The Fortnite Game Mode Disaster: Here's what went wrong

The latest Fortnite Playground Mode was one of the most popular modes ever set up for the game. It was so popular, in fact, that its launch brought the matchmaking servers of Fortnite on his knees, sending the game into emergency maintenance shortly thereafter. A few days later, the Playground mode returned to Fortnite and now Epic has provided an update on what went wrong with this launch.

In a postmortem published on the Epic website last night, the company explains why, exactly, the Playground mode brought down Fortnite's matchmaking which was a surprise to many. After all, Fortnite is one of the most popular games in the world, so obviously Epic's servers are ready to handle a large number of players, is it? not? As it turns out, Fortnite actually had the server's ability to handle all people looking to create Playground matches – where he failed in the matchmaking service himself.

Epic explains that The Matching Service (MMS) relies on nodes that place players in open servers corresponding to their requested regions. Given Fortnite's Royal Battle formula each server can typically hold 100 players, but the Playground mode was limited to four at a time, which means that 25 to 100 times more matches are created specifically for the Playground mode . This, by extension, meant that each node now had to manage a server list 15 times longer than normal, which significantly increased compute time.

The nodes were overwhelmed by looking in these longer server lists than usual for placing players in queue, eventually searching for free servers on lists belonging to the Internet. other nodes. This was enough to create a backlog of queuing requests, which, according to Epic, resulted in "a feedback loop that eventually paralyzed the system."

To solve the problem, Epic says he shares the Pairing of Playground cluster services so that its problems do not affect the linking for other modes. From there, Epic says that "the solution was to give the cluster the ability to rebalance the sessions of other nodes to avoid repeated searches." Epic had to spend a lot of time testing this solution in cycles that took several hours finish each time, but it is said that the tests have helped to ensure that the Playground mode – or any of the various modes of Fortnite – would be able to handle a rush of players in the future.

End, Epic says it was a "solid reminder that complex distributed systems fail unpredictably." The good news is that the work that Epic had to do to put the Playground mode online will continue to enjoy the game as it grows. the hope is that we will not see another failure like this. The Epic article gives an excellent insight (and rare) behind the scenes of some of the problems that can afflict developers, so be sure to give a full reading if you have a few respite moments .