Fortnite patch issued to fix Alpha Tournament chaos as Epic Games forced to address scoring and matchmaking problems

The firm admitted to issues with both matchmaking and scoring and since then has posted an update in the game's official forum on Reddit detailing those and other problems.

Users took to the forum to blast Epic for the issues. "I just wasted 3 hours of my time. Finished with 16/20 points for the session because my first 2 games didn't count, missed out on 7 points from those. Stellar job, A+ to EpicGames on this one," said one poster.

"Looks like I won a game before their servers were actually capable of recording points lmao. Smh epic," said another.

Another posed the question on everyone's lips: "Does anyone have any thoughts on how Epic keeps consistently launching new things that are broken?"

The matchmaking system was initially broken by the "sudden influx of players attempting to search for matches at the start of the tournament", according to Epic.

As a result Epic says they are "updating our matchmaking strategy to better accommodate the rush of players at the start of a tournament."

They did not reveal why a sudden influx of players at the start of the first tournament for the most popular competitive game on the planet came as a surprise, however.

The matchmaking system also has deeper and more persistent issues.

Players were meant to be being matched with those of similar scores, so that better players ended up matched up against each other as they competed to move up the leaderboard.

This, in turn, should have given lesser-skilled players the chance to earn points and earn the tournament pins once better players moved up the bracket and out of their matches.

According to the post from Epic, "this isn't working correctly", and means that matches are much more mixed than planned, "especially when it comes to players with high scores."

While again not explaining the problem, the developer said that they would be "continuing to iterate on this" and warned players to expect the performance of this key feature to "fluctuate regularly".

Once players managed to get into a game, they were then hit by scoring problems.

One particularly frustrating bug saw players not receiving any points at all "because they were not being matched into the tournament correctly", despite everything on the player's end indicating that they had.

Epic says that restarting the game should stop this happening again after you notice the first instance, and claim an error should now display to warn players beforehand.

There were also issues involving a 2-3 minute delay in points for eliminations being awarded, and a North America specific issue that was preventing any points from being awarded at all.

It's bad news for anyone hit by those issues in the early stages too, as Epic has made it clear that lost points are not recoverable.

Finally, the scoring system itself had come under fire as players found an exploit to quickly rack up points.

These players would drop into a crowded area, such as Tilted Towers, get enough kills for a point or two, and then get themselves killed so they could drop in again.

This worked because any one match can only get you six points, with half of those being for final placement, meaning that while you can get your first three points in a matter of minutes, the next three require waiting until the entire round has played out.

Epic said they were "keeping an eye on it closely", but were not planning any changes because "once matchmaking is working as expected, this strategy is a lot more difficult."

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