What Fortnite’s v8.20 core mode changes mean to casual and competitive players

Today’s Fortnite v8.20 update has reverted a few changes made to the core game modes in the v7.40 update last season. This means that all mechanics implemented in that update, also known as Siphon mechanics, have been rolled back and are now disabled from default Solo, Duos, and Squads playlists.

Players jumping into a core game mode from now on will notice that the material cap has gone up back to 999 per material, that players will no longer gain 50 health or shield upon eliminating an opponent, that opponents have stopped dropping stacks of 50 of each material when they are eliminated, and that the amount of material granted by the environment when harvesting has gone down by 40 percent.

Related: Fortnite leaks reveal Lava Legends cosmetics and skins coming after v8.20 update.

Epic Games said it rolled back the v7.40 changes because it felt “it has resulted in an unhealthy level of aggressive play, diminishing other viable strategies.” Since the v7.40, players have complained about their standard matches being too difficult, which even made some question about whether skill-based matchmaking was implemented in Fortnite.

That means Fortnite: Battle Royale standard matches are back to how they used to be before v7.40. Other competitive game modes will still have these changes enabled. Players in core modes will be forced to spend more time harvesting, health and shield recovery items are important again, and aggressive plays will be easily punished since players are not instantly rewarded for eliminations.

Players who still want to play Fortnite as it had been from the v7.40 to the v8.11 update can jump into the Arena Mode or any other competitive mode, where all these mechanics are still in place.

For now, it seems that core game modes will be more welcoming to newcomers and casual players once again, as they’ll be able to build twice as much and not have someone rushing them with a Shotgun most of the time. It’s likely that players who like a more competitive setting will move on completely to the Arena mode to have the previous experience with more difficult matches.

These changes are already live in Fortnite.