Compensation When Downtime Drags On
Though Epic Games does seem to be really pushing to eliminate downtime as much as possible when it comes to Fortnite’s patches and content updates, sometimes things just have a bit of a meltdown on their end. A server could randomly get an error, or just the masses of players trying to hop on the Battle Bus is too much for their servers to handle. When this has happened, Epic Games has not only been quick to diagnose the issue, communicate this with fans, and provide a rough estimated time for when it’ll be back online, it also knows where things have gone a little too far.
Back toward the start of last month, Fortnite was down for a good 24 hours or so, with fans either unable to play the game at all, or with severe issues with the Fortnite services. Where a few hours for a content update is expected, this unexpected downtime (which was then broken down in a massive postmortem for fans here) was disappointing to both Epic Games and fans. To make up for issues, Epic dished out free cosmetics and Battle Stars to Battle Royale players, and Seasonal Gold to Save the World players, as well as a Troll Stash Llama for free.
This isn’t something Epic really had to do. Sure, fans were angry at the downtime, but this is a free game in early access and so these kinds of issues are somewhat expected, particularly when you’re rocking over 30 million players. Still, fans felt the love.
