I am sure we are all aware of the fact that MANY people get scared away from playtest and team invites due to the requirement of personal information. This is a major issue that needs to be readdressed at some point with a better flow. I understand why team invites require personal information- because there is money involved… but why on earth does playtest invite ALSO require users to enter personal information? It makes no sense and quite frankly I am getting tired of doing quality assurance on LIVE products!
Here is a basic rundown of the problem for me :
1. I will finish the first iteration of a map
- Cant playtest to check any of my verse code or mechanics because no one wants to join
my team or accept playtest invites due to personal information requirement.
- Forced to stop everything editor/game-wise and rush through making a thumbnail,
just to even check if the map works. Being that thumbnails are ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL
this is a major problem as it tends to make me rush them
- As with the thumbnail the same issue occurs with the name and description of the
project, I am often rushed to come up with clever/insightful names and descriptions
due to this constraint
3. Forced to publish and run playtests on a live map
- Cant use the `listed` / `unlisted` option because all of us small creators
know that messing with that toggle AT ALL will crumble your map for
Discover oppurtunity. I am assuming there has to be a bug or something on the
backend that is happening unintentionally causing that toggle to end up making a
map *UN-Discover-able*, I do not think this is an intentional cause/effect
but forsure worth looking into
- I have been publishing since pre-Discover so I have come to learn that when a new
map is published, if it never gets loaded into with other players it will have zero chance
of hitting discover. You can load in solo to a newly published map all day for hours and it
still wont be *`Discover`-unlocked*, you HAVE to play with other people to '*unlock*' it
for Discover..I have tested this claim over a dozen times. That first test on the live map
with other players *primes* the map for a Discover oppurtunity.
4. Forced LIVE playtest reveals bugs
- If bugs are found (which 75% of the time is true) you have to hope it is not a game breaking
- bug because now the map is `*primed*`, forcing me to scramble to the editor in attempts to
- publish a fixed iteration before my potential Discover spot comes.
5. Map hits Discover with bugs
- Broken games/features make players back out and not think twice about it.
6. Poor Discover performance on the inital Discover placement
- If a map performs anything under 100 ccu on it's inital placement to Discover you might
as well kiss that map goodbye because it will never get another shot. The algo
says "I gave it a shot and it did bad, sorry! Try again with a different map!"
- Number 5 can also be switched to the scenario of a rushed/bad thumbnail causing poor
Discover performance, a thumbnail that was only rushed- so it could be play tested mind you..
- I have also had maps that get the inital Discover placement in the middle of the night leading
to poor performance and those maps never get another shot- and one of these maps gets a
consistent 10 ccu daily from my core friend group with sessions 1.5-2hours DAILY;
yet the map perfromed poorly at its 3AM placement and now will not ever be given a
shot again from the algo.
I was very excited when I saw the addition of play testers when it launched because I was certain it would not require personal information but I was wrong and IMO its honestly a pretty useless feature due to this problem. I am not sure of all the moving parts on EPIC’s end to this problem (legal-wise, algo-wise) but I would guess there is alot of factors at play making this hard to fix for creators. One suggestion I can say that would be VERY helpful to the issue would be to have less obfusicated invite URLs and to get rid of the subdomain-ing, i.e. *create*.fortnite.com. There
would be ALOT more trust if the invite links were direct TLD at fortnite.com and without the scary alphanumeric scramble at the end. I think people would FAR less afraid if invites were something along the lines of fortnite.com/@creator/team-invite/InvitedUserName anything that is actual words would be better than the steal your identity looking link , which if people do go to, it then procedes to actually ASK them for personal information…it really is a crazy town process that does not work and needs attention.