Month: April 2020

Enlarge / The Papaya map for Fortnite's "Party Royale" mode features apparent icons for racing, gliding, and a soccer match. (credit: @VastBlastt & @FNBRHQ / Twitter)

If you've played Fortnite with a group of teenagers recently, you probably quickly realized that, for many players, the game is less about killing fellow players and staying alive and more about just hanging out with friends in a shared 3D space. Epic is now explicitly leaning into this use case with a new "Party Royale" mode that asks players to "leave their weapons and [materials] behind."

That description comes from an email sent by Epic to a number of Fortnite content creators in recent days, inviting them to a test of the "experimental and evolving space" starting late Friday evening. Data miners ShiinaBR and Lucas7Yoshi have extracted an expanded description of the limited-time mode, which adds that players will be able to "hang out with friends, play games, perfect your skydive and more. The party’s just getting started!"

Dataminers have also extracted an overhead image of a new map for the Party Royale mode, apparently nicknamed "Papaya" in game files. Icons on that map, and variable names found in the code, strongly suggest mini-games based around gliding, races on foot and in vehicles, motorboat challenges, and even a soccer match, as well as "theater" and "hub" spaces for gatherings.

Enlarge (credit: _chrisUK)

Jay Warren was frantically trying to submit an online loan application under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), but the site he was accessing at lendioapply.crossriversba.com/ kept timing out. He says he tried to reload the application some 30 times and still had no luck. When a page finally appeared, he found something even more troubling: he was staring at the application of a stranger who lived 1,200 miles away.

The first page he saw displayed the name, email address, and business phone number of the person. When Warren clicked to the next page, he saw the last four digits of the woman’s social security number and her business address. Knowing that the application required an amount of other sensitive information—including disclosure of any criminal history, average monthly salary, a driver's license scan, a scan of a voided check, a proof of payroll form, and, optionally, the most recent tax return—Warren stopped there.

“If I had kept clicking on, who knows what I would have seen,” said Warren, who lives in Tucson, Arizona. “I felt weird about it, so I got out of it.”