Few things are as rage-inducing for gamers as losing your umpteenth Fortnite Battle Royale to sweaty players who keep dancing on your grave.
The hostility has gotten so bad, it seems, that developer Epic Games has been forced to step in.
With the release of Fortnite’s latest update earlier today (April 23), Fortnite players can now block four of the game’s most “confrontational” emotes. They include Laugh it Up, Take the L, Whipcrack, and Make it Plantain.
Apparently, Epic has deemed this handful of celebratory jigs as the most likely to be misappropriated by toxic gamers.
How to block emotes on Fortnite
After you update the game, the option to block emotes will be available via the settings tab.
Just navigate to the “account and privacy” section and then to “social privacy” to find the new feature.
Here, you should see an option called “See Confrontational Emotes”, which is currently set to only allow you to see the chosen emotes when they’re “from friends in party”. You can then either turn them back on for everyone or switch them off entirely by toggling left or right.
There are some reports going around on social media claiming the new option is turned on for everyone by default, but these are incorrect.
Of course, if other players have confrontational emotes disabled, they won’t see your moves either. As Epic notes, this doesn’t stop you from using all of the game’s emotes, just the four mentioned above.
What are Fortnite emotes?
For the unfamiliar, Fortnite players use the game’s lengthy library of free and premium emotes to express themselves. Breaking into a spontaneous dance move is a great way to have a laugh with your mates or celebrate a Victory Royale.
But, there’s a dark side to emotes, too. Imagine waiting for your mates to revive you after being shot down in the heat of battle, only to have other players repeatedly lash your cartoonish corpse. That’s one of the ways the Whipcrack emote is used during combat by the game’s worst offenders. Meanwhile, the unhinged bray of the Laugh it Up emote gets tiresome pretty quickly, too.
Although it may all seem pretty childish to outsiders, it’s important to remember that Fortnite is largely played by a younger crowd. In that sense, some of the game’s emotes are no different to playground chants – yes they’re crude, but you’re probably guilty of joining in.
