Well, if there's anyone who can make server crashes work in their favour, it's Epic Games. The company is bringing back Fortnite's Playground limited time mode tomorrow, 25 July 2018, although this time it will be a much less crashy affair.
Epic announced the news via twitter, saying that more details on Fortnite's Playground LTM will be coming with the 5.10 patch notes. The post reads, "Set up squad battles with new team select options, skirt around in an ATK and gear up with lots more loot."
In case you didn't have a go at Fortnite's new mode already, you should because it's intended to be a low pressure creative zone. There's no safe space but you can respawn and, as Epic kindly advises, polish up on those group ATK raids.
Interestingly, even though Playground LTM crashed Fortnite's servers at the time, Epic have actually learned some valuable architectural lessons that will actually be applied to the regular Battle Royale mode as well. And no, by architectural, I don't mean building upwards.
Epic actually explained it all in their Playground LTM Postmortem post, pointing at Fortnite's Matchmaking Service (MMS) as the culprit. short, the way this works is - players get assigned to nodes, which assign them to servers.
Playground LTM required 15 times as much server power and even though Epic provided it, node lists grew as much and clogged up the system somewhat awful. This was especially problematic in scenarios where nodes had to borrow server slots from one another.
Ultimately, the dev ensured that nodes are no longer burdened with repeated lookups and instead perform them in bulk, which is now pending implementation on Fortnite: Battle Royale's servers as well. Epic says it's future proofing and who else should know better.
Epic Games
Following Fortnite's v5.0 update, which added the revamped SMG above and retired the Tactical SMG to the Vault, it is expected that Epic will be adding more SMGs to the fray in v5.10. In fact, Fortnite's in-game screen teased the Compact SMG as coming soon but we should know soon enough whether it's part of the v5.10 package.
