Fortnite’s unpopular Turbo Build changes have been reverted

Just one day after the controversial changes were introduced, Epic Games has reverted Fortnite patch v10.20’s Turbo Build nerf.

The original changes increased the time between placing structures with Turbo Build — a game setting that allows players to hold down their build button and automatically place structures — from .05 seconds, to .15 seconds. This may not sound like a big change, but to pro players and fast builders, tripling the time made a huge difference. As soon as patch v10.20 went live, players began complaining about the changes, and trying to figure out why Epic made it in the first place.

To help fans and players understand the reasoning behind the change, Epic released a blog post on Turbo Building, and why it felt the changes were necessary. Epic explained that the changes were an attempt to reduce the advantages low ping players got. This advantage was especially pronounced in situations of Turtling and wall replacing — when one players is standing inside a 1x1 fort and another player tries to destroy their wall and rebuild one of their own. In these kinds of situations, the advantage would always go to the player with lower ping and better connection to the server.

However, the changes didn’t really fix the problem and high-ping player continued to struggle, so Epic chose to revert the change. Turbo Build will now once again place structures in .05 seconds. But Epic isn’t giving up on making connection speeds a little more fair, as it introduced another change to help keep competitors on a level playing field.

After a structure is destroyed, players can’t replace it for .15 seconds. If two players are attempting to place a piece in the same place at the same time, a random roll will determine whose piece gets selected. While this may sound shockingly arbitrary, it actually ends up being a lot more fair than simply allowing connection speed to determine who gets to build.

While this change should go a long way toward making fights between players with different connection speeds more fair, there will always be an advantage in online games for whoever has the fastest connection to the server. But at least with Epic’s new solution there’s a chance that it tackles the problem without negatively impacting Turbo Build.