Those who wanted to enjoy a round of Fortnite: Battle Royale over the weekend were faced with hours-long waiting queues. What was going on?
Waiting times of up to 7 hours were reported when logging into Fortnite. This was due to an extreme situation with simultaneous players wanting to play Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode in the new Halloween outfit.
Epic, the developer of the game, mentioned in a tweet that there were up to 811,000 players seeking a spot in the battle bus simultaneously on Sunday.
Accordingly, the servers (and the bus) were very crowded. According to Epic, they are working hard to handle the influx of players in the future.
According to Epic, everything will improve in the future
But that’s not all. In a further post, Epic discusses measures that are intended to improve the online gaming experience. Specifically, Epic addressed the following issues:
- Diverse inconsistencies with Epic’s servers are causing rubberbanding. The reasons for this are the netcode as well as parallel-running machines on the same server, negatively impacting the player experience.
- Inconsistent framerates lead to negative player experiences and a disadvantage compared to other players due to input latency, as movement and aiming with weapons are severely restricted by these issues.
- The connections of the players are also being addressed. Those with a poor connection will face the problems mentioned above more frequently.
To combat these fun blockers, Epic will closely monitor which behaviors lead to a limited gaming experience in order to take appropriate measures.
The server performance will be closely monitored. Epic plans to intervene if framerates drop too significantly. They aim for a “first target” of stable 20Hz. Additionally, pings will be monitored based on region and internet service provider, and providers will be informed in case anomalies accumulate in specific regions or with individual providers.
What else Epic is planning to improve the gaming experience, you can find out from the official developer post!
How can players themselves influence the situation?
In addition to the measures that Epic can undertake, the developer offers a guide that players, especially on PC, can use to check if their connection is suitable to play Fortnite: Battle Royale:
- Check if your graphics card drivers are up to date
- Check your ping to Epic’s servers via the website Cloudping – a server is located in Frankfurt, by the way
- If you are playing Fortnite via Wi-Fi, check whether using a network cable improves the gaming experience. Wireless connections are more susceptible to packet loss.
- If you are using a TV, you may also be affected by latency issues. There are plenty of guides online on how to reduce the latency of your TV device.
What has been your experience with the game? Have you been affected by the issues mentioned here?
