Fortnite Summer Skirmish Had Major Lag Problems

Game Rant

By Anthony Taormina

Published Jul 15, 2018

Watch clips from content creators to see how bad the lag got during the Summer Skirmish, one of the first eSports events offering Fortnite players $8 million in prize money.

Fortnite kicked off its first official eSports presence this weekend with the Summer Skirmish, an 8-week competition offering $8 million in prize money. On Saturday, the first round of Summer Skirmish took place, pitting 48 teams of two against each other with the goal for this week focused on Victory Royales.

Unfortunately, what was supposed to be the first official showing for Fortnite’s eSports potential, showed that the game is not yet ready for primetime. Or at least, whatever servers were supporting the Summer Skirmish need to be beefed up for next week.

At certain points, the Summer Skirmish tournament was running fine but other times there was considerable lag for the players. Lag is bound to happen with an online game, but when that lag is negatively impacting those competing for $250,000 then there is a problem. Check out some of the clips of the lag below:

The worst instance that we saw during the Summer Skirmish was lag that prevented players from escaping the storm circle that closes in periodically. On a player’s screen, they were clear of the storm but the lag was holding them back and doing damage. The lag also made it very difficult for players to get accurate kills on one another, as their position would constantly shift around.

The good news is that this event is more of a fun competition for content creators on Twitch, YouTube, and other streaming platforms and not a major tournament. Epic allowed these Fortnite personalities to play from their homes so that they could keep their communities involved. So while it was a competitive event, Summer Skirmish is not representative of the more high stakes competitions that will be held in the future.

For those, players will be playing on a LAN connection with no lag and everything should run smoothly. That’s what Epic Games used for its Celebrity Pro-AM at E3 2018 and there was no visible lag during that tournament.

This was just a bad showing because 98 players were all connecting from different parts of the world, all while Fortnite’s servers were sustaining its millions of active players. Hopefully, Epic can do something to beef up the servers for next week, though, because there is still a lot of money on the line.

Fortnite is available now for Mobile, PC, PS4, and Xbox One.