Fortnite's $1 Million Winter Royale Tournament Isn't Going Well

The Fortnite Winter Royale million-dollar tournament is up and running however, thanks to a couple of the game's most recent updates, players are super unhappy with how the competition is shaping up.

One of Fortnite's strongest selling points is the fact that the game is constantly changing. From new modes and in-game items to map alterations and more, every week brings something fresh and exciting to Epic's 100-player battle royale. As it turns out, that's not exactly a good thing when you're trying to run a massive tournament that's got a million bucks in prize money on the line, especially if those updates greatly unbalance the proceedings.

As we recently reported, Epic has been hosting various qualifying rounds for Fortnite, with players earning the highest scores being invited to join the closing rounds of the Winter Royale tournament. The issue players are coming up against are the recently implemented planes and, even more recently, the Infinity Blade.

I'll start with the slightly less game-ruining inclusion of planes. In a standard round of Fornite, the planes seem like fun twists on the standard gameplay. They allow players to get around the map more quickly, have front-mounted machine guns and can even transport teammates in squad-based modes. Since there aren't a lot of weapons available that can harm a plane at high altitude, tournament participants have learned that they can just hop into one of the vehicles and fly around the map in order to stay in the match longer. While they're goofing off in the clouds, the rest of the tournament participants are struggling for survival below. There's even footage over on Eurogamer of a group of planes circling the shrinking combat zone, with none of them actually firing at each other in a sort of unofficial truce in order to guarantee they all last until the closing moments of the round.

While that's certainly not in the spirit of Fortnite, you can't blame players for taking advantage of every opportunity presented to them when a million dollars are on the line. Still, it's an issue that probably should have been anticipated and is making for some super boring Esports competitions.

Even worse, though, is the Infinity Blade, which went live just this week. There's only one Infinity Blade available on the map, and it grants the player who wields it an insane advantage including higher health, higher armor, health recharge for kills, the ability to leap into the air and do massive damage. The Infinity Blade can also slice through structures like butter, which is a huge leg up on the competition in the late stages of the match.

This is exactly the kind of goofy limited item Fortnite fans usually get a kick out of, but only when it's available as part of a special event like what was done with Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet earlier this year. The Infinity Blade is available in the standard mode, though, which means it's fair game for the Winter Royale tournament.

It's possible Epic will patch both the planes and the Infinity Blade out of standard modes in Fortnite for the remainder of the tournament, but then they'd probably have to scrap all of the competitions so far, as some players have already taken losses with these items in play.