Being a Fortnite player has recently become somewhat puzzling due to a sudden change introduced by Epic Games. The developers threw gamers in the famous Battle Royale mode for a loop when they dramatically reduced the scanning abilities of Recon NPCs and POI Banners.
Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite, are known for their consistent updates and modifications to maintain a balanced gaming environment in the Battle Royale mode. As new content is rolled out every few weeks and a new season update occurs every couple of months, keeping the game competitive can be a real challenge.
The game's fifth Chapter, in particular, stirred discussion amongst its community. There has been much talk about certain items and weapons deemed overpowered, such as snipers, the Ballistic Shield, and Medallions. The popularity and influence of these elements in the game's meta have inevitably led to some nerfs being implemented.
To players' surprise, Epic Games has recently decided to seriously nerf the scanning abilities of Recon NPCs and even completely disable them for POI Banners. This decision seemed to come out of nowhere, which left many players scratching their heads.
This change has raised eyebrows among players who are already having a hard time figuring out why such a nerf was needed. A player named Leading-Pop5059 perfectly expressed the community's confusion by posting a commercial and asking: “So there’s no point in recon NPCs, and who was even complaining about this?”
The change was made public through a screenshot of a hotfix dated February 23. This hotfix, leaked by the trusted creator HYPEX, details that “NPCs & POI Banners no longer mark nearby enemies and chests.”
Specifically, Epic completely deactivated the scanning of POI Banners. Whereas Recon NPCs weren't completely disabled, their functionality was still severely diminished. Instead of scanning the nearby area every 45 seconds as they used to, Recon NPCs now do so every 10,000 seconds.
The community's response to this update was mixed. A significant number of players expressed their confusion and dismay at these unexpected changes. Comments varied from players challenging Epic Games to 'stop nerfing everything into the ground' to others pointing out the absurdity of having scans that last for almost three hours.
However, it was not long before players started to speculate that this drastic modification was due to a glitch. Some suggested that Epic Games had encountered a bug with the scanning abilities and decided that the best solution was to completely disable it until a fix could be found.
The exact nature of the supposed bug isn’t clear. Some players have said “the bug was that there was no audio played if you were scanned except the little diamond on your head which you could easily not notice”, while others, like HYPEX, have suggested that the glitch had caused “an issue causing darkened lighting issues for some players.”
Whatever the reason may be, Epic Games responded to the commotion by fixing the bug that caused the darkened lighting issue. However, the scanning for Recon NPCs and POI banners remains disabled. At this point, all Fortnite players can do is sit back and wait for further updates from Epic Games.