How To Fix Fortnite Ranked Long Queue Times

Fortnite Ranked is still feeling pretty fresh, having only launched towards the tail end of Chapter 4 Season 3. As a new competitive arm to Epic Game's Battle Royale, Fortnite Ranked began with the introductory Season Zero, offering some special rewards for competing players.

Season Zero is set to continue throughout Fortnite's upcoming Chapter 4 Season 3, giving competitive players the chance to climb through the eight ranks: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Elite, Champion, and finally Unreal. Progression isn't as easy as it seems, with players gaining and losing a percentage of their current rank depending on match performance. 

If things weren't already hard enough, some players are having difficulty getting into a match at all, with queue times for certain Ranked matches running upwards of an hour. There are some obvious reasons behind this, mainly being down to just how fresh Fortnite Ranked is. Other than those sweating Fortnite 24/7, not a huge amount of players have made it to the higher ranks relative to the standard mode player counts. Generally, this results in some slow matchmaking in the Diamond, Elite and above tiers.

Fortnite Ranked Queue Times: How To Fix

The main problem with Fortnite Ranked right now is a lack of players hitting the higher tiers. As the Ranked season progresses, more and more players will be hitting those ranks and populating the right matches. 

But, if you're finding yourself in Ranked queues hitting an hour or more, then the best course of action is to reset the matchmaking search. Typically, matchmaking shouldn't take this long in a game with a healthy playerbase like Fortnite without there being some kind of bug or issue at play. 

Players took to Reddit to express their pain when it came to the Ranked queue. One user said, "Platinum 2 is basically the end of ranked. Getting into a game becomes pretty difficult at that point."

Given time, getting into Ranked matches should become a smoother experience, one that doesn't pit Platinum 3 players against Unreal. Like most Ranked modes, Fortnite Ranked will be reset from time to time, usually at the start of a new Ranked season. The exception, so far, has been in Season Zero, where Ranked was reset as part of the v25.10 update.