The first Fortnite Summer Skirmish was cut short on Saturday night after just three matches.
Why? Participants were not happy with just how bad the server performance was; it was a total mess.
It came as a bit of a shock when Epic Games revealed 8 weeks of Fortnite skirmishes over the summer – for a total prize pool of $8m.
Trying to organise their first true esports event in the same week that they launch the new season wasn’t the best idea.
The inaugural winners were Kevie1 and Notvivid who earned their place thanks to a solid performance in the Showdown event; held a few months ago. Both FaZe tfue and TSM Myth were well down the rankings in 4th and 11th, while King Richard finished second from bottom.
So, what was the problem with this then?
Well, the servers were so bad people were lagging into the storm. In fact, some players couldn’t even build because the lag-spikes were that horrendous.
Next, there was the experience for the viewers.
Unless you watched it from the streamers perspective, you didn’t see much action. The Fortnite Twitch account had three commentators who didn’t provide insight beyond stating the obvious:
Looks like he’s picking up shield there. Yeah, that’s a clever move.”
That was literally what one of the comments was. I split my time between the Fortnite channel, and Myth’s to keep my sanity.
Even worse was the fact that not one of them pointed out the lag, and instead just carried on like everything was fine when it obviously was not.
Twitter’s Had Enough
Many fans took to Twitter to ask the biggest question, ‘Why isn’t Dr Lupo commentating?!’ – a very good point. When you have someone like Dr Lupo who could do the job better on his own, you really do wonder what Epic Games was thinking.
With $250,000 on the line, it is safe to say that all those involved were playing just a tad slower than usual. In fact, you would probably suggest that your grandparents would get rowdy at a similar pace to the first three games.
One of the participants, TSM Myth, believes that Epic is merely using the Summer Skirmish events to figure out how to improve in the future and he made this post on Twitter:
While we’d have to agree with him that Epic will have some fine-tuning to do and need events like this to get it right, they need to up their game regarding production.
Epic should listen to similar complaints about competitive PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds events. A reliable way to keep on top of all of the action while providing insightful and entertaining commentary is what the community deserves.
It wasn’t great for a first attempt, but with seven more weeks of competitive Fortnite organised by the developers, we should hopefully see some improvements.