Fortnite
Epic
Chapter 2 seemed like it was going to breathe fresh life into Fortnite with a brand new map, but it also seems like the exact moment Epic decided to either go on vacation, or to reduce transparency about changes and issues with the game to practically nothing.
The issues just keep mounting, and it’s hard to know what’s a genuine problem and what might be in people’s heads because Epic is literally not commenting one way or another on most of these potential problems. We used to get lengthy blog posts explaining changes and decisions and extensive patch notes each week, and that’s been reduced to almost nothing, maybe a tweet every so often, at best.
Here is what Fortnite players urgently want answers about, and yet Epic does not seem interested in communication this season whatsoever.
Patch Notes – I have already covered this specifically, but it is absolutely bizarre that a game that makes as many additions and balance changes in Fortnite no longer has public patch notes. Dataminers have to extract nerf and buff values from the backend to share with the community, and new items like the Harpoon Gun simply pop into existence in the game with no fanfare.
Console Gameplay – Two weeks ago there was a massive, 15,000 upvote thread on reddit expressing that players believed that Epic had reverted some of their settings for console play, and that now controller console players were getting matched against either PC players or mouse and keyboard players and getting dominated as a result. Whether this is the case or not is unclear because Epic has not said a single word about it, one way or the other.
Skill Based Matchmaking – Another report from the community is that as of the Harpoon update, there seems to have been a reversion to SBMM which is making matches a lot “sweatier” (harder) than they have been previously, similar to how things were back in season 10, and no one enjoys that.
Bots – There is also a running theory that Epic has dramatically the reduced the number of bots that are showing up in games, which also may be making the difficulty of matches harder for many players. But again, no official word from them.
Fortnite
Epic
These are not the only issues with the game right now, certainly, but they are ones that keep coming up with no response. This is also going on behind the scenes. I have emailed my normally responsive contacts at Epic about things like the lack of patch notes this season, and I have heard nothing back, which is pretty unusual.
It seems flat-out bizarre that Epic has gone from being perfectly communicative (which is kind of expected from most live game publishers in 2019) to being almost totally silent in the span of a single season. Maybe they’re testing how this strategy plays out, but I think the playerbase can agree that more information is better than less, or none at all. We’re over halfway through the season now, and we’ll have to see if anything changes the next few weeks, or next season, at this rate.
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