Fortnite

Epic

We are now in the back half of Fortnite Chapter 2, season 1, a strange season with a new map and almost no communication from Epic for reasons that remain unclear. This week we just got a new batch of “Hide and Seek” challenges which are…not my favorite, and as ever, have little to do with the name.

Here are the challenges for this week:

• Land at Frenzy Farm, Slurpy Swam and Sweaty Sands (0/3)
• Harvest 500 wood, 400 stone and 300 metal (0/3)
• Eliminations at Frenzy Farm or Sweaty Sands (0/3)
• Search chests at Pleasant Park or Lazy Lake (0/7)
• Consume Foraged Items (0/10)
• Deal damage to opponents with Pickaxes (0/100)
• Hit 5 consecutive weak points while harvesting materials (0/1)
• Hit Headshots (0/10)
• Visit Landmarks in a single match (0/5)
• Eliminations in different matches (0/5)
• Search the hidden letter ‘I’ found in the Hide and Seek Loading Screen (0/1)

While we do have to land and get elims at Frenzy Farm, which is where the Hide and Seek loading screen takes place, there are no challenges that actually involve…hiding, which some of the past weeks have gotten. As ever, these just sort of seem like a random assortment of challenges thrown together with no real rhyme or reason.

No hiding required

Fortnite

There are two that involve harvesting, one is a decent amount of materials while another is hitting consecutive weak points on surfaces which should really not be that hard if you take your time.

You need to consumer foraged items which appears throughout the world. The damage/kill based challenges involve multiple headshots, which shouldn’t be too difficult, kills in five different matches, which will take a little while by definition, and everyone’s favorite, pickaxe damage, which is usually best done either at the beginning of the game when everyone is scrambling for loot, or when you have a downed enemy in front of you, as it still counts then.

You need to visit five landmarks in a single match, which given the fact that there are somewhere between 40 and 60 on the map I believe, that should not prove too difficult. Finally, you need to find the letter ‘I’ in the Loading Screen as we are almost done spelling out FORTNITE over eight weeks, where the word will unlock a secret legendary skin soon enough. I have a guide for where to find that letter here for you to check out if you need it.

A boring week, but most of these weeks have been, frankly. Hopefully things get spiced up in the back half of the season here.

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The fifth generation of wireless technology is here, and during a demonstration Wednesday at its office in Naperville, Nokia showed how the company’s products can provide everything needed to run an entire 5G system for high-speed, low-delay communications.

By playing the online game “Fortnite” on three laptops and a cellphone, all while streaming a high-definition video, Nokia employees showed the speed and multifunctional capability of an indoor 5G system built entirely using Nokia products. The company says its “end-to-end” deployment of the system, called a 5G centralized radio access network, was a “world’s first.”

“That integration — that’s really the magic of what we’re seeing today,” said Michael Kinnavy, head of 5G and small cells research and development.

Nokia builds, operates and sells all pieces needed for the type of 5G network it set up and used Wednesday, including fiber-optic equipment, cloud computing capacity, radio units or signal base stations and what’s referred to in company lingo as “UE” or user equipment — aka cellphones.

Wednesday’s event served as a motivator for employees at the Naperville campus to innovate new uses for 5G technology, which cellphone carriers and phone makers are beginning to roll out.

“We get to help evolve and change the world,” said Ron Domeracki, head of 5G and small cell U.S. systems verification.

The higher speed of data transmission and lower latency or delay — less than the 32 milliseconds noticeable to the human ear — of the 5G system Nokia used Wednesday could allow for uses such as remote-controlled surgeries, self-driving cars or package deliveries by drone, Kinnavy said.

“These are the things that are going to reinvent the way we experience life,” Kinnavy said. “5G is a pipe for us to build a lot of unique applications on.”

While early cellphone technology was about making a call, it later became about sending texts, then checking the internet, then streaming video.

“Now we’re taking it to the next step, which is about augmented reality, virtual reality,” Kinnavy said.

Nokia’s Naperville campus is involved with testing some of the future uses for 5G as customers reach out to see what could be possible, Domeracki said. That’s also why the company wanted to prove it could set up an in-house 5G network, load it up with high-data uses such as streaming video and online game-playing and watch it perform.

The games didn’t freeze or lock up during the demo, which Domeracki said is an important feature for gamers who don’t want to accidentally lose a life during a momentary technological glitch.

“The stability of this has been rock-solid,” he said.

NEWBURGH HEIGHTS, Ohio (WJW) — Swatting calls to two Northeast Ohio police departments have been linked to the popular video game Fortnite.

Investigators said a teenager in Canada made hoax calls to police in Newburgh Heights and Parma, claiming he shot his mother following an argument and had poured gasoline around.

Newburgh Heights police received the swatting call around 7:45 p.m. Tuesday. The caller claimed he was at an address on Beta Avenue.

“I had an argument with my mother, and I shot her,” the caller told a dispatcher. “I just want to kill myself… I’m going to shoot anyone that comes near me. I don’t want to get arrested.”

Police responded to an apartment building with their guns drawn, knocked on doors and spoke with residents before determining the call was a hoax.

“You hope for the best but prepare for the worst,” said Newburgh Heights Lieutenant Michael Marniella.

He said the call strained resources, with officers responding from Newburgh Heights and Cuyahoga Heights and a SWAT team and fire department on standby.

“We are armed, and we have to treat this as a potential homicide, a potential hostage situation,” Marniella said.

About 15 minutes after the call to Newburgh Heights, Parma police received a similar call, placed via the Internet.

“I just got the gun from my mom’s closet and so I shot her,” the caller told a dispatcher.

Officers responded to a Chesterfield Avenue home to find three kids playing Fortnite, according to an incident report.

One of them had the name given by the hoax caller and previously lived at the Newburgh Heights address, according to the report.

Parma police used information from the victim, including a Fortnite username, to link the call to a 15-year-old in Stratford Prince Edward, Canada.

Police there seized his Xbox and said he admitted to the crime, Marniella said. He is expected to face charges in Canada.

Investigators said the suspect likely accessed the victim’s current and former address through the game, which connects players online.

In recent months, deputies in Medina County responded to swatting calls also tied to Fortnite. In August, the winner of Fortnite’s World Cup was the target of a swatting call.

Investigators are urging parents to beware and make sure children are not providing personal information, including addresses, to others through Fortnite.

“Parents need to monitor what they’re doing and what’s being said because, as law enforcement, you saw how we responded and it could have ended in a bad way,” Marniella said.

A few weeks after the launch of Fortnite’s second chapter, developer Epic made a seemingly minor change: the Fortnite installer for Android was updated to become the Epic Games App. What was once a tool for keeping Fortnite updated has now transformed into a way for the company to distribute its own mobile games. Today, Epic is launching its second game through the app, a cross-platform title called Battle Breakers, which is available on PC, iOS, and Android through both Samsung’s Galaxy Store and the Epic Games App.

The game itself is a hero-collecting role-playing game. The premise is that ”monsters from space trapped the world’s greatest heroes in technomagic crystal.” Players can save and collect these characters to use in more than 1,000 dungeons, and Epic says that Battle Breakers progress will work “seamlessly” across mobile and PC, much like Fortnite. Battle Breakers also appears to have similar monetization as the battle royale hit, with both an in-game store for buying characters and a battle pass. Epic says that the game was “built as a passion project by a small team” at the company.

The Epic Games Store first launched last December, and at the time, the company expressed interest in eventually bringing it to mobile. Right now, Epic says that the Android app is explicitly for first-party games — i.e., those made by Epic — but it’s hard not to envision a future where that eventually changes. Epic was able to get the Fortnite installer on to millions of phones by making it a requirement for playing the game on Android. By rebranding the app, it now has a powerful tool for distributing games on the platform.

Epic co-founder Tim Sweeney has openly expressed his dislike of mobile app stores in the past, particularly the 30 percent cut that both Google and Apple take from sales. “The 30 percent store tax is a high cost in a world where game developers’ 70 percent must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games,” Sweeney told The Verge last August when it was first revealed that Fortnite wouldn’t be available through Google Play. “30 percent is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service.”

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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Fortnite update 11.11 is finally live after a brief delay, and we have the abridged patch notes to prove it. Unfortunately for Battle Royale fans, the latest drop doesn’t do much. PvE players can enjoy a new questline and weapon for Save the World, but everyone else will basically be playing the same game as last week. Read the full patch notes below.

Fortnite Update 11.11 Patch Notes

Save the World

Match Maker Questline

‘Fortnite’ update 11.11 has arrived with new quests for Save the World. Read the full patch notes below. ‘Fortnite’ is available now on PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC and mobile. Epic Games

Sadly, Penny and Rarnold’s relationship wasn’t meant to be. It’s time to move on and make new friends, literally, out of whatever you happen to have lying around. Why not? Fire up your Reanimators and get ready for some sciency abominations in Match Maker!

“Arrlene” Izza

It’s a perfect night for mystery and horror with Arrlene Izza!

• Standard Perk: Monster Smash
• • Increase Life Leech with Melee attacks and Goin’ Constructor by up to 15 percent based on the percentage of your missing Health
• Commander Perk: Monster Smash+
• • Increase Life Leech with Melee attacks and Goin’ Constructor by up to 15 percent based on the percentage of your missing Health. Additionally, Melee and Goin’ Constructor eliminations have a 50 percent chance to conjure a Phantasm.

Black Blade

The Black Blade is available in Save the World as of ‘Fortnite’ update 11.11. Epic Games

Leap to the Husks and show them who’s Ghost Boss Material with the darkest of dark… blade of blades! A large sword with moderate damage and high impact is yours for the taking.

Available from the weekly store starting November 13 at 7 p.m. Eastern Time until November 20 at 7 p.m. Eastern Time.

Raven, the master of dark skies, returns to the Event Store!

• He’s standing right behind you…
• • Standard Perk: Bang and Pow
  • • Increase Left and Righty Damage by 25 percent
  • Commander Perk: Bang and Pow+
  • • Increase Left and Righty Damage by 25 percent. Lefty and Righty causes explosions which deal 20 base Energy Damage in a .5 tile Radius.

Bug Fixes

• Can’t increase the Rarity of the Nightfall Schematic.
• Locked Missions appearing for some players in Hexsylvania.

Battle Royale

• Cosmetic issue involving Kitbash Outfit’s head to appear floating.
• Magma Wrap looks different than intended.
• Gift wrap missing for gifted Battle Passes.

Creative

• Wireframe sphere may appear around some pet Back Blings.

For Save the World fans, update 11.11 marks the first time in a while players have seen a significant content drop for that mode. Fortnite Chapter 1 introduced new PvE quests almost every week, but the situation has been far less frequent for the current season. Considering those folks are paying customers compared to the legions of free Battle Royale enthusiasts, it makes sense to throw them a bone every once in awhile. With a new weapon and character available in addition to the missions, fans of that experience will have a lot to do today.

Beyond that subset of players, though, Fortnite update 11.11 is more or less a dud with a few minor bug fixes. In fact, with regard to Battle Royale, there aren’t even any skins available for sleuths to datamine. It’s possible the unforeseen bug that caused Epic to delay update 11.11’s release caused its content plan to shrink, but it’s worth noting that weekly patches have been far less impactful throughout most of Fortnite Chapter 2 overall. Especially in the absence of full patch notes, there isn’t much to be excited about. Hopefully that means non-PvE players can expect big things around November 19, when the game’s next update is expected to go live.

Fortnite is available now on PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC and mobile.

What are your thoughts on Fortnite update 11.11? Will you be trying out the new Save the World quests? Tell us in the comments section!

An Australian Fortnite player who was charged with assaulting his pregnant girlfriend while livestreaming the online video game will not face jail time, a report said.

Luke James Munday, 27, of Sydney, was sentenced to a 14-month good behavior bond on Wednesday for the December 2018 attack, according to The Guardian.

He had pleaded guilty in September to assaulting his then-partner, Grace Campbell.

The attack happened after Munday repeatedly refused Campbell’s requests to sit down for dinner, which led her to throw several objects at him, the report said.

Munday then got up and slapped her across the face. The actual assault wasn’t captured by viewers of his livestream, but some witnesses heard it and called police.

In Picton local court on Tuesday, Munday’s lawyer, Steven Mercael, said his client was provoked into action.

Mercael also pointed out that Munday was previously a domestic violence victim at his home, suffering scratches and a busted lip.

Players continue to fall for this popular Fortnite troll. Here’s a PSA to everyone: stop falling for this.

It’s difficult to dub something “the oldest trick in the book” when the book has only been out for a little over a month. Still, this Fortnite troll is quickly becoming the oldest trick in the book.

If you’re a regular visitor of the r/FortniteBR subreddit, then you probably know what I’m talking about: players building at the bottom of the waterfalls to bait opponents (and even teammates) into jumping off and dying.

There are countless clips of players jumping off of the waterfall, only to be greeted by a tarp of wood that results in their death.

Fortnite players began using this trick almost immediately. I’ve even trolled a friend or two with it, myself. It’s a funny gag as long as you have a Medkit or some Floppers they can use to get back up to 100HP.

Of course, opponents fall for it too. This is the more recent clip that inspired the PSA you’re now reading.

We’re nearly six weeks into Chapter 2. Stop falling for this, people. You’re past the point of complaining if you die to this. It’s on you to check before you jump.

It can be difficult to remember if you’re in a pinch, but you should always take a peek over the side of the waterfall before you jump. It will take you a few extra seconds but it may save your life.

Don’t say that no one warned you if you die to this.