The recently announced changes to Fortnite Crew have been accompanied by some unpopular changes to XP gains in Chapter 6 Season 1, with progress slowing compared with past seasons–a jarring shift after the just-ended Remix season was overly generous with XP.
As with every new Fortnite season, players spent Chapter 6’s launch day binge-playing the new battle royale map and trying out all the new weapons and items. But a lot of folks noticed something odd after playing all day–they weren’t as far along in the new battle pass as they’d normally expect to be. Whereas dedicated players could usually earn 20 or 30 levels just from playing a lot on day 1, this time around, a lot of folks (including myself) found their gains grinding to a halt before they hit double digits.
This is reportedly the result of some newly implemented major changes to how XP is primarily gained in Fortnite. Season-long milestones for battle royale have been removed entirely, there is now just one set of three daily quests for all modes combined instead of quests for each mode, and XP in other modes (Lego, Reload, OG, Festival, Save the World, and Creative) is now primarily time-based and hard-capped weekly–it only takes a few hours to reach the cap, and after that gains are reduced to a trickle.
According to dataminers, Lego, Reload and OG modes all share one pool of weekly playtime XP, capping at 21 levels in total. Creative modes cap out at about 11 levels gained per week, Save the World caps out at nine levels, and Festival actually has a daily cap of just over one, single level. These caps only apply to passive, playtime-based XP, so any quests would provide an additional boost.
Battle royale and Zero Build, meanwhile, have had their passive XP removed entirely, which is why gains slow down so much once you finish the weekly and kickstart quests.
This is likely a consequence of the new changes to how Fortnite Crew works. With the new chapter, a Fortnite Crew subscription now includes the Lego Pass, the Music Pass, and the upcoming monthly OG Passes, but the rub is that you can only earn rewards on those passes while subscribed–you no longer get the battle pass for the duration for buying Crew at the start of the season. Since the price of a month of Crew didn’t change, some trade-offs were to be expected, and so Epic Games rationing XP on a weekly basis so players progress at a more steady rate makes sense in that context.
Unsurprisingly, there’s been a bit of a backlash to theses changes on social media and reddit, but Epic likely will wait and see how everybody feels in a couple weeks before making any changes. The company made a similar attempt to ration XP over the course of a season when Chapter 4 launched two years ago, with weekly quests that expired instead of staying until the season ended. It took nearly two months for Epic to revert that change, despite a similar response from fans. That said, this is the sort of thing that Epic can hotfix without a big update, so this status quo could change at any time.