Another week, another Fortnite controversy. Less than a week after Epic Games calmed the storm that was the #RemoveTheMech, one of the world's most popular games found itself amid another round of backlash from players.
In its most recent update, Fortnite made several changes to its Battle Royale mode, including the addition of the Shield Bubble and the Pandora location, which is part of the Fortnite X Mayhem collaboration with the upcoming Borderland 3. At first glance, the patch seemed mundane, until scrolling down to the Gameplay section revealed a change to the wildly popular Turbo Building feature, a setting that allows players to hold down their build button and automatically place structures.
The alteration resulted in the time between subsequent Turbo Build placements increase from 0.05 seconds to 0.15. While that may seem like a small change, it proved drastic for a significant portion of the Fortnite community that had become accustomed to the speed of Turbo Building over the past few seasons. Many players began to speak out against the update, including some of the game's most notable users.
“We’d have to legitimately form a union. Realistically if we all banded together in a group DM, we could say, ‘We’re not going to play anymore’,” Tyler "Ninja" Blevins said during a stream following the patch. “We’re not going to play cash cups, we’re not even going to try to compete. We’re not going to do anything’.”
Similarly to the mech situation, Fortnite released a statement to explain the alterations to Turbo Building. In the write-up, the developers said that rapid use of Turbo Building favors players who have a better connection, allowing them to take other player's walls with ease. They go on to say that the feature also allows for spam building, which takes away from the competition between two players in a build fight. As one might imagine, this post was received about just as well as the one defending the mech was.
With another potential catastrophe on their hands, Fortnite made the decision a day after rolling out the Turbo Building update to revert the change. In a subsequent post, the developers made it clear the changes weren't intended to alter the gameplay so significantly, and that they would move forward with a few minor alterations that could help the lack of competition during build fights. Although, if Fortnite wants to make good with the community, the developers may want to run these kinds of alterations by players beforehand and save themselves a lot of headaches.
Fortnite is available across multiple gaming platforms, including Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Windows, Nintendo Switch, macOS, iOS, and Android devices.