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The Fortnite Ghost Rider Cup ended with 20 teams tying for first place, after each of them finished with perfect scores.
As expected, the Fortnite Ghost Rider Cup has had to be resolved by tiebreakers across six of the seven servers where the tournament was hosted. 20 teams, and 60 players, all earned perfect scores across the entire cup, winning a full 10 out of 10 games each.
Fortnite Ghost Rider Cup Results
The order of these teams’ placement had to be decided by each team’s average eliminations. However, this has skewed the results in such a way that it is difficult to imply that any one of the teams is better than another at this particular Fortnite LTM.
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Had this tournament had anything more on the line than early access to a skin and a few other digital goodies, such a high number of ties would discredit the validity of this tournament’s results.
The problem with letting these Fortnite tournaments go to tiebreakers
Tiebreakers aren’t meant to be the main way to order the top placing members of a tournament. They are meant to allow for the occasional technical judgement to expedite a tournament’s results during rare occurrences.
Some tournaments even have different tiebreaker rules depending on when the tie happens, with earlier ties being resolved quicker than later ties. However, the rigidity and automation of these particular Fortnite tournaments has led to a situation where tiebreakers aren’t just expected, but an unseen core part of what the tournament is actually testing for.
Therefore, while this tournament seems to ask which team of Fortnite players can play the Marvel Knockout LTM best, it’s also asking which teams can play most aggressively to earn the highest average eliminations. Had any of these perfect teams also managed to have the same average eliminations, their ultimate placement would be decided by a coin flip, meaning that each team is only two ties away from having their placement be totally arbitrary.
What gets chosen to break ties delegitimizes certain strategies
If tiebreakers weren’t that common in this Fortnite tournament it wouldn’t really matter that average eliminations were selected to break ties. However, with their current prevalence, this choice of tiebreaker delegitimizes strategies that emphasize defense, survival, and cautious play.
Additionally, because the powers used in each match are selected at random, it means that a team unlucky enough to get assigned games which favor defensive play will have a significantly lower chance of being placed according to their ability.
Fortnite tournaments usually go to great lengths to diminish the role of luck in their games, making it rather surprising that this one seems to rely so heavily on luck based outcomes.
While it isn’t likely that these kinds of Fortnite tournaments will happen too often, it does seem like Epic could, at the very least, use a different tournament structure for one-on-one competitions.
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