Fortnite players on the west coast of the United States have been having an increasingly tough time playing the game and one pro has demonstrated exactly why.
With Fortnite’s servers being housed on the east coast, players on the opposite side of the country frequently deal with high ping, making it hard to execute certain technical maneuvers.
Building, one of the most important aspects of Fortnite, is heavily affected by the connection issue, as evidenced in a short video Fortnite pro ‘psalm.’
In the video, two players are facing each other and using the turbo building function to try and outbuild their opponent who is shooting them with an SMG.
The player who resides on the east coast is able to successfully turbo build and prevent taking any damage whatsoever.
The west coast player, however, is nowhere near as successful.
A tale of two stories:
An east player tries out turbo building. A west player, intrigued, attempts the same.. pic.twitter.com/xTegZ2z67e
— psalm (@psalmHotS) November 16, 2018
Things start off fairly well, but after a couple of seconds, the delay due to their high ping gives the enemy player enough of a gap to kill them very quickly.
The disparity in ping is something that players have been dealing with for quite some time and it doesn’t seem like it’s going away anytime soon.
As 100 Thieves pro ‘Kenith’ pointed out in a reply to the video, an Epic Games employee recently stated that “80ms ping is perfectly playable, even competitive,” to which many players heavily disagree.
But Mr psalm, I thought pic.twitter.com/SJrZKYbjsi
— 100T Kenith (@kenith) November 16, 2018
Kenith wasn’t the only pro to respond to the video, as a few others found the video to be the unfortunate truth of the situation.
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FaZe Clan Dennis ‘Cloak’ Lepore
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
— FaZe Cloak (@cloakzy) November 16, 2018
TSM Karman ‘Kaysid’ Sidhu
ahdiqnlsjqjdocnqnekwjqkskdjbaqn
— TSM Kaysid (@TSMKaysid) November 16, 2018
Fnatic Erikas ‘Eryc’ Vaitkevicius
Lmaooo is this actually confirmed/tested multiple times? I've had this happen to me so many times and that explains it
— FNATIC Eryc (@ErycTriceps) November 16, 2018
compLexity Gaming Michael ‘Hogman’ Hogman
This is pretty hilarious lol
— coL Hogman (@Hogmanlolz) November 16, 2018
Cloud9 pro Christian ‘Criz’ Rizk even took the moment as an opportunity to speak out against turbo building in general, saying that players “should have to ACTUALLY walk backward, build a stair, dodge bullets…not just hold a button.”
The video has been gaining much steam both on Twitter and on the Fortnite Competitive subreddit, and given how closely Epic looks at player feedback, it wouldn’t be out of the question to see some changes made in the future.