The biggest changes here seem like they're to the blue zone, which is going to start appearing more quickly, retract faster, and do more damage (assuming these changes go over to live):

That's going to create some quicker games, for sure! Also:

If you are a team leader, you can now kick your team members.

• You can also kick any team member using “Team” tab in the friends list, found at the bottom right corner of the screen..

I think it'd help to even further ramp up the damage on those first and second contractions, especially the first. It's easy now to just meander and "eat a little circle" while doing that initial looting. To me it makes more sense to make those first rings fast and deadly in order to push everyone together, then slow it down to how it is now and let the players sort it out.

It is interesting to see PUBG move towards quicker matches. It'll be interesting to see how else they change the game in the coming months.

Looks good... a shorter loot phase will make the gear you take into the mid game more varied between games, and a more forgiving late circle (ie. one you can outrun) will at least give you a fighting chance when you get a bad circle in the late game. So I agree with the philosophy behind the changes. That said, they may have overdone it a bit in cutting the blue zone delay time. Although that will partially be compensated by the blue moving slower, so you'll get some time back there.

Don't fully understand their justification for revealing the first circle while in the plane on Miramar only. But the changes they are making to the north of that map are smart and welcome. They must have seen the heatmaps showing very little activity up there.

Full list of gameplay changes:

• As the end of the match approaches, the safe zone will increasingly favor areas with land over areas with water.
• On Erangel specifically, the first safe zone will now be revealed 30 seconds earlier.
• On Miramar specifically, players can now see the first safe zone while flying in the airplane. (We may or may not carry this over to the next live update. We want your feedback about this change.)
• In-game clothing spawns have been removed from all maps. Other item spawn balance remains the same.

• We’ve added more roads, off-road paths, and car spawning positions to facilitate easy travel into and out of the area.
• Higher-tier loot is now more likely to spawn in specific areas of the north of Miramar.
• We’ve optimized the GPU performance of buildings seen from mid-range (all maps).

And then there's a few bug/UI updates too.

Also Savage is going to be available again on the test server this weekend :D