Fortnite: Top 700 PC FNCS Players Ranked

The Fortnite Champion Series has finally concluded. The tournament, divided into regions between PC and consoles, raises an interesting question, however. How can you tell which players did the best if they never played against each other?

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Fortnite Champion Series: A question of skill

4TH PLACE SOLO FNCS LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOO ($25,000) pic.twitter.com/vpYUy6wJ96

— Bugha (@bugha) August 17, 2020

During ongoing coverage of the Fortnite Champion Series you might have noticed that some servers ended up with much lower results on average than others. Occasionally, the top 5 players in one server would all have more points and more impressive results than the best player in another server.

Does this mean that these players were just better than entire servers? Not exactly. When evaluating Fortnite player’s performance in a competitive environment, there are two important factors to consider: both the players and their opponents' skill level.

An above average player will rise higher in an environment of bad players than a great player will in an environment of other great players. Therefore, in order to estimate who the best players are, we must first identify how competitive, or difficult, each server is.

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Developing a formula

FNCS 1st RT＆LIKE PLZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/1iPhuHZFG2

— FA ふらむFNCS Winner (@Framisgod) August 16, 2020

In the interest of openness, this is how I developed the formula to weight each server for evaluation.

How I developed the weighted formula

While I am confident it is at least partially there, the formula could have been further refined by someone more mathematically inclined. I, however, needed significant assistance merely to achieve what I had here, and seeing as I am only human there comes a point where a product simply must be shipped. So here it is.

First, I averaged together the top 100 players from each server in the first heat of the first PC Fortnite Champion Series Qualifier. This data is publicly available at FortniteTracker.com. From this, I found each server’s average and the average of all servers put together, and created the following formula

(1 / (ALL SERVERS’ AVERAGE / SPECIFIC SERVER’S AVERAGE)) = Competitiveness

Then, once I had assigned a value for each servers’ competitiveness, I weighted it against each player’s score. In order to make the data more readable, I averaged each player’s score against the total average again resulting in this:

((ALL SERVERS’ AVERAGE + SCORE) / 2 ) * COMPETITIVENESS) = Weighted Score

From this point, I simply arranged each player’s weighted score in order to develop an estimate for each Fortnite player’s global performance. Therefore, I give you...

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The Top 700 PC Fortnite Players, Ranked

1st place solo fncs grand finals 🥇 pic.twitter.com/EUh1yDZAqy

— E11 TaySon (@taysonFN) August 16, 2020

The entire list can be found here.

One of the things I was surprised to discover was that there was some degree of evidence to the suggestion that Europe had the most competitive Fortnite environment. The European server consistently had a smaller range of scores throughout the Fortnite Champion Series, something suggestive of a more even split in its top players’ skills.

One downside to this experiment is that I feel it gets a little unreliable when dealing with the lower population Fortnite servers, especially Asia and Brazil. Asia was especially hit hard through this formula due to having the largest variance in the qualifiers and then having a three-way tie for first place, and a 4 way tie for fourth!

I have no doubt that the number one player from Asia could have performed better in a more controlled environment, but so long as COVID-19 keeps in person Fortnite events out of sight, estimation is the best we can hope for.