Why is Fortnite Meta so Sweaty in the Simpsons Mini Season?

If you’ve been hoping to jump into Fortnite and explore the entire Simpsons world… there might be a problem. It’s the sweatiest Fortnite meta we’ve seen in ages. Regular players are getting destroyed by sweats. And looking at how the season is designed, it might be by design.

Jumping into the new season you can find Simpsons characters, all the locations you want to explore like the Simpsons House in Fortnite. But there are also so many players. Real ones. And they’re good. Plus, they want to fight and there’s extremely limited ways to get away.

When combined with the smaller map and loot pool, it’s feeling a lot more like Fortnite Reload than Battle Royale. It seems we’ve had a season which has given sweats full control of the lobbies. But, looking at some of the specifics about the season’s design, it might have been inevitable. We’ve got a smaller map, restrained loot, and an adjusted player count which might mean players are being deliberately huddled together. This is why the Fortnite meta looks so sweaty right now.

Simpsons Season Turns into a Sweat Season

If you load up Fortnite right now, there’s a good chance your lobbies are going to be much sweatier than they have been for a while. It’s an effect that’s all over online Fortnite communities. Some players are getting killed very quickly, barley getting a chance at a game. What’s going on?

A bit part of the answer is how the Fortnite map has changed. We’ve got this whole Simpsons map now, which is small. It’s closer to the size of a Fortnite Reload map than the normal Battle Royale ones. Yet, the player count is at 80 per game. Not 100, or 40.

This is just enough to ensure pretty much every POI has more teams than is comfortable. Players are in closer quarters at pretty much all times. Then, when a fight does break out, third parties are much closer. It’s a Fortnite meta of near constant fights because the map is way overpopulated.

All of this means there’s way more players alive in an area than normal. Teams are grouped much closer, so there’s a lot more fights. Fortnite sweats chasing down all opponents can just hop from team-to-team, no more downtime. What’s more, it’s difficult to get away.

No Mobility Fortnite Meta

The Fortnite sweat problem is made worse by the lack of mobility. We’ve got shockwaves, but not many of them. Definitely not enough to use them to escape more than once. There’s no other mobility item. Even car spawns are way down. This means there’s very little mobility, and you can’t escape the sweatiest Fortnite players. Even if you did, there’s nowhere to go. There are too many players for most storm circles.

As the storm circle closes, players are pushed together and it’s rare to have much space to breath between the other teams fighting. Without mobility, everyone is rotating around the slow way.

None of this would be a problem if the matchmaking was better, but it’s clearly in enough of a state to cause a lot of players major frustration with the Fortnite meta.

Fortnite Matchmaking is Awful

The other factor is matchmaking. Fortnite has skills based matchmaking, but the last two Fortnite seasons have felt like it hasn’t. There are a few factors to consider here.

The nice one, is that Fortnite seasons are always rough for the first few days. New seasons bring back lapsed players, and those that the matchmaking system doesn’t have enough data on. It also seems to serve as something of a reset for how the game judges player skill.

This means a lot of people in the game are being matched up in lobbies without the normal matchmaking limits. High-skill players judged by matchmaking to be equal to low skilled players. This always happens to some extent with new Fortnite seasons. But the problems with the Fortnite meta this season have made things worse.

The other thing to consider is that Ranked isn’t as entertaining for these really short seasons. It might not be worth bothering grinding for just a few weeks, which can push more serious players into pubs instead of Reload. Making Fortnite sweaty for those in lobbies with them.

Matchmaking as a whole has been a little off for a while now. In the last season, the player count dipped below a million for a long time. Divided up by mode (there’s now tons) and the different server regions, it meant fewer players to match it. C6 S4’s matchmaking seems to disappear once the player count got too low, like it didn’t work without ample players to pull from at all times.

Is This a Good Fortnite Meta?

The current Fortnite meta is a lot more balanced than the normal cheese items, high mobility, and crutches like melee spam weapons. But when matchmaking isn’t great, it means a lot of players aren’t having fun.

No game has perfect matchmaking, but Fortnite’s seems to have degraded substantially in the last year. Hopefully, once Chapter 7 launches things can get back to normal. In the meantime, players can always use the bot lobby trick if they want to explore Springfield without getting sweated on.