Fortnite Battle Royale surpassed 810,000 concurrent players last weekend, prompting a number of matchmaking issues and periods of server downtime.
Developer Epic Games has since apologised, and has now outlined the areas it hopes to improve—such as client and server performance, tracking ping and packet loss across different regions, and dynamically routing traffic to data centres when matchmaking.
We’re sorry for the trouble this weekend. The Battle Bus had 811K concurrent players on Sunday. We're working hard to keep it in the air.October 30, 2017
Full details on what exactly Epic is casting its eye over can be read here, however here's the most relevant breakdown for PC players on the development side:
- Improve performance on min spec PC systems (Nvidia GTX 460, Radeon HD 5570, Intel HD 4000). This is an area where we made things worse recently, but took initial steps to correct in v1.8. We’re not going to stop there.
- Fix GPU hangs on PC and continue work with graphic card vendors such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel on improving performance and stability.
- Reduce hitches during gameplay. We define a hitch as a frame that took more than 60 ms, resulting in an entire frame to be skipped. The goal here is to get to less than one per minute with focus on entirely eliminating hitches over 100 ms.
- Fix remaining hitches on dedicated servers. E.g. a lot of players jumping late can result in rubber banding for players early on.
- Optimize server performance of common actions like taking damage.
- Identify source of hitches that are limited to first hour of releasing an update.
- Optimize our server and network code to allow sending of player state to all 100 connections per frame. Right now we are updating 25 connections per frame in the lobby and 50 during the game. That means your play experience isn’t where we want it to be till there are 50 players left. This is a major change that is running in parallel with other optimizations.
- Improve our handling of edge cases that can result in wells of despair.
- Improve our matchmaking system to dynamically route traffic to data centers within a region based on location. Basically have the ability to optimize for ping without taking away from the ability to play with friends.
- Hire more smart people that are passionate about these sorts of technical challenges.
Epic also provides various tips for improving performance from the player's end via the above-linked post.
Have you been affected by poor matchmaking and/or performance in Fortnite Battle Royale? Let us know in the comments below.
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