Fortnite pro Clix says he’ll refuse to play in the FNCS if Epic doesn’t do something about stream snipers

Clix’s Fortnite trio failed to qualify for the SypherPK Cup yesterday after his group was hounded by endless stream snipers during the competitive event.

Clix’s Fortnite trio, shared with Bugha and Bizzle, already qualified for the Fortnite Champion Series finals with the highest score across all servers in the first Fortnite Champion Series qualifier. Despite this trio’s proven skill, their failure to qualify for the much smaller SypherPK cup suggests that Epic has a serious stream sniper problem.

Fortnite streamers and stream snipers

Successful competitive Fortnite streamers often find themselves in a difficult position. Do they stream their competitive events and create the content their audience wants, or do they play offline in the hopes of not having their competitive events interrupted.

Fortnite lacks any real method for handling streams like that. While the Fortnite community is split heavily between competitive and casual players, the two groups often intermingle during normal play. Due to the size of normal games of Fortnite, it’s rare for an event to be made purely of competitive players until the final stages.

Stream sniping is something that skilled streamers often have to deal with, but there isn’t really anything that can be done about it. Under most cases, it’s difficult to prove, and some streamers have a reputation for calling any particularly frustrating opponent a stream sniper.

Streamers often accept this degree of frustration as part of being a successful streamer, and with how big (and profitable) some of these streams are, it seems to be a fair trade.

What can streamers do about stream snipers?

It should be said that Clix is in a uniquely frustrating position. On the one hand, he is a streamer first, and wants to be able to stream the content his audience wants. On the other hand, he’s a competitive player, and wants to be able to compete under optimal conditions.

Getting stream sniped can seriously dampen his chances as a competitive player, but refusing to stream competitive events would cut off a significant portion of his income. Still, there are possible solutions that don’t amount to simply getting Epic to ban stream snipers.

If Clix and other competitive streamers streamed their competitive events with a fair delay, perhaps as high as ten minutes, they would be able to provide the competitive Fortnite content their audience wants. It’s true this would make engaging with the audience more difficult, but audience engagement is something that already gets cut down during competitive events, as players focus in on the game.

Overall, it’s a difficult situation, but banning suspected stream snipers likely won’t work as well as players hope. Because Fortnite is a free game, anyone who wants to stream snipe could simply make alternative accounts to harass streamers with. Similarly, proving that a Fortnite player is a stream sniper, and not just a particularly frustrating opponent, is a difficult task.

Will Clix really boycott the Fortnite Champion Series?

During his stream, Clix mentioned that he wouldn’t play in the Fortnite Champion Series unless these Fortnite players got banned. It’s likely this wasn’t meant as an oath but more as an expression of his frustration.

After Clix, Bugha, and Bizzle’s performance in the Fortnite Champion Series, it’s not likely that Clix would just abandon his team after getting tilted.

Fans of Clix and his trio can probably breathe easy about that at least.