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The Fortnite competitive scene is going through a bit of a rough time right now, and the community may be partly to blame. Fortnite pro Itemm recently announced that he will be moving on from Fortnite in favor of Valorant, saying that the Fortnite community finds toxicity funny.
Fortnite community struggles with immaturity
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One of the biggest problems with Fortnite as a community is that it is still incredibly young. Not just in that the game hasn’t been around that long, but those who play it tend to be teens themselves. Almost no other competitive community includes people around the age of 14 or 15 that have agents and direct business inquiries to another person.
Even the competitive community I am more involved in frequently has top players in their early to mid 20s, with those under 18, even when skilled, rarely achieving the top spots at huge events. This is simply because with age comes maturity and experience, both of which are needed to avoid making simple mistakes.
But Fortnite as a game will rarely ask players to really think through their gameplay. Often times, players can simply brute-force their way to victory with good reactions and shot placement.
Buildfights, while something that could in theory allow for more complex thought, can often be won just by being significantly faster than your opponent. This encourages players to play quicker, rather than to play smarter, and helps skew the player base younger. And it shows.
Competitive Fortnite is not taken seriously
Itemm wrote a post talking about his experience within competitive Fortnite.
“Now picture the scenes we're both vibing at like 1 am in our hotel rooms the day before the tourney and I get a message from Tommo that a new update had been released and a BIG FUCK OFF VOLCANO got put over our spot so we are going into the tourney without a plan. Imagine this happening in any other game. This is really where my discontent with how Epic runs competitive really started.”
It would be hard to imagine any competitive sport being taken seriously if the game’s managers and organizers were to pull a last minute change that significant. Plenty of other competitive games will wait until after competitive events to release balance changes and new content specifically to avoid this, but Epic did not seem to care about the legitimacy of competitive Fortnite.
Itemm is not the only Fortnite pro to move on from the game in favor of Valorant. Hopefully he will be able to find what he’s looking for there.
