Fortnite Dev Team Addresses Missing Inventory Issue, "We Really Messed Up"

In the age of PUBG, many other players are opting for a more colourful experience over at Epic Games' Fortnite. Over the past week, however, many players have been reporting an issue of missing inventory following the new build of the title being released. Fortnite players were very vocal about the issues in-game, including losing their entire inventories, not receiving purchased in-game loot, and problems with their Storm Shield Storage.

The bright side is that the developing team is keeping up with their track record of being incredibly transparent and upfront with their player base. Their attentive attitude to their community is admirable, and makes already loyal players even more so knowing that they are being taken care of.

Epic Games is aware of this issue, and they took to the official Fortnite blog to address it head on:

TL;DR

• We really messed up.
• We lost some players inventory in a limited time window on Wednesday.
  • We are giving you a pile of items, vbucks and more if you were impacted by the world item loss.
  • We're committed to also doing an additive restore of your lost items in the future. We don't yet have an ETA on this, but we will make it happen.
• We had some reports of people not getting their purchased Vbucks.
  • We granted you an equal or greater amount of V-Bucks if you never received them in your initial purchase.
• It is our top priority to make sure that this doesn't happen again.

More Detail...

Well, we messed up in three dimensions...

The first one was a problem with our build deploy on 12/27 resulting in some of you being routed to a bad node during the 12-5 pm window. This created a situation where the game couldn't access your inventory, and it appeared like you didn't have all your cool things in your world inventories. (Which sadly, included your ability to access your building shapes) Then the game saved your new "lost state" over your old world item inventory, resulting in inventory loss. Since it was limited to those people who touched the bad node, we couldn't simply rollback the entire game because it would disrupt millions of players and their progress.

What that means is that certain people lost a lot of world items (not schematics and currencies though) and all around are missing a bunch of crafting items and weapons. We're sorry, like, really sorry. This is one of the worst things a collection game can do to a player.

Second, we found that Storm Shield storage was also affected for some players. We are looking into a solution for this issue now and will update everyone later.

Third, we came across is a select group who purchased V-Bucks but never actually received them. Also super irritating when you want to buy something and the system appears to take your money and you didn't get your stuff! We compensated players with an equal or greater amount of v-bucks on the morning of December 29.

So.. we've had an eventful few days! Right now, the team is figuring out a better way to address individual accounts for the future. We are also putting our heads together to ensure we don't run into any other faulty nodes during deployment. Making sure this does not happen again is our top priority.

Let's talk about how we are going to make this right.

The initial first pass solution, without a full inventory restoration, just isn't going to cut it. Since we don't know how long it may take to restore the whole inventory, we're granting a much bigger amount into your storage, based (roughly) on time played. We respect your time, effort and dedication to Fortnite and will be running the granting script overnight. This should complete sometime tomorrow morning (12/30 ET). Thank you for being vocal about this on our social channels! We can't get your time back, but we will always do right by you.

We are really sorry this happened to you during the holiday season, when all you want to do is sit down and play games. It is our absolute top priority to ensure that this does not happen again and we promise to always make it right to the players if we make a mistake.