Fortnite’s tournament mode got underway officially on October 16 when the ‘Alpha tournament’ went live, but there were a few bugs and gameplay issues affecting some players’ experience.
Worst of all was perhaps the incorrect score glitch, were players would not earn their points due to a matchmaking error, but the game gave no indication of the error.
There was also other issues with matchmaking too, some of which were caused by the sudden influx of players when the tournament started.
Epic Games have now addressed these issues and more in a Reddit post, outlining some fixes which they have already made and others which they are monitoring, with a fix forthcoming.
They also spoke about players exploiting the kills point system, whereby simply going to Tilted Towers to rack up as many kills as possible and then ‘suiciding’, players can earn more points faster than playing the match out.
Epic’s esports rep u/SkyzYn says they’re “keeping an eye on it”, but believe that once matchmaking is working as intended, this will be less of an issue.
Here’s the full update from Epic Games after the first day of Alpha tournament mode.
Alpha Tournament Status and Known Issues
Hey all ~
Earlier today we launched the in-game tournament system and hosted the first session of the Alpha Tournament on the EU server. We’d like to provide an update on several known issues, what we’re still investigating, and what you might expect as we iron out issues within the system throughout the week.
Server Capacity
The sudden influx of players attempting to search for matches at the start of the tournament caused some issues with our matchmaking services as they attempted to balance match assignment in response to the demand. We are updating our matchmaking strategy to better accommodate the rush of players at the start of a tournament.
Schedule & Tournament Regions
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An issue was identified where often the ‘Tournament Region’ displayed in the Events tab would indicate a player was viewing the event list for ‘North America’. This is a visual bug only, each region has their own tournament schedule and all times displayed inside of the Events tab are correct based on your local timezone and system clock.
Incorrect Scores
We have a couple known issues around incorrect scores:
Scenario one – players did not receive any points because they were not being matched into the tournament correctly – despite it appearing as if they were. Restarting the game would fix this issue and allow you to earn points. This should now display an error if you try to matchmake with this issue, and we’ll be fixing in a future release.
Scenario two – players may incorrectly either receive a point or not get credit for reaching an elimination or placement goal. However, the correct score would be shown after a 2-3 minute delay or the next time a player returned to the Lobby. We’re actively investigating a fix for this, but your score should be correct at the end of an event currently.
Unfortunately, any points lost during this event will not be recoverable.
Matchmaking
The tournament system is intended to match you against players with similar score during the session, becoming less strict in its search over time to ensure you find a match eventually. Players who have higher scores should expect longer matchmaking times and tougher matches, while players with lower scores should expect an easier time as many of the higher scoring players filter out.
Currently we’re finding that this isn’t working correctly and is resulting in matches that are more mixed in score than we intended, especially when it comes to players with high scores during the event. We’ll be continuing to iterate on this to provide a better matched experience, so expect this to fluctuate regularly.
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We’re also keeping an eye on feedback for things like tournament scheduling, scoring formats, and visual presentation to help inform future development after we’ve gotten everything working as intended. Dive into the tournament system blog and announcement video for some insight into where we’ll be taking the feature going forward.
UPDATE (7:43 ET): We’ve identified and fixed an issue during the NA Alpha Tournament which was preventing points from being awarded.
Source: Reddit