Don’t expect to see Playground Mode back in Fortnite Battle Royale anytime soon
By Ben Sundock
A couple of days ago, Epic Games released a description about what happened when they first tried to release Playground Mode in Fortnite Battle Royale. Based off of what I read, it doesn’t seem this LTM will be making a return anytime soon.
Once it was released, Playground Mode was a complete success. The developers absolutely killed the way in which players could easily get materials and loot to either battle with friends or practice building or moving around the map.
But, don’t expect to see this mode back in the rotation of LTM’s any time soon, or ever in fact. In a post on their website titled ‘Playground LTM Postmortem’, Epic went in-depth describing what they learned from the game mode and what caused the delayed release.
"“We recently stood up our Playground LTM on June 27th, at about 4 AM EDT. Following this, we experienced an overload of our matchmaking service which caused both the default modes and Playground to fall over. We worked to get the service to where it needed to be, and were finally able to roll out the mode on the evening of July 2nd.”"
Of all the limited time game modes that the Battle Royale has seen in its lifetime, this one probably drew the most hype. Fans have pleaded and asked for a mode where they can be on the map either by themselves or with friends.
But, unbeknownst to many fans and to the developers as well, the servers that carry the game cannot support the increased load of games taking place simultaneously. To summarize what was stated in the article and make it simpler, the Matchmaking Service (MMS) couldn’t handle nearly 100 times the amount of matches being requested.
The MMS is the automatic software that pairs players searching for a game with other players searching at the same time in the same region. This service is used to seeing players looking to be paired with over 90 players at the same time.
Even though many players were going into the Playground Mode by themselves or with a maximum of three others, the servers still had to hook in the players with the map, lobby, etc.
So, the increased workload upon the release of the mode on June 27th overloaded the system and effectively collapsed the entire game.
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While Epic was glad to experience these issues and figure out a way to work through them and bolster the servers as a whole, don’t get your hopes up of seeing this incredible mode return soon. It may be depressing to some of you, but simply put, it is too difficult for Epic Games to have some 50 million players worldwide and cater to the four friends who want to play a game on their own.
The only way I see this mode working in the future is if there is some way to do an offline local game. Otherwise, we may never see Playground Mode again.