Fortnite Arena sand tunneling disabled, plus some players lose gold bars
If you plan to grind out some Arena matches in the near future, you may have to adjust your gameplay strategy. Epic has announced that sand tunneling is temporarily disabled in its competitive gameplay following a new video showing a way to exploit the feature. Likewise, and due to an unrelated bug, some Fortnite players have lost their gold bars.
News about the glitch surfaced from YouTuber Glitch King who recently published a video showing how to use sand tunneling and a gas tank to 'teleport' your character into a building. Though that doesn't matter too much during regular matches, it could be used to give an unfair advantage during competition.
We've temporarily disabled Sand Tunneling on the Island while we investigate an issue. We will let everyone know when this feature returns pic.twitter.com/k5s9nDX5qM
— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) December 22, 2020
Soon after the video was published, Epic published a note on its Fortnite Status Twitter account stating that it has temporarily disabled the sand feature in Arena mode. The company says that it is investigating the issue, and, presumably, it will return in the near future.
In addition, Epic has published an update on the Snowdown Shuffle bug that was causing issues with players losing their Gold Bars. Though the company didn't explain what the issue was, it says in a new tweet that it was able to return the bars to players...but only if they lost 2,000 or more.
Update: In tracking the issue with Snowdown Shuffle, we were able to successfully return Bars to players who lost 2,000 (or more) Bars. We're unable to restore Bars for players that lost less than 2,000 bars — we apologize for this inconvenience.
— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) December 22, 2020
Players who lost fewer than 2,000 bars aren't able to get those items back — Epic says that it apologizes 'for the inconvenience.' Though some players have complained about this, it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things; gold bars are easy to earn and don't impact gameplay.