If you've spent any time on twitter, you know it's a bot-infested nightmare with a habit of upending world order for lack of a comma or something. It's no different in the relatively consequence-free world of gaming: right now Fortnite: Battle Royale threads are swamped with bots advertising ways of getting free V-Bucks, the game's premium currency that can be used to buy skins and other cosmetics. It's gotten bad enough that Epic recently had to issue a warning over Twitter: if anyone is telling you to go to a website and enter your password to get free V-Bucks, they're lying and its a scam.
PSA:
Visiting websites or clicking links claiming “free” Vbucks or in-game items are unsafe. The official Fortnite website is https://t.co/2e5rxQV3Uo.
Guard your account information and DO NOT trust third-party websites with your account information!https://t.co/9Xt9VtnmbP
— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) March 7, 2018
That doesn't mean that there aren't free V-Bucks to be had in Fortnite -- just notice how I only say Fortnite and not Fortnite: Battle Royale. Some people might forget about Fortnite: Save the World, but it's the original version of Fortnite, before Epic added the free PvP mode inside of it -- it's a co-op survival RPG where players build ad-hoc forts to defend against zombie hordes. Save the World and Battle Royale don't interact much, but they do both share the same premium currency. So if you want free V-Bucks, that's where you'll need to go.
Things get more complicated from there. To start out with, Save the World costs $39.99 on Xbox One, PC and PS4 with occasional deals, so that's something to be considered if you're really only buying it for V-Buck farming. That's about 4,000 V-Bucks that you could get right away, with no grinding. Save the World could potentially get you more V-Bucks than that over the long haul, but you'll need to work for it. Of course, that's no problem if you actually want to play the game: in that case, the $39.99 is buying you both an expansive new mode in a popular title where the chance to earn free premium currency is just a bonus.
Once you're in Save the World there are ample opportunities for earning free V-Bucks, from login bonuses to daily quests, the main quest line and events. V-Buck farming in Save the World is slow going: you only get 50 a day for a daily quest, and 600 for completing an area in the main questline. But you can grind it forward, and there's even a website called Free the V-Bucks that serves as a guide for anyone using the PvE mode for maximum V-buck farming efficiency. It has all of the min/maxing discussion you might expect out an MMO.
As USGamer reports, there's some bad blood surrounding Battle Royale players rolling up into Save the World trying to max out their V-Bucks rather than actually play the game, a symptom Save the World's general second-fiddle status where Battle Royale is concerned. Save the World is a co-op game, and so disinterested players only there for the V-Bucks showing up in matchmade sessions can drag down the experience for anyone who's actually enjoying the game. On top of that, Battle Royale has clearly become Epic's development focus.
Theoretically these are two modes within the same game, but Battle Royale's free-to-play status and meteoric rise means that the two function in entirely different worlds, and some players think it would even be better to just split the two games entirely.
It's not hard to imagine how this could work well -- PvP and PvE are balanced in all kinds of MMOs, after all, even if the gap is wider here. The transition could become easier once Save the World goes free to play, which it's meant to do sometime in 2018. Until then, however, the lopsided nature of this relationship is clearly having an adverse effect on the game, or at least one of its modes.
