Fortnite’s pencil warriors may have just been wiped out

Building structures and getting the high ground are two of the most important skills for high-level Fortnite play. You used to be able to peek through structures you built by entering the edit mode and removing a square.

This gave you a way to see what the enemy was doing without them being able to see inside your structure, which put you at the advantage, particularly during late game duels. You could see out, but no one could see in.

That advantage has been removed in the game’s latest patch.

“Blocks that are removed while in edit mode are now opaque rather than clear,” the Fortnite team wrote in the patch notes. “Adjusted to limit player’s ability to peek through structures while editing.”

This is what players see in edit mode now that the patch is live:

xJcat/Reddit

Professional players are already weighing in.

This change is meant to eliminate so-called “pencil warriors,” a derogatory term for players who surround themselves inside a structure and stay in edit mode so they can see what’s going on around them without having to peek out.

“As a person who used this often it’s a needed change,” one player wrote on the game’s subreddit. “There should be no reason that you can peek through a wall while the other player cannot. I should not be able to see a person, edit a window and kill them instantly.”

Players who want to see what other people are doing will now have to leave their structures, or at least pop their head out over the top, making them vulnerable to snipers. There’s no longer any way to completely turtle without also cutting yourself off visually.

It may seem like a small thing, but it has the potential to change the behavior of many players. What will late-game duels even look like now that you can no longer just build as high as possible, and then look down through the floor without exposing yourself to enemy fire?

This is one of the changes Epic Games has introduced to attempt to break up standard strategies in the late game and invite other ways of playing while remaining competitive. It’s going to take a day or two before we begin to see how much this changes things, but it’s certainly going to shake up competitive play.