What can Fortnite do to fix the all-black pay-to-win skin?

Fortnite seems to keep releasing skins that give players unfair advantages in game, creating more and more pay-to-win elements in the historically cautious game.

Fortnite has always established its identity as a free-to-play game that refused to offer players any way to purchase an in game advantage, and yet, the last few months have seen more and more pay-to-win elements creep into the game.

Currently, players can purchase a superhero skin painted almost completely black, allowing them to almost totally blend in to any shadowed area.

All-black superhero skins are nearly invisible if you have shadows turned on, as all console players do by default.Thoughts?Credit: u/FkLemons pic.twitter.com/NZNihL6GdT

— Fortnite News (@FortniteINTEL) January 4, 2021

This Fortnite skin is “nearly invisible”

Usually, whenever the Fortnite community complains about something being pay-to-win, there is at least some degree of exaggeration involved, but this time, it seems the player reaction has been spot on. There is simply no way to describe how significant the advantages gained by being unseen in the shadows is.

But this skin doesn’t just allow Fortnite players to hide in dark corners of the map; the pitch black appearance can also obscure the player’s silhouette against a dark background. What sets these apart is that they aren’t just edge cases and peculiar circumstances, these are common moments that any player can run into.

This is a strong case where Epic needs to release some kind of patch or update to prevent this from happening in future games of Fortnite.

How did Fortnite get this problem to begin with?

Let's play spot the superhero skin! pic.twitter.com/oalgLeSGh3

— Fortnite News (@FortniteINTEL) January 7, 2021

Part of the reason Fortnite runs into this problem so often is that Fortnite doesn’t seem to have enough ways to make players stand out from their environment. Another example of a game with a strong cartoon aesthetic, Team Fortress 2, used strong silhouettes, unique character lighting, and highlighting to ensure that players were always identifiable from their environment.

3,You know how the TF2 characters have ICONIC silhouette to each of them?How each character has different proportions relative to the most general playstyle of the class? (this is concept art but i couldnt find any modern comparisons and everyone knows them anyways.) pic.twitter.com/blq2UUCK7A

— Johnny will always say BLM, and ACAB. (@johnnypointzero) April 1, 2019

Fortnite should implement similar features. Even something as simple as giving all character models a soft glow in their outlines that make them easily distinguishable in low light situations would go a long way towards avoiding this problem in the future.

No matter what solution Epic comes up with, it’s clear that they need to do something to deal with this problem. Fortnite has seen the release of more problematic skins in the past few months than usual, ranging from those that look too similar to figures in the environment, to those that just blend in too effectively.

Players shouldn’t have to adjust their visual settings just to be able to see who they’re trying to shoot at.