While Fortnite: Battle Royale is teetering from one high to the next, the situation in PvE “Save the World” looks different at the moment. A change has just driven the most paying and diligent players to the barricades. Epic has fiddled with the players’ God-Rolls: The dragon weapons have been forcibly rerolled. But there is hope.
The rules and game mechanics of Fortnite: Battle Royale are quickly explained. All 100 players start each round with the same opportunities. Besides cosmetic skins, there is nothing to earn that you can take into the next round.
In the PvE part of the game “Save the World”, it’s different. There are tons of heroes, survivors, defenders, traps, and weapons that have different rarity levels and tiers. Fortnite is modeled here on mobile RPGs from Asia: You can grind for hours and days to perfect your “loadout” and equipment.
And: There are random rolls that unlock on items at certain levels. A weapon of the same type and tier can have different stats: One roll on an item increases critical damage, the next increases “base damage”, and the next may only increase damage in certain situations.
Players hunt for the perfect weapons in Fortnite: Save the World
Just like in Destiny 1, hardcore players are specifically farming “God-Rolls”, meaning weapons with the perfect perk combination. Recently, the “dragon weapons” have been highly sought after. These are special weapons for the spring event that look like they come from China.
They were farmed, and players were keen on rolls like “Critical Chance.” Players have invested hundreds of hours into the items they wanted to farm. Often, these players spend significant money in the game’s cash shop as well. Such players are referred to as “whales” in free-to-play games.
Patch 3.2 has rerolled the dragon weapons
However, with one of the latest patches, 3.2, Epic changed the rules and “rerolled” all dragon weapons. Epic meant well: they wanted to exclude really bad perk combinations, but it went horribly wrong.
Now there are new rules, but to implement them, all existing weapons have been completely rerolled, including the beloved God-Rolls with perfect stats.
These weapons theoretically now have higher-tier perks, but in practice, the weapons are significantly worse.
The PvE players who had such superweapons are outraged. They describe how much money and time they have invested in Fortnite so far and are calling for refunds.
One player complains on reddit: I want my $800 back. I log in and see everything ruined. My mythic items are not even as good as legendary ones anymore.
Epic says: “We made a mistake”
Epic probably knows this and said: “We made a mistake. In the future, we want to approach this differently”, but over the weekend, it seemed like a gigantic disaster had occurred.
Compensation and changes
On Monday evening, the compensations and changes were announced:
- Epic will return players’ old dragon weapons to the state they were in before 3.2. The new versions of the weapons can also be kept by players – this should happen during the week.
- The stat cap is being addressed by Epic with Patch 3.3 this week.
- Additionally, they are reverting the changes to the crit chance perk.
Fans are reacting to this announcement quite relieved.
You can read more about the compensation here.
More on the topic:
Fortnite: Save the World for free in 2018, but when exactly?
