Fortnite Exploit Is Being Banned Everywhere
After discovering an insta-kill glitch with the Kinetic Blade, Fortnite has disabled use of the weapon.
Fortnite, just like many other multiplayer games, often suffers from glitches that result in ridiculously powerful weapons and abilities that disrupt the gameplay. Just a few months back, a game that paid a ridiculous amount of money in settlements also removed its most controversial weapon, and now it has done the same—the kinetic blade katana, which triggers an exploit, has been removed from the game, as well as anyone who relied on this exploit to gain an unfair advantage.
As reported by Kotaku, Fortnite is issuing bans to anyone who uses the katana exploit, which allows them to freeze time with the Kinetic Blade katana. The exploit was discovered a few days ago before the Fortnite devs temporarily disabled the blade’s use in tournament play, but after some competitive players were suddenly killed in matches—courtesy of a glitch that “wrote a death sentence” offline, and cashed it in as soon as the connection was re-established—in other words, they were killed by an offline player.
Here’s what happened. Fortnite and other multiplayer games require a constant internet connection. In some cases, the connection drops for a second but reconnects, and the only thing a player sees is a small, acute lag. If the connection isn’t re-established within seconds, the game will issue a disconnect message and remove the player from the match. That’s how it usually works, in layman’s terms. And that’s exactly the root cause of this exploit.
Dishonest Fortnite players would disconnect their Wi-Fi mid-game, quickly select and dash to their target, and use the Kinetic Blade’s slice feature repeatedly until they’ve done more than 200 damage before reconnecting the Wi-Fi. On the other side of the screen, the unsuspecting victim would play as they usually do, unaware of the nefarious deed, before spontaneously dying, while the dishonest player would be teleported back and granted a kill.
The exploit has reached such severity that Epic Games has resorted to punishing those using the exploits with temporary bans and removing the weapon from the game to maintain a fair playing field for all gamers. And this isn’t the first time Epic Had to remove content due to exploits; Shockwave Hammer was previously disabled because it allowed payers to jump endlessly around the in-game map without having to recharge the hammer at all and killing players instantly instead of dealing moderate damage to opponents.
In other Fortnite-related news, the devs previously built a fan-favorite Destiny map in the newest crossover, in addition to the game adding characters from the best anime and the best Star Wars villain in their respective crossovers. Not only that, but the game faced a crash some time ago, for which Epic offered players rewards as means of making up, and has removed one of its flagship elements—thus introducing the No Build mode.
The return of the Kinetic Blade to Fortnite hasn’t been announced, but we can expect the blade to return with a future update to the game. Fortnite is currently available on PlayStation and Xbox platforms, as well as Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows PC.
