Fortnite Summer Skirmish Debuts With Lag Issues

Fortnite once again dipped into the world of esports yesterday with the start of the Summer [...]

By Tanner Dedmon

Fortnite once again dipped into the world of esports yesterday with the start of the Summer Skirmish tournament, but the resulting lag issues gave it a rocky start.

The summer tournament brought together the best Fortnite players around with teams competing for cash prizes being pulled from an impressive $250,000 prize pool. Epic Games' plan for the tournament structure had 35 different teams composed of competitive pros and streamers playing in a series of 10 matches with the first to achieve two Victory Royales being declared the winner. It didn't get that far though with only four games played, games that were peppered with lag that made the matches frustrating to watch and play.

Viewers could follow along with whichever streamer they chose to watch during the tournament to offer different perspectives, streamer CouRageJD being one of the ones participating. A clip from his stream below shows what the lag was like at times, a situation that'd make any advanced tactics difficult.

With lag giving way to uncertainty on the players' ends since nobody knew when it would kick in, competitors were more cautious in their movements. In many cases, this resulted in camping and far less action taking place, neither of those being any fun for people to watch in a competitive tournament as players valued their own lives and keeping the dream of the cash prizes alive more than going for kills.

Despite the issues that affected the tournament, Epic Games was still able to come out with a ranking for the players who participated. Though they only played a few short games and didn't complete the full structure as originally intended, Epic Games now lists the team of Kevie1 and NotVivid in the No. 1 spot, at least after the first week of rankings. You can see that as well as the victors for each of the four matches through the Summer Skirmish page.

Epic Games wasn't blind to the problems that the tournament face either. After calling it quits four games in, the Fortnite Twitter account tweeted a thank you for all who participated and said that Epic Games would be working on "improving server performance and ironing out issues" for the next week of Summer Skirmish. Different formats will also be used each week, so next week's games will offer an alternate structure than the tournament's debut.

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