Streamers are constantly complaining about stream snipers in Fortnite: Battle Royale. Now the developers have come up with a way to make stream sniping significantly more difficult. It couldn’t be simpler: disguises.
This is shown by a leak: The leaker Lucas7yoshi is already known in the Fortnite community. He has successfully predicted several items or features before Epic Games’ announcements. This recently included the explosive bow.
Now the leaker has found something like a stealth mode in the code and has published the text about it on Twitter. The mode is intended to make the work of streamers easier.
Anonymous Mode
Changes your cosmetic loadout that is shown to opponents in a match. You and your teammates will still see the cosmetic loadout you selected.
What does this mean? The cosmetic loadout refers to items that you can choose in the locker. So things like skins for the character, gliders, weapon skins, vehicle skins, harvesting tools.
If you encounter an opponent who is in Anonymous Mode, they will look visually different to their opponents than they do to themselves or their team.
Whether they are wearing special skins or just running around in “Default” appearance is still unclear.
Why is Fortnite doing this? The background seems to be stream snipers. These are players who specifically hunt streamers in their matches.
They watch their live streams and recognize where the streamers are currently running and what they look like. Then they go to the positions to eliminate the streamers. They are happy about the attention.
Big streamers like Ninja often complain that they are approached by stream snipers and that this makes their matches significantly more difficult.
Fortnite has already done something about the problem by hiding names in the kill feed. So it doesn’t say in the chat “Ninja has eliminated player XY.”
But stream snipers see in the streams what outfit Ninja and Co. are wearing. So they can already see from afar: “There, the guy with the Prisoner skin, that’s Ninja!” and focus on that opponent.
This young stream sniper was already looking forward to a Ninja kill, but was probably too excited:
Especially with the upcoming World Cup, stream snipers are a big problem:
What is changing? If Fortnite really implements this mode into the game, the snipers will have a much harder time recognizing a streamer.
You won’t know anymore “Aha, Ninja is currently on top of the volcano, I’ll check the surrounding area and look for his skin.”
You’ll only know “Ninja is somewhere near the volcano and must be one of these 20 players here.”
The visual cues will therefore be completely eliminated. Additionally, streamers broadcast their matches with a delay of a few minutes. So you don’t see the current location of the streamer, but an outdated position.
This young stream sniper was already looking forward to a Ninja kill, but was probably too excited:
