Fortnite players want Epic to nerf this “Pay-to-win” skin
Fortnite players have discovered a skin that gives an advantage in dark areas. They’ve coined it “pay-to-win”.
During Season 4, Epic Games offered players a new skin set that gave them customizable superhero skins.
These skins gave players the ability to choose several different styles and colors. Of these colors came the problematic all-black variation, which makes the outfit extremely difficult to spot in dark areas.
Many competitive players took note of this advantageous skin and started using it in their games, resulting in what was seemingly a “pay to win” skin due to the immense difficulty to spot players in this skin.
In the Tweet above you can see the skin in action during a night game. With shadows enabled, players are near impossible to spot while sweeping a room. They’re easy to miss and appear to simply be black blobs in the corners.
For PC players, this can be alleviated by disabling shadows, but console players are stuck with this issue due to the inability to disable shadows.
This issue isn’t restricted to dark corners, as players can also blend into the game in general. A post by Fortnite Intel on Twitter shows us various areas across the map with players using the skin. It’s awfully difficult to spot at first glance, and most won’t notice until shadows are turned off.
For now, it’s best for PC players to run the game without shadows enabled, and a saturation filter applied to the game through NVIDIA Shadowplay or the AMD equivalent.
Console players could find small tricks with their displays to make players more visible, but they’ll be at the mercy of Epic Games until a proper patch is implemented.
Hopefully, Epic finds a way to properly compensate players, as the only possible option to fix this would be to completely remove the black skin variant. Perhaps we will see a replacement color or rework to the existing skin.