Epic Games has confirmed that a Fortnite inventory bug had been affecting players during “a limited time window on Wednesday.” This bug completely wiped out players’ inventories, devastating those who had invested a lot of time into the game.
Those affected will be gifted “a pile of items, V-Bucks, and more.” In addition to this, Epic Games is “committed to also doing an additive restore of [players’] lost items in the future.”
Some players that made V-Buck purchases never received them. Epic Games is remedying this by gifting “an equal or greater amount of V-Bucks.”
Here’s the full update post, in which the developer explains what went wrong, and the fixes being worked on:
Well, we messed up in three dimensions…
The first one was a problem with our build deploy on 12/27 resulting in some of you being routed to a bad node during the 12-5 pm window. This created a situation where the game couldn’t access your inventory, and it appeared like you didn’t have all your cool things in your world inventories. (Which sadly, included your ability to access your building shapes) Then the game saved your new “lost state” over your old world item inventory, resulting in inventory loss. Since it was limited to those people who touched the bad node, we couldn’t simply rollback the entire game because it would disrupt millions of players and their progress.
What that means is that certain people lost a lot of world items (not schematics and currencies though) and all around are missing a bunch of crafting items and weapons. We’re sorry, like, really sorry. This is one of the worst things a collection game can do to a player.
Second, we found that Storm Shield storage was also affected for some players. We are looking into a solution for this issue now and will update everyone later.
Third, we came across is a select group who purchased V-Bucks but never actually received them. Also super irritating when you want to buy something and the system appears to take your money and you didn’t get your stuff! We compensated players with an equal or greater amount of v-bucks on the morning of December 29.
So.. we’ve had an eventful few days! Right now, the team is figuring out a better way to address individual accounts for the future. We are also putting our heads together to ensure we don’t run into any other faulty nodes during deployment. Making sure this does not happen again is our top priority.
Let’s talk about how we are going to make this right.
The initial first pass solution, without a full inventory restoration, just isn’t going to cut it. Since we don’t know how long it may take to restore the whole inventory, we’re granting a much bigger amount into your storage, based (roughly) on time played. We respect your time, effort and dedication to Fortnite and will be running the granting script overnight. This should complete sometime tomorrow morning (12/30 ET). Thank you for being vocal about this on our social channels! We can’t get your time back, but we will always do right by you.
We are really sorry this happened to you during the holiday season, when all you want to do is sit down and play games. It is our absolute top priority to ensure that this does not happen again and we promise to always make it right to the players if we make a mistake.
If you have any further issues please reach out to our Player Support reps on our website. Thank you for sticking with us!
Were you affected by the Fortnite inventory bug? Is this a good-enough solution? Let us know.
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