Why Fortnite Players Are Stuck Waiting in Queue After This Emergency
It's given new attention to "Radical Heights"
Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite, took the multiplayer game’s servers offline Wednesday for “emergency maintenance” due to issues with the database systems. The issue comes just after the latest 3.5 patch that alters some of the game’s most damaging weapons, and it gives a new boost to potential battle royale challenger Radical Heights.
The developer announced on its status update page that the game would undergo “emergency downtime to deploy major upgrades to our database system” around 9:24 p.m. Eastern time. At around 1:10 a.m. on Thursday, the team reported that it’s “still working on the database upgrade process, and remain in downtime.” At this point it’s unclear when the servers will return, and the game’s official Twitter page is advising players that there is no official estimated time of arrival for fixes:
The downtime has given an unexpected boost to Radical Heights, Boss Key Productions’ answer to Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds that launched on Tuesday. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, the Twitch streamer that played Fortnite with rapper Drake earlier this week, attracted just under 130,000 viewers to his stream of Radical Heights during Epic Games’ downtime. Polygon noted that the Steam Early Access version has “a lot of great design at work.”
Fortnite’s issues arrive just hours after the launch of patch 3.5. The update changes the game’s most devastating weapons by introducing a short delay when switching. This is designed to “reduce the effectiveness of quickly switching between weapons for high burst-damage.” A new 50v50 Limited Time Mode repeats a similar launch back in December 2017, while an epic rarity drop called the Port-a-Fort will instantly create a pre-made fort.
While the free-to-play game has cemented its position as king of the genre after a successful launch on iOS — it’s already making $2 million a day on that platform alone — repeated server issues could hamper its runaway popularity in a similar fashion to Pokémon GO two years prior.
Here’s hoping Epic Games can resolve the issues soon.
