, and not so coincidentally, PUBG Corp. is also selling five levels on the Event Pass for an additional $4.99.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is available now on PC, Xbox One, and mobile devices. The Sanhok Event Pass is currently only available for PC.

Source: Reddit