Fortnite – Inappropriate Lobby Text
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Anonymous
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My tween daughter has been playing Fortnite for a couple months. She accepted a friend requests from people she's played with in another Switch game. Having a stranger friend in this other game is really innocuous. There’s no chatting, no way to learn anything about the other players, and no real interaction except to join each other in matches. It was pretty safe and innocuous.
Fortnite is different. There’s text and voice chat, and in game it’s much easier to interact with each other. All of the players she friended in the other game automatically were added as friends in Fortnite. This one player started joining my daughter every time she played Fortnite. That was fun at first but became annoying when they joined her every single time she was in the lobby. We are always with her when she plays, and sometimes play with her as we have 2 consoles. So we see all the interaction. We don’t voice chat during the game, but we will get on voice chat briefly to let the other person know we’re going to stop playing or taking a break. So this player has heard my daughter talk, but has also heard my husband talk. Anyway, this player started acting a little strange during matches. Nothing alarming, just odd behavior like shooting at her, running around instead of playing, or getting hurt on purpose so she’d have to revive them. But then last night she was playing and this person sends a lobby text chat message to her that they love her. Freaked me out. Freaked her out. I took a screen shot of the message. We had an extensive talk about online safety with her. We’ve talked about that plenty in the past, too. My daughter blocked this person. Tonight we're going to go through the friends lists and removed all people we don’t actually know. I’m going to turn off her voice chat as well for this game. Anyone else have something like this happen? Anything else I should do? |
Anonymous
| Nothing with messages but DS had someone come on and make loud sexual noises once. It freaked him out since they loudly started out of nowhere and he’s had voice chat off ever since. I was in the room and heard it since he didn’t have on headphones. Usually his friends use their regular phones on speaker or FaceTime on cells now while they play on something else. He only has friends he actually knows and I can still monitor well since he’s only 10. |
Anonymous
| Delete fortnite |
Anonymous
| Can’t you report them? |
Anonymous
| I don’t know why you’re surprised when you allow your child to interact with strangers online. |
Anonymous
Yes and fortnite will ban people. The language on fortnite can get very bad. Just report the player to fortnite/epic. They make it easy to report people... make sure you report the in game harassment(interfering with play, following her, etc). My DD reported someone who was trying to box her in and the player got banned within a few minutes. |
Anonymous
Box her in what way? Building in the game? |
Anonymous
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OP here. Looking into it further, I found I can also make joining her lobby invite only. So if someone wants to play a game with her, she has to invite them. And we changed her account to automatically reject friend requests. If she ever wants to add someone she knows, I think we can do that if we get their username. I think that takes care of what I need to do.
We used to not allow her to accept friend requests, but I relented after doing some myself in the other game and determining it was okay. We've gone back to not allowing friend requests, unless it's someone we actually know. I know we should have kept that policy all along. What about her username? Should I ask her to change that? My username is something kind of unusual and is also used for all my social media accounts. I'm changing my Fortnite name to something different that I don't use for anything else. DD doesn't have any social media accounts so I don't know if it matters. |
Anonymous
Sometimes people build walls around you. I've had teammates drop grenades on me on purpose while looting. Super annoying. |
Anonymous
| Can you block people? |
Anonymous
Yes. We blocked this person. But last night we removed them as a friend when we did the friends purge, so I don't know if they are still blocked. I'm not sure it matters now that she is invite only and auto rejecting friend requests. I guess they could end up in the same team randomly at some point. Not sure how likely that is. If she changed her username this person wouldn't know it was her. |
Anonymous
That is so creepy and nuts. Gross. Glad you are watching out for her. |
Anonymous
| In a way, if you aren't ready to let your kid go with friends to the mall or a concert or anywhere public with lots of stranger and hang out, you aren't ready for them to hang out on line in a similar atmosphere. While there is no risk of a stranger physically harming them, there is a higher risk of inappropriate verbal interaction. Teens can handle that; tweens, not so much. |
Anonymous
It is creepy. There’s also a chance it’s a young person with zero social skills who is craving interaction with others. But since we have absolutely no way of knowing, we had to axe it. In a way it’s good this happened because I was like, what am I doing letting her be game friends with people she doesn’t know. That’s not smart. |
Anonymous
Lol, that's kinda funny. |