Did Epic secretly reduce the number of bots?

It seems like last week’s “stealth” update may have done more than just add the Harpoon Gun.

Over the last few days, players have started to notice less AI bots in their Solo matches. Of course, with the developers having apparently vaulted patch notes for good, it has recently become a guessing game as to what is going on.

When Epic Games first announced that they would be adding bots to Fortnite, they were quite vague about exactly how it would work. Their statement mentioned that higher skilled lobbies would see less bots as they were mainly there to help newer players develop.

The current state of bots is CONCERNING (especially in DUO's... i will be making a tweetlonger about this in a second.. Once again, this makes the good players even stronger.????

— Svennoss (@Svenosss) October 16, 2019

However, once Chapter 2 got underway, people were encountering a lot more of these AI opponents than expected. Even top tier content creators and pros were finding that lobbies were filled with bots, leading to significant blowback from the community.

Now though, it appears that things might have changed. A post in the FortNiteBR subreddit by user Levesque77 touches on this exact topic. They comment that they have come across substantially fewer bots in Solo matches and ask whether this has been the same for anyone else.

Less/No bots? from r/FortNiteBR

The replies seem to further indicate that something has been adjusted. Many people agree that they have seen less bots as of late, and feel like they are now working more as Epic intended. Theories suggest that the matchmaking spread has been increased in order to reduce the number of AI in-game. This would mean that the skill range in each lobby is now a decent amount wider.

The idea that the number of bots has been reduced is also backed up by a recent comment by Avery “Avxry” Lopriore on Twitter. Replying to Tyler “Wildcat” Wine’s post on the current state of Fortnite, Avxry said “They reverted SBMM to what it was in season 10”. Again, without any official comment from the developers, we can’t be sure that this is true, but it certainly seems so.

It wasn’t bad until the harpoon update. They reverted SBMM to what it was in season 10. It’s legit horrid and a snooze fest

— Avery (@Avxry) November 10, 2019

It would make sense that Epic made a change at the same time as last week’s Harpoon Gun update. It was a couple days after this that players began to report differences to skill-based matchmaking and the number of bots, and you would have expected it to take some time for patterns to emerge.

Most Fortnite fans see the reduction in AI players as a positive thing, competing against real enemies feels more rewarding. However, the alleged matchmaking change isn’t so popular. People feel that it reduces the effects of skill-based matchmaking and puts them back in lobbies with players who are much better than them.