Fortnite: First ever official 1v1 box fight tournament scheduled for tomorrow

Fortnite will feature its first ever one-on-one box fight tournament tomorrow as part of its Wild Wednesdays tournament series. By limiting the tournament to just two players, this event will be more reliable for identifying who the best Fortnite players are under specific, controlled conditions.

Two enter, only one leaves.Compete in Fortnite’s First Official Box Fight Tournament this Wednesday! A big thanks to @HassanFTN and @ShrideFN for putting the Creative Island together. Read more about the tournament here: https://t.co/Y7l65ICSqp

— Fortnite Competitive (@FNCompetitive) October 26, 2020

Box fighting in Fortnite

Box fights are a critical part of playing Fortnite at a high enough level. It’s usually presented as a set of skills meant to be applied during a specific situation, however, and not the entire fight as a whole. The practice involves the way players build, attack, and defend against each other during a tight, close quarters environment.

Box fighting involves specific skills like controlling space, demolishing your opponent’s builds and replacing them with your own, and using quick edits to control a situation. Players are expected to use builds to pin their opponent into a corner and take advantage of right-hand peeks to score a safe elimination, while simultaneously trying to slip out of your opponent’s grasp and preventing them from doing the same.

However, Fortnite box fight tournaments have the potential for being easier to run and more interesting in the long term than the usual Battle Royale tournaments, if only because there can be a clearly defined winner in each fight.

A Fortnite Battle Royale tournament includes multiple variables such as getting good or bad loot drops, getting third-partied, zone movement, and the possibility that someone is coordinating with someone else in the tournament. One-on-one box fights eliminate all of these variables.

Congratulations to @HassanFTN 🎉Their map "Island of Dreams" will be featured in Fortnite’s First Official Box Fight Tournament. Special thanks to @ShrideFN for helping with the mechanics. Tournament kicks off October 28! pic.twitter.com/24CtU1iBtx

— Fortnite Creative (@FNCreate) October 26, 2020

Box fighting should make for a good tournament, however…

While a one vs. one tournament has a lot of advantages when being run, it appears that this Fortnite tournament will not be run that differently than other tournaments.

Instead of using a tournament bracket structure with multiple pools and a top 64/32/8 as is typical of most one vs. one tournaments, it appears that this Fortnite tournament will instead make use of matchmaking and have a match cap of 35 games to prevent someone from grinding too many matches.

This becomes problematic when we consider that the matchmaking process is a bit of an unknown, as we can’t be certain if each match is made fairly according to expected tournament rules. Additionally, this also leaves in the possibility of multiple players achieving a perfect score of 35 points and having the first place position go down to a tie-breaker, something which happened during the Daredevil Cup.

It’s understandable that the managers of competitive Fortnite didn’t want to setup a structure to support these kinds of tournaments when the game’s core audience and playerbase play the game for its Battle Royale format instead. Nevertheless, expect there to be some murkiness about who exactly wins the first official Fortnite box fight tournament.