The Fortnite Summer Skirmish wasn't advertised too heavily. It flew under the radar to most everyone except Fortnite diehards and even they had trouble finding information about the event. All of the information was listed on Fortnitesummer.com about a week ago, but that was only discovered and shared extensively by the community about 10 hours before the event started.

Some are speculating it wasn't advertised heavily because Epic Games knew it might be lackluster. Turns out, it was more than just lackluster, it was a disaster. After only four games out of the scheduled ten, the event was canceled due to oppressive lag. On top of this, the matches that did happen were plagued with extremely boring gameplay.

Pro players had no real incentive to play aggressive or get kills resulting in a viewing experience that can only be described as tedious.  A cash incentive was put in place for whoever got the most kills, but it was much lower than the prize for actually winning the tournament. Winning the event required teams to win two matches out of the ten, and by far the most effective way to do this was to avoid fighting at all cost.

So in order to win, pros took stall tactics to the extreme. Players were even purposefully staying in the Storm as long as they could to avoid skirmishes. Compared to the already popular UMG Friday Fortnite event, this was a clear step backward.

Community reactions

"This tournament format is borderline unwatchable."

"Why would any player with a brain risk death when they can camp their way to an easy win."

"Imagine having a 250k tournament and not giving a single piece of information about it other than some leaks from the participants."

"The desk personalities look horribly unprofessional. And that the commentary is just awful in general."

The above quotes were all lifted from the competitive Fortnite subReddit and they weren't hard to find. These type of comments are flooding the community, each one focusing on a different angle of disappointment.

Popular FPS player FazeJev took to Twitter to also express his disappointment:

See for your self

The lag made it unplayable for the pro players streaming and, while the commentators tried their best to make light, it was an extremely unprofessional display from Epic Games. $250,000 cash is a lot of money for people to compete over and when that competition has nothing to do with skill or precision, it proved incredibly frustrating for the competitive Fortnite community.

Here are some of the worst examples of the lag interrupting the tournament.

Epic Games tweeted this after the tournaments premature end:

Using a different format is the least of Fortnite's problems. Many critics have pointed out that Epic Games have known about the lag issues involving custom lobbies for months and still proceeded with this tournament. In fact, this isn't the first tournament that has been hampered by lag -- it's just the first one Fortnite has put on themselves.

The competitive Fortnite community isn't impressed. When casters aren't taking the event seriously, lag is hindering pro players attempts to play the game, and the tournament rules were posted only an hour or so before the events starts it is hard to get excited about the future of Fortnite as an esport.