Epic_Jason

Hey everyone,

We’ve heard the community feedback loud and clear that melee could use some love, so with patch 4.4 we will be making substantial buffs to melee weapons. Damage and impact values will be raised across the board, with an eye towards closing the gap between fast, light damage-focused weapons and slow, heavy control-focused weapons.

As a result of this change the durability of melee weapons will be consumed a little faster, and the cost to craft them has been increased. This increase is only affecting the lower-rarity materials - ore, crystal, and power cell costs are all remaining the same. The overall cost to use melee weapons is still well below the cost of crafting ammo for ranged weapons.

We recognize that this change alone won’t be sufficient to bring melee to parity with ranged weapons, particularly in terms of survivability and uptime. Instead, this is intended to be the first step in a series of broader chang...

The Skill Points in the Collection Book and SSDs will still be required to max out the Skill Trees completely.

We’ve heard your feedback and in update 4.3 we've decided to add more Skill Points to the Commander Level-up rewards - enough points that a max-level player can now purchase every node in the Skill Tree. This includes the set of two Storm Shield Defenders that were previously locked at the end of each Skill Tree tier.

When we initially designed the Skill Tree, we wanted players to make choices about which nodes were most important to them, but as the game has evolved many changes have been made, including recent improvements to the usefulness of some Gadgets. We don't want players who skipped those Gadgets in their Skill Trees to feel like there's no way to have fun with them.

These Skill Points have been added to our existing levels, so upon entering the game on patch day, players will immediately be awarded with all of the new Skill Points that have been added to Commander Levels at or below their current Commander Level.

So ...

Crit Rating is converted into a Crit Chance buff, which is then added to the base critical chance of the weapon. This makes the Crit Rating + Crit Damage perk combination best when placed on a weapon with high base crit values.

A new weapon will still have its inherent Crit Chance, but the perks on the weapon will all be Crit Rating. Only legacy weapons will have the old Crit Chance perks.

With the addition of the Perk Recombobulator in update 4.2 (which you can read about HERE) you are going to gain the ability to upgrade your perks to grant larger bonuses, pick what perks are on your favorite weapons, and choose combinations that synergize well with each other and the weapon that they are applied to. When using Perks built around our current numbers in the new system, we quickly found that the combination of top-level Crit Chance and Crit Damage Perks significantly overpowered all other combinations, and the Recombobulator allows you to easily put those perks together. We want players to choose perks that synergize with a particular weapon or playstyle, rather than having only one correct perk choice for all weapons.

We are going to complete...

Hey everyone,

During the “Guide to Holiday Survival” event we added the Event Store and introduced a new currency called Seasonal Gold, to give you a way to directly acquire items. At the start of the “Spring It On!” event we reset everyone’s gold to 0 to keep the amount of currency from growing to unsustainable levels over time. This allows us to avoid inflating the prices of the more desirable store items, keeping them from becoming out of reach of all but the most hardcore players.

Starting with our 4.0 Update and going forward we’re going to try something different, and we wanted to give you all a heads up about it now so you can plan accordingly. Instead of resetting gold at the start of each season, we’re going to implement a cap of 5000 gold. If you reach this cap (or are above the cap when it first goes into effect) you will cease to earn additional gold until you spend enough to drop below the cap. This is timed with the start of the ne...

Hey everyone,

In our post last week we talked about some upcoming changes that were coming to Canny Valley and Twine Peaks in v3.6. After hearing your feedback we’ve decided to hold these changes for the time being. We plan to implement an improved version of them at a later date, and are investigating adding power level restrictions to address the concerns raised about low-level players in high-level missions. We’ll keep you guys in the loop as our plans evolve.

Jason

Senior Systems Designer

Hey folks,

Welcome to another Design Chat! These are a series of posts where we discuss upcoming changes to the game and explain the reasoning behind them.

In update v3.5 we responded to feedback around low-level players getting up into high-level areas. We did this by locking out Miniboss Mission Alerts on missions that you had not yet unlocked through the quest progression. Many Canny/Twine players have their power level and quest progression fall out of sync, typically resulting in a power level far higher than the missions they have access to. The Mission Alerts provided these players with an avenue to play higher-difficulty content and earn better rewards.

We believe the underlying issue here is the number of quests and missions required to unlock a new difficulty in those zones. In an effort to improve mission unlocking in Canny Valley and Twine Peaks, we are implementing the following changes to the quests in these locations in update 3.6:

• ...

Hi folks,

 
In response to several threads around low-level players joining high-level mission alerts we turned off the ability for alerts to be played in zones that you haven’t unlocked yet in v3.5. We do not currently have the functionality to do anything beyond a simple on/off switch (we can’t restrict access to the alert by Power Level, for example), but we’ve seen your immediate feedback, so as a short-term fix we are reverting this change in Canny Valley and Twine Peaks. We’re aiming to get this out April 12th at 4AM ET.

 
We’re going to look at the rate of progression through Canny/Twine and make some adjustments, to try and better align progression through them with your power level. Keep an eye out for updates, and let us know your thoughts on the changes.

 
Thank you,  
Jason

We switched the team setting on the Survivor car so it's considered a friendly building. Only the pickaxe will be able to damage it.

Welcome to the first part of a new series of "Design Chats” where we present some of the upcoming changes we're planning to make to the game, and explain our thinking behind them.
 
One of the ongoing initiatives of our Design team is to make the world of Fortnite feel more immersive and natural. An upcoming change in v3.5 to support this initiative is to rework how weapons interact with the environment.
 
In Save the World your pickaxe is the only weapon that does decent damage to the world around you, with other melee weapons doing minimal damage, and ranged weapons (including explosives) doing nothing at all. We think this feels really strange, especially for a world where nearly everything around you can be destroyed, and have been considering changing it for some time.

The primary reason guns and explosives don't damage the world already is because we didn't want players in the heat of combat having to worry about missing a shot and blowing up part...

We promised to provide a follow up revolving around the changes we made with update 3.2. Let’s talk about how we are going to make this right.

Dragon Weapons

The change we made to dragon weapons led to a lot of cases where weapons received a sub-optimal combination of perks. While these perks may have had higher rarity, they performed worse in practice. To make this right we’ll be granting a new schematic of any changed dragon weapon so that they match their original state, with their original perks, at the level they were at prior to the 3.2 update. You should get the new copy even if you’ve already recycled or otherwise disposed of your schematic after update 3.2. Additionally, we’ll be leaving the current version of the schematic in your Armory too, in case you prefer the new version.

We’ll update with a precise timeline on the restoration soon, but it should be this week. We’re currently in the process of deter...

Dragon Weapons
 
In Patch 2.5 we introduced a data error that caused the newly created Dragon Weapons to ignore our normal perk rules. We immediately started hearing from you about weapons that were extremely underpowered, loaded up with nothing but low-rarity “gray” perks. We fixed the error in Patch 3.0, so that all weapons dropped after that point had sets of perks that were valid, but that change alone didn’t help the players who had already earned one of those poor weapons. For patch 3.2 we decided to run a script to detect weapons that were below our normal minimum threshold, or that had multiple gameplay perks that could potentially introduce unexpected bugs. Due to incorrect parameters the script enforced the maximum caps too, dragging down players who had lucked into an extraordinarily good weapon. The nature of our current perk system did not allow for a targeted re-roll at the scale of this issue (i.e. fundamental reroll rules were incorrect), ...