Epic Games continues to tinker with Fortnite: Battle Royale’s competitive setup this weekend with Blitz Showdown, the second limited time mode that asks high-skill players to compete for V-Buck challenges. And like the last competitive mode, Solo Showdown, it isn’t sticking around for very long. Blitz Showdown will end tomorrow, June 4, at 10:00 a.m ET, at which point all scores will be final–Epic will presumably announce winners shortly afterward. The top 100 players in each server region will receive V-buck rewards, making for 5 first place winners and 500 winners overall.
Those 4 days aren’t quite so short this time around, because it only takes 25 rounds to qualify, down from 50 last time. Those rounds are also significantly shorter because the showdown is taking place in the Blitz mode, which starts to form the storm circle as soon as the match begins and then moves much more quickly as things move forward. It’s a mode that favors aggression, speed and a little bit of luck, and it also works well for the new scoring system that awards points both for elimination and placement.
We’ll see how things pan out: I wouldn’t expect as much participation this time around, both because it’s not a novel concept anymore and because the lack of a participation prize means that the vast majority of players have little incentive to sign up, especially considering how wide the skill gap can be between top players and merely skilled players. That may the point, of course: Epic may be figuring out how to get the very best players to self-select into a challenging mode as a way of upping the difficulty without a formal matchmaking system: from a coding perspective, it’s much easier to just have players sort themselves.
It makes sense because we’re still squarely in the experimentation phase when it comes to competitive Fortnite: Epic has promised to put up $100 million in prize money for the game’s first competitive season, but we won’t get there until the developers have had a chance to gather a little more data. The company has said that it’s also looking into ways to create competitive modes that appeal to a wider base of players, but right now it appears to be fine-tuning the process of finding the best of the best in advance of real money competitions.
