Mech spawn rates cut as Fortnite trends for all the wrong reasons

A day after promising changes were coming to the BRUTE mechs in Fortnite Battle Royale, Epic Games is already lowering their spawn rates in the game’s Arena and Tournament playlists. This follows a Friday evening when #removethemech was Twitter’s worldwide top trending hashtag.

Fortnite’s Champion Series event is next weekend, so Epic said it will be monitoring the effect of these changes, meaning more may come. It’s still unclear whether the BRUTEs will be part of that tournament. The BRUTEs came to the game with the introduction of Fortnite Season X, but many players are unhappy with their effect on the game’s balance and call them overpowered.

Yesterday, Epic said it would introduce a targeting laser to show the direction the mech suit is aiming rockets as they are being charged. That beam will also have directional audio. Players have been demanding a meaningful nerf and say this isn’t it, it just gives them more visual information.

Late yesterday, top professionals like tfue weighing in on the BRUTE as the Twitter trend crested; it’s almost universally panned. The spawn rates for BRUTEs will be lowered to 21.5 percent for one to three BRUTEs spawning at the beginning of the match, all the way down to a 3 percent chance in Storm 5. The old rates were 100 percent and 10 percent, respectively. The number of the BRUTEs will also be cut down.

One player immediately got in a crowd-pleasing shot, suggesting that the spawn rates for BRUTEs instead should be lowered to 0 percent. “Epic has to hire you ASAP,” replied another.