Fortnite: What Went Wrong With the Summer Skirmishes?

Last week, Epic Games revealed their 8 million dollar Fortnite Summer Skirmish series, only to have it be pulled almost immediately after. From bugs, to missed schedules, and overall lack of player interest, the Summer Skirmish was no more. Now the studio is talking about what went wrong "postmortum" on the technical side of the crash and burn.

In true Epic Games fashion, the team took it as a learning experience and are being completely transparent with their friends regarding what could have been handled differently. It's these type of responses that make so many players love the company, the attention to detail regarding their player base is absolutely outstanding. But as far as the Summer Skirmish itself, here's what the team had to say:

"It represented the first time we've been able to bring together a high concentration of some of Fortnite's most talented players and community creators all in one game. We experienced many pain points from a server performance standpoint and feel we under delivered for the premiere of online competition in Fortnite. While we often run tests to learn how the servers will perform, having significant prizes on the line changed gameplay behavior significantly. In addition, since we chose to highlight the streams of players in the event, most players stayed in the game to spectate after they were eliminated. The combination of these two things led to a gameplay experience that was much worse than we expected."

But what went wrong, exactly? The biggest issue was that the servers just couldn't seem to support this event. "We believe that there are number of factors that caused the poor server conditions during this event. This includes the number of players still alive in the later circles, the number of players that stayed connected to spectate until the end, and the amount of dense building that occured late in the matches."

They added, "Our top priority now is to understand and optimize server performance in these situations. For example, when an explosion damages a large number of building pieces, and each piece needs to send that event to a large number of connected clients, we get a big spike in server CPU load."

As far as what they learned, they are currently working on how to better predict these issues before they happen in an effort to avoid them all together. As for some of the features, the Summer Skirmish was meant to provide a healthy environment of competition to both celebrate the game and its players, and allow fans to show off their skills. The hopes for the future are that they can implement new features like they did with the Fortnite Pro-AM event earlier this year, though they recognize that they need to work on the format a bit first before that can happen.

As far as the meta goes, the team added "Week 1 also illustrated some of the difficult player vs. player engagement scenarios with so many talented builders under one roof. Complicated, snaking tunnels make it difficult to follow the action, but also amplify the lack of it (action). We're thinking carefully about how to address late-game building for long-term health of competitive play."

As for placement and eliminations, the team went all out for what they will do in Week 2:

"We're eager to mix up formats to keep things exciting and entertaining during the Summer Skirmish series. Each week we'll get to see how incentivizing different elements of the format influences competitor's decisions. The key takeaways for any formats are the learnings gained in understanding differences in play patterns between public match play and the Private Match environment with a lot of talented players playing against each other.

"We are curious to see how more elimination heavy incentives influence play, though we want to retain the core values and play experiences that everyone else can relate to in-game. Creating complicated scoring systems can be confusing and anticlimactic if they're not a part of the core play experience. The one-life survival dynamic creates tough real-time decisions for competitors. Each engagement against similarly skilled opponents presents a risk assessment scenario that is typically not apparent for those competitors (or viewers) when observed in public matches.

Competitors generally need to expend a lot of resources (ammo, health, materials) when attempting to eliminate their opponents. And in team-based play (Duo or Squads) they're also required to spend additional resources to secure the elimination against a downed opponent. Tactical play becomes more beneficial than flashy play - and that's where we'll need to strike the balance."

"For week 2 we'll be exploring a public server format where we'll be tracking competitor's performance over a period of 10 games. We intend to pick back up on Private Match play in week 3 of the Summer Skirmish series while we work on server performance issues we experienced this past weekend."

To learn more, check out the full blog post here.