Fortnite’s first Esports tournament turned out to be a disaster.

Fortnite – The game that keeps breaking records and is always fresh with new content and patches every week, made it seem as if Epic Games can do no wrong with their game. But the first Esports tourney they hosted last Friday turned out to be a huge disaster.

The Fortnite Summer Skirmish Series is an eight-week event in which different players/streamers from all around the world will be competing for a total prize-pool of $8 Million. The format of the tournament changes every week. The format for week 1 was a “double victory” format. It was a duos tournament where the event would be concluded when either a duo wins 2 matches or if 10 matches have been played without a duo having won twice. The prizepool for each week is $250,000. There was a lot of hype for this tournament but it all turned out to be a big fail. Here’s why.

Horrible lag.

The game was almost unplayable for most of the players as they were not able to build, edit or even move around properly because the lag was just absolutely atrocious. Many of the players just died to the storm because they couldn’t make it into the storm as they were unable to move. Here’s clips from CourageJD and HighDistortion’s stream where they died to the storm because of the lag.

Utterly horrendous camera work.

Epic decided to not use the spectator mode feature they made for the Pro-Am tournament and instead they decided to show the Twitch livestreams of the various streamers/players that were playing in the tournament. Also, it seemed as if they did not have a proper team to manage what was being displayed on the screen, because many times they would just show the streams of players that were camping while there were many fights going on, all over the map. Moreover, the team was so mismanaged that they kept displaying an excel sheet of all the streamers over and over again by mistake.

The panelists/casters for the tournament.

There were many complaints on /r/FortniteCompetitive about Epic’s choice of casters for this tournament. The casters seemed amateurish and quite unknowledgeable about both the game and the players. Many times, they would even pronounce the names of the players wrong. Also, they did not mention the lag for a single time in the entire event, even while the players were screaming about it in fury. After having Goldenboy and Dr Lupo as the casters for the Pro AM event, people had a lot of expectations for the casters of this tournament, but they were disappointed.

Epic decided to stop the event after just 4 matches because of all the troubles they were facing. They promised to fix all the issues for the next event on the coming Friday. Hopefully they manage to find all their faults and fix the issues in time.