Fortnite players know that lobbies aren’t entirely human. Some enemies have such stilted movement or perish in such deeply silly ways that the only logical conclusion is that you’re fighting a bot. The extent of Fortnite’s bot usage is difficult to discern in the middle of a match, however, which is where data miners come in. AllyJax, a Fortnite leaker with an accurate track record, periodically tests the number of bots generated by a match. And as of late May, anyone playing the OG version of Fortnite might find themselves barely surrounded by real players at all.
According to AllyJax, the minimum number of human players OG Fortnite needs before starting a match is just eight. That means there’s a chance you could be in a lobby that has 92 AIs fighting for a chance at a victory royale. This doesn’t necessarily mean every match will be an army of bots, but it does mean that you cannot trust that every single character you kill in Fortnite’s nostalgia mode has another person on the other side of the interaction.
To determine the number of bots, AllyJax uses a Discord bot know as The Dub, which, among other things, can be commanded to count the number of real players in any given lobby. Bots are largely identifiable by names retained across different matches.
It’s also worth noting that Epic Games appears to adjust bot numbers all the time. Previously, AllyJax found that OG matches could be 25% bots one month and 40% bots the next month. Epic has also reverted course in the past and decreased the number of bots that a lobby might generate. The bot-heavy lobbies are also only present in social play, not ranked modes.
Epic Games did not respond to a request for comment. With that said, games like Fortnite rely on bots for a variety of reasons, like ensuring short wait times. As of this writing, the older-season-replicating OG playlist is the fifth most popular Fortnite mode, which means that its player count is a fraction of what you might find in the main battle royale modes.
Fortnite also eases new players into its gameplay by introducing them to bot-heavy lobbies at first, after which the game uses skill-based matchmaking to determine the prevalence of AI in any given match. At times, players might intentionally go on a losing streak to force Fortnite to generate a bot lobby.
In short, Fortnite might thrust a player into a bot lobby for their enjoyment: It’s hard to have fun if all you do is lose. But does a victory royale feel as sweet if you know that you didn’t make a real person suffer for it? Much to think about.
