“Unplayable” Fortnite servers ruin two tournaments in a day: Is this the worst they’ve ever been?

Some pros were left complaining of motion sickness due to the constant “rubber-banding” in yesterday’s FaZe Cup.

With 100-player lobbies, complex building and editing mechanics, NPCs, vehicles and so much more, the Fortnite servers have a lot of different inputs to handle. Going back to the Summer Skirmish in 2018, poor performance has always been a hot topic in the competitive scene, and unfortunately, we are still facing the same problems today.

On Sunday, two otherwise perfectly-executed third-party events, the Amar Duo Cup in EU and FaZe Clan Elite Cup in NAE, were tarnished by extreme server lag. The FaZe Cup especially descended into anarchy when players found they were often unable to move, hold walls or even shoot their weapons under the pitiful conditions.

Before going any further, it’s important to note that these third-party tournaments use custom-matchmaking, which appears to run on separate servers to Epic’s standard in-game offerings. From what we’ve seen so far in Season 6, performance in Cash Cups and Arena etc., has been pretty solid.

Despite there being $25,000 on the line in the FaZe Clan Elite Cup, a bunch of pros became so frustrated with the lag that by game 3, they were dressed as Bananas, working together to build a giant Sky Base rather than trying to win. Unsurprisingly, Reet, Sway and their respective Trios were kicked from the event for teaming shortly after.

While you can certainly sympathize with these guys for wanting to have some fun, others took things a little more seriously. Last season’s FNCS Champions, Slackes, Jahq and Acorn came out on top once again, continuing a truly sensational spell of form.

The shoddy servers quickly prompted a torrent of outrage on social media, with the hashtag #FixFortnite trending on Twitter. No doubt they also played at least a small part in OG competitive star Chap’s decision to take a break from Fortnite, which he announced following the FaZe Cup.

Big brands like Nissan and FaZe won’t keep coming back if these sorts of situations persist. We can only hope that upcoming third-party events, such as today’s SypherPK Trials hosted by Twitch Rivals, are not impacted so severely.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the developers held a “Performance Evaluation Tournament” which was used to run scans and gather data on server performance. They have not yet offered any public feedback, however this could mean that improvements are in the pipeline.

For most of us it is impossible to understand the reasoning behind these issues and how to solve them. Clearly there is no simple fix, but it definitely feels like this should be a priority.