Epic Games says a recent change to Fortnite Save the World that drastically cut back on the XP players could earn was in fact a bug, and the issue is being fixed.
The trouble came to light yesterday when players discovered that Epic had apparently made a change to the XP cap on Save the World, the original Fortnite PvE experience. Fortnite Save the World is pretty much an afterthought at this point, long ago left in the dust of Fortnite Battle Royale, but players can still use it to earn progress in Fortnite overall. As Forbes explains, players could previously earn multiple levels per day from playing Save the World, but with the start of Chapter 6 Season 1, it was cut to a total of nine levels per week, a drastic reduction.
This did not go over well with the Fortnite community. Multiple threads on the Fortnite subreddit were highly critical of the change, complaining that the tighter cap unfairly impinges upon their progress. Many felt the change was part of a more forceful push to monetize the Fortnite battle pass, and there was also considerable upset that all of this happened without any warning: Epic said nothing at all about the new XP cap prior to pushing it live.
Now it has said something, and it turns out the Save the World XP issue is a bug. "We're aware of an issue where after a certain threshold is reached, Save The World players earn less XP than intended," Epic posted on X. "We're working to resolve this now and will let you know when a fix is live."
It looks like this might have been part of a broader problem with Fortnite, as XP awards in Lego Fortnite were also disabled because of a problem with how it was being handed out. The Lego Fortnite Status account said all XP that would have been earned during the period that awards are disabled will be granted at some point before the current Lego pass ends.
All of this may have emerged from a change to Fortnite's overall XP reward system that was announced in October. Rather than having separate daily quests for each mode, as of December 1 the regular battle pass, the music pass, and the Lego pass all share reward tracks and advance with XP earned from any Fortnite mode except Save the World. This hasn't proven entirely popular either, as some players say the merging of daily rewards has cut back on the amount of XP they can earn and forced them to play game modes they're not interested in, but at least it's not a bug.
