Despite the initial excitement around Fortnite‘s The Simpsons season, sentiment surrounding the battle royale has steadily curdled throughout November. The problem? People aren’t having fun. Turns out, when only one person can win a match, everyone else tacitly becomes a loser, too.
Player complaints around fun became loud enough that Epic tried an experiment over the weekend, with the aim of making things less intense for casual players who just want to have a chill time with their friends. It was a nice idea in concept, except it didn’t work at all. While the game has now reverted to its normal state, the sweaty incident elucidates Fortnite‘s most dire existential threat as a long-term service game.
“Sweats,” as they are dubbed by the community, have been around since Fortnite‘s inception. The term refers to people who not only play to win, but do so in a way that treats every encounter like a life-or-death situation. These are the sorts of people who will chase someone across the map to get a kill, even if it’s inconvenient for them. You know, the type of person who could never be swayed to have a human interaction with another player that doesn’t end with death. They’d rather shotgun you in the face than do a bear hug emote. The object of any game is arguably to win, but what separates a sweat from a normal player is the level of resolve when it comes to getting a kill. These players also stand out among the community because fans expect this type of high-stakes intensity in ranked modes, not the run-of-the-mill modes.
Normally, the start of any given season tends to be the sweatiest as the entire active player base returns to see what’s new this time around. This means the skilled players will be in lobbies with the weekend warriors who have no idea what a K/D is. Eventually, things peter down as the season progresses, and the average player starts feeling like they can breathe again. The Simpsons season and its record-breaking numbers had the same issue, but on a much bigger scale due to the sheer number of concurrent players. The smaller island size of Springfield also made conflict a constant.
Players have been complaining about how hard the game is for weeks now, from daily Reddit threads to viral TikToks that garner millions of views. The Simpsons season was quickly considered to be the “sweatiest” season ever. To some, that might feel like an exaggeration. But evidently the grousing became a concern for Epic Games, because the company released an update in late November meant to address the problem.
From Nov. 22 to Nov. 24, Epic said Fortnite would officially be in a “No Sweat” mode. For that weekend, the player count would drop from 80 to 60, the powerful Deoderant Applicator gun would be more common, and players would be able to gain levels faster. The purpose was to give players a bit more breathing room on the island, as fewer players would be competing for drops after landing. Theoretically, this would also give players more time to loot and gear up before they encounter other players.
It was a well-intended patch. But if you ask players who geared up in Fortnite last weekend, it didn’t work at all.
“No sweat weekend is WORSE and harder,” one top-voted Reddit thread reads, where the player claimed they were put in lobbies where a single team could rack up to 20 kills. The thread is full of people claiming they barely noticed any difference. Instead, now the common experience is described as a lonely start where people can’t find one another, transitioning into a doubly sweaty final push once the match dropped to its final contestants.
“This no sweat weekend is awful,” another popular thread reads. The poster later added that No Sweat weekend was “just 20 less players but the same amount of try hards [shotgun] pumping everyone.”
It’s not an isolated sentiment, judging from posts on other social media sites. In one TikTok with 1.5 million views discussing the changes, the comments are all people upset at how No Sweat weekend unfolded.
“So sick of getting dumped into unemployed lobbies and TTV streamers who knock you before you land,” one popular comment on the TikTok reads. “Literally been the sweatiest weekend in ages,” another opined.
In a way, the issue Fortnite faces here is an impossible one. Battle Royale is the main event that people flock to aside from the Steal the Brainrot copycat mode. Epic has released a number of other offerings, like the Lego, music, and racing modes — none of which have managed to break through to general audiences in the same way battle royale has. For a little while, there was excitement around the Delulu mode, where proximity chat allowed players to interact with one another more deeply. Epic tried pushing things further by randomizing the number of Delulu winners at the end of a match. The available arsenal, which isn’t themed around The Simpsons and instead tuned around providing fun weapons, also helped Delulu feel like a welcome change of pace. New items, like the friendly grenade that makes it impossible to harm anyone in its bubble, illustrate how strongly Epic wants to craft a version of Fortnite where the primary verb isn’t murder.
But as the mode became a mainstay, the experience changed. Now, you’re more likely to encounter a bunch of annoying kids screeching into a microphone than you are finding an unusual or interesting interaction. Allowing for an unknown number of winners also strips victory of any meaning even though the very thing that is making people unhappy is losing. Really, anything Epic could try here sounds futile. Lobbies with more bots make people feel like their wins aren’t real. Other modes can’t match the high of battle royale, but that competitive spirit is the exact thing that makes the mode unapproachable.
Right now, the rumor is that Fortnite is going to majorly shake things up next season. Leakers claim that the game will experiment with things like storm circles of different shapes and revival stations people can drive around. What Epic actually implements in Fortnite Chapter 7 is yet to be seen. What The Simpsons season has made clear, though, is that as Fortnite enters its seventh year, the world’s most popular game is undergoing a crisis. People want to play Fortnite, and the right collaborations still have the power to create excitement and prompt players to drop onto the island once more.
But how exactly does Epic adequately balance a game where the fun lies in its brutal lack of fairness? The fact you can spawn and find either a bazooka or a wimpy pistol — and then make do with what you’ve got — is the very essence of Fortnite. It’s great when things work in your favor, and you’re the one with the golden gun. When you’re the one with the gray gun, though? It sucks. That’s the point; that’s the game. Once upon a time, there was something crunchy about Fortnite‘s gruesome meritocracy. In 2025, though, the world itself just keeps getting tougher. Unbelievable as it might sound, the people lucky enough to have jobs don’t want to come home and unwind by dying less than a minute after a match starts. Fortnite‘s No Sweat weekend might be over, but the existential question plaguing Epic Games seems to have no end in sight.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
