Fortnite players baffled over massive nerf nobody asked for

Fortnite players have been left confused after Epic Games issued an extreme nerf to the scanning abilities of Recon NPCs and POI Banners in the Battle Royale.

Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode has constantly been updated and tweaked by Epic Games as they try to keep things balanced.

As developers typically have unleashed new content updates every few weeks and new season updates every couple of months, it can be tricky to keep it competitive.

In Chapter 5, the talking points in the community have revolved around particular OP items and weapons. These include snipers, the Ballistic Shield and Medallions, which have all dominated the meta, caused mass divides and had nerfs.

However, seemingly out of the blue, Epic has now puzzled players by issuing an extreme nerf to the scanning abilities of Recon NPCs and even disabled them completely for POI Banners.

Fortnite players confused over Recon NPC and POI Banner nerf

Fortnite player Leading-Pop5059 posted to the community: “So there’s no point in recon NPCs, and who was even complaining about this?”

It was shown alongside a screenshot of a reported hotfix on February 23, which trusted creator and leaker HYPEX stated: “NPCs & POI Banners no longer mark nearby enemies and chests.”

Specifically, Epic has entirely disabled the scanning of POI Banners, but instead of deactivating it completely for Recon NPCs, they have just drastically nerfed their ability. “Recon NPCs now only scan the nearby area every 10,000 seconds instead of 45 seconds,” they further explained.

Many equally confused players flooded in with their comments. “Epic try not to nerf everything into the ground challenge (IMPOSSIBLE),” with another pointing out that “it only scans once per game then? 10k seconds is 2.78 hours.”

However, various players soon suggested it was because of a glitch: “Scanning is bugged, so they made it so nothing can scan anymore.”

Despite one claiming that “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.” HYPEX has suggested that the glitch was instead related to “an issue causing darkened lighting issues for some players.”

At the time of writing, Epic Games confirmed they had fixed the bug that was causing darkened lighting issues, but scanning for Recon NPCs and POI banners is still disabled.