Fortnite: Battle Royale’s New SMG Receives Balance Change After Community Outcry

Fortnite developer Epic Games released a hotfix for the Battle Royale mode today that severely nerfs the new Compact SMG and other submachine guns after complaints from the community.

The game’s 5.1 update launched early yesterday and added the new Compact SMG to Battle Royale. Players quickly found the epic/legendary weapon to be too powerful, often shredding through both built structures and other players in mere seconds. The community posted to the Battle Royale subreddit with criticism, memes, a collection of clips showing off its unfairness, and even comparing the weapon as more powerful than Thanos’s laser beam ability when the Marvel villain was the focus of the Infinity Gauntlet Limited-Time Mode last May.

Epic Games wrote in a Reddit post that a hotfix was applied to the game on Wednesday afternoon to adjust the values for both the Compact SMG and the Submachine Gun, released in the 5.0 content update last week. The official patch notes, listed below, decrease the weapons’ accuracy, damage, range, and more.

• SMG and Compact SMG accuracy bonus reduced from 35% to 15%.
• SMG damage reduced from 19/20/21 to 17/18/19.
• Compact SMG damage reduced from 23/24 to 21/22.
• SMG fire rate reduced from 13 to 12.
• Compact SMG fire rate reduced from 11 to 10.
• SMG, Compact SMG, and Silenced SMG damage falloff.
  • Range reduced from 2400/3500/5000 to 2000/3000/4000.
  • Percentage reduced from 100/80/65% to 100/70/40%.
• Rare SMG and Compact SMGs drop rates slightly reduced.

The studio has not addressed any concerns over the decreased health of built structures for some materials, the other change in the 5.1 update that fans also rallied against, though it is hard to know if the decreased structure health was more of a problem because of the too-powerful SMGs without more data. The developer said it would continue to monitor Fortnite’s balance and make further changes if necessary.