In an effort to improve server stability and performance,Fortnite Battle Royalehas disabled stat tracking for the time being. Developer Epic Games made the announcement on social media early Friday afternoon and the feature has yet to return.
On forums and the game’s subreddit,Fortniteplayers reported long matchmaking times and connection errors, which is never a good sign for an online-focused game. Epic has not said whether or not the errors are related to the release of update v3.4, which introduced thenew guided missile weaponand brought back the Sniper Shootout mode.
Specifically, Epic Games says thatFortnite Battle Royaleis experiencing degraded performance with the game’s backend services, which leads us to believe this is more than a problem with an update. The fact that Epic disabled stat tracking suggests that there is simply anoverwhelming amount of playerspinging the servers at any given time and the game can’t handle it.
With any game that focuses on online play, especially one that offers 1v100 battle royale matches, there is bound to be some connection errors and matchmaking issues. But the fact thatFortniteis able to deliver a consistently solid experience is impressive. It helps that the game has become massively popular and Epic Games has the freedom to update and patch it so frequently, but issues like these are rare and are usually fixed within a few days.
Too many players is a good problem to have, and it’s no surprise given Fortnite’s expansion in the last month. First, the game boosted its profile after Twitch streamerNinja grouped up with rapper Drake, and then the game released to select mobile users on iOS.
In other words, there are a lot of players online in Fortnite at any given time, and that number is only going to increase as themobile versionexpands to include all iOS users and eventually Android users as well. We’ll keep Fortnite players posted whenever stats are turned back on.
Fortniteis available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
