Ninja and other pros are furious with FNCS matchmaking bugs

Although many players feel that Fortnite’s current state is the best it has been for competitive in a long time, a number of technical problems are ruining its integrity.

Weeks one and two of the Fortnite Champion Series Squads event were plagued by a host of issues including teams not being able to queue for matches, points not counting and individuals being disconnected from games.

With Epic Games’ not offering any sort of communication on what is going on, it seemed like week 3 would bring more of the same woes. This was indeed the case. After having already suffered matchmaking glitches and missing points in previous weeks, unfortunately it was more of the same for Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and his team.

Ninja’s squad put on an amazing show in the semi-finals, accumulating 122 points and clocking in at sixth place. Things were going well until they entered their last game, when for no apparent reason, FaZe Clan’s Trevor “Funk” Siegler got stuck on the loading screen and couldn’t join. The worst thing about this bug, is that even if his teammates played out the match and did well, the points wouldn’t count. Knowing this, Ninja rage quit straight out.

The squad finished in 12th place on the final leaderboards, meaning that they came heartbreakingly close to qualifying for the FNCS Season Finals heats. The top ten teams advance, meaning that ten points from their last game would have been enough, which is easily doable. A lot of the Fortnite community doubted Ninja’s ability to do well in competitive events, and he is proving them wrong here. This may well have been his best chance at making it to the FNCS Finals, which for someone who has been so heavily invested in Esports for so long will be devastating.

Following the disaster, Ninja’s teammate Nate “Nate Hill” Hill took to Twitter to let out his frustration with both Epic Games and other competitors. He called out the squad who contested his team’s drop spot as well as the players who “threw their tourney to grief ours”.

Teammate dcd last game Ggs only @fortnite Ggs to the team who lost every spawn fight to us. Also Ggs to the team who threw their tourney to grief ours for some reason. I hope you find happiness in your life guys ??

— Nate Hill (@NateHillTV) November 18, 2019

The only comment that the developers have made on these technical errors is a tweet advising a solution for players who can’t queue for FNCS. They say that if all team members have recently played a match of Arena, they should have no problems queuing. Many angry players saw this as too little, too late.

Envy’s Logan “Bucke” Eschenburg and co were another talented pro squad that were left feeling swindled after the week 3 event. They actually ended up above Ninja’s team in 11th, after facing the same issue of a player not loading in. Luckily, they have already qualified in previous weeks, but they still may well have lost out on a sizeable chunk of cash.

Just lost thousands of dollars because my teammate didn’t load in and if your teammate doesn’t load in, that’s a full game gone. Game that we didn’t load in also ended at our POI(sweaty), after playing 4 games with zone in misty/retail. Very unfortunate. 11th Week 3 Finals pic.twitter.com/F06VhhCGG9

— Envy Bucke (@BuckeFPS) November 18, 2019

These issues are leaving a dark cloud over what had the potential to be a fantastic season of competitive Fortnite. The lack of communication is concerning, but we can only remain optimistic that Epic are working on solutions as we speak.