New Fortnite tournament lets only the top 1% progress

A new Fortnite tournament, the One Percent Cup, will limit progression to only the top 1% best performing duos.

Recent competitive Fortnite events have been much more experimental as of late, even featuring game modes such as the Marvel Knockout LTM or 1v1 Box Fights mode.

This new one alters the fundamental functionality of the tournament’s structure by drastically shifting the range of players able to make progress.

Announcing the One Percent Cup on @FortniteGame November 17th!Grab your duo to place inside the top 1% to qualify into the next round.Sign up here: https://t.co/QjqYNvnFn3#ONEOFAKIND pic.twitter.com/SQ8LOlsos3

— One Percent (@OnePercentHQ) November 6, 2020

How will this rule change affect who can advance in this Fortnite tournament?

For typical Fortnite tournaments, player pools are gradually limited through specifically chosen cut-off points with numbers selected on a server by server basis to ensure that the games remain competitive.

In theory, using a percentage based system may achieve the same goals as the rules of other Fortnite tournaments, but with one notable change. Because this Fortnite tournament will use a percentage based advancement system players won’t know for sure exactly how highly they have to place in order to advance until the end.

While other tournaments will simply inform competitors about the number of players who can advance, this time it will be determined by the overall player count. For every 100 teams who enter, just one team will advance.

Estimating how many teams will advance

Coming soon. #ONEOFAKIND pic.twitter.com/gcTSwMVAL1

— One Percent (@OnePercentHQ) November 8, 2020

The number of advancing players will differ for those playing on the NA East and NA West servers. For comparison on the potential numbers, in the first week of the Fortnite Champion Series for both servers, the NA East server saw 11,610 teams and 34,830 players compete, while the NA West server only saw 4,773 teams and 14,319 players.

Rounding down, if the same number of players formed duos for this particular Fortnite tournament they would have 17,415 teams on the NA East server and 7,159 teams on the NA West server.

This would mean that after one round, those who played on the NA East server would see 174 teams advance, enough to fill 3.5 pods of 50 teams apiece, while NA West would only have 71 teams advance, or just shy of 1.5 pods of 50 teams.

Likely the actual numbers will be smaller than the amount of competitors in the Fortnite Champion Series, but this nonetheless shows one of the potential issues with this system.