Fortnite players are in open revolt over surprise change to items

The players of Fortnite’s Save the World mode are currently revolting over an update to the game that re-rolled the stats on “Dragon Weapons,” a rare set of guns that can be unlocked by turning in Firecracker Tickets, the currency that can be earned during the game’s “Spring it On” event.

“Basically what happened is a lot of people spent money and countless hours trying to get the best rolls on their Dragon weapons, like Crit Chance,” one player explained on Reddit. “With this new update, Epic rerolled basically all of everyone’s Dragon weapons to become trash and useless. And this was intentional by Epic. They meant to do this. The problem is that when you spend 50+ hours or $200 trying to get something, then Epic destroys it, you’re going to be absolutely pissed.”

The game’s subreddit is filled with players who are threatening to leave, or who are just displaying their extreme displeasure at the move.

Epic Games has posted an apology to the subreddit in an effort to explain the changes and try to contain the damage.

“When we first released the Dragon Weapons they were able to roll completely invalid sets of perks,” Epic explained. “They could be very bad (5 grey perks) or absolutely amazing (5 gold perks), but in both cases they did not follow our normal perk rolling rules.”

Only some weapons and schematics were re-rolled, according to Epic’s stated rules:

Legendary

If the schematic didn’t have at least one blue and one gold perk — the item was re-rolled.

If the schematic had more than two gray perks, four blue perks, or four gold perks — the item was re-rolled.

Epic

If the schematic didn’t have at least one blue perk — the item was rerolled.

If the schematic had more than two gray perks, three blue perks, or three gold perks — the item was rerolled

The goal for the future is to give players more control over their perks. “The system for re-rolling perks is actively being worked on, and will empower you to pick and choose which perks you want to change on the weapon,” Epic wrote. “We’ve started some high level design work on the weapon perk re-roll system, it’s going to take some time.”

That may be helpful in the future, but it doesn’t change the fact that players suffered nerfs that may have hurt weapons they spent significant time, energy or money to unlock. This breaks one of the most important rules of free-to-play games: Don’t make the players feel as if their time and money has been wasted if you can help it. It has to sting to learn this system and use it well to craft your loadout only to have an unexpected change wipe out your hard work.

One player complained that they spent $800 on the game only to have their items lose power.

“I’m devastated,” they wrote. “I want my money back. My loadoats are ruined. My schematics have rerolls on them. Stat caps have made my seven mythic leads no better than legendaries IN TWINE PEAKS ... Epic you have just spit in the face of your whales. Literally the worst thing a f2p game could possibly do.”

Fortnite: Battle Royale players are sympathetic to the issue, and the difference in the tone of the communities right now is huge. One is enjoying an influx of new, happy players ... while the other feels forgotten and abused.

“Even though I don’t play [Save the World] as much as [Battle Royale], I’d like to think we’re still one community and it’s sad to see this injustice done to /r/Fortnite so I’ve made this post to demonstrate to them our support and hope that Epic can fix these problems with STW to make it an amazing game like the BR is now,” one player wrote.

We reached out to Epic Games for comment, and will update the story when we hear back.