Bug reporting is one of the most important facets of the player-developer relationship in any game, as was proven recently by a community interaction in LEGO Fortnite.
A recent Reddit thread highlighted by Dot Esports yesterday featured a player’s highly unfortunate story of how their entire LEGO Fortnite inventory disappeared, with several dozen stacks of items in their storage chests completely vanishing with no explanation.
Not long after the article was posted yesterday, however, the Redditor, named KedaiNasi_, posted an update to their thread, saying an Epic Games representative “privately messaged me with the news that they’ve pinpointed when shit goes down in my world and have reverted it.”
LEGO Fortnite’s senior director of production, Jesse Merriam, reached out to Dot Esports to confirm the story that the team reverted the player’s in-game timeline to retrieve their lost items. “We live and die by every piece of player feedback,” Merriam said. “Their builds are amazing and their struggles are ours too.”
Merriam also said the team of developers “nearly have that nasty bug figured out that caused their issue,” and are hard at work preventing a bug like this from happening again in a future update.
The happy ending to the story goes to show that reporting bugs is quite important to help developers track them down, but so is doing so in a respectful manner. It’s fair to be upset when something like this happens, but no game developer wants their players to have a bad experience.
It’s not reasonable to expect Epic to personally fix everyone’s game any time there is an issue, but as KedaiNasi_ said, “if you lost progress like I did, record videos of it, post your videos or pictures in this sub, tag it with the ‘bug’ flair so they’ll know,” and the team may end up reaching out to you to help out as well.
Kudos all around to both Epic and the player for this wholesome interaction, because the entirety of the gaming community could use more like it.