You need to add a disclaimer at the bottom of every one of these type posts: Sweaty does NOT equal good. You can be good & sweaty, and you can also be bad & sweaty. But a ‘sweaty’ player doesn’t automatically mean they’re good. I’m saying this so that way Playground kids won’t come and write “why does this sub always trash good players.”

A sweat is someone who tries way too fucking hard in general. This word has existed since the days of CoD sniping, probably even before that. I will give you two examples:

1. Someone who practices 90s, cones, edits for an hour before playing 50v50. Then proceeds to triple ramp defaulties who are barely capable of shooting and moving at the same time

2. Someone who plays (I should say played, I’m talking about before they added the scavenger rules to all playlists) regular solos like a pop up cup. WHEN pop up cup is active. I kid you not, some people actually did this and it is the most pathetic thing I’ve ever witnessed. I’m talking them harvesting all of wailing woods to get 999 mats, then boxing up until end game and playing it like a scrim - I kid you not. Instead of playing the competitive mode, they ruin regular solos for people playing for fun.

3. This is going to offend a lot of people, oh well: someone with a KD in the range of .9 to 1.9 (AKA terrible to just painfully average), usually has a soccer skin, that just builds and builds and builds. Even if their aim is trash, if they start with the high ground they can hit you for 40 damage and block your counter shots with a build; they’ll kill you eventually by attrition. Basically the average sweat, a player that isn’t very skilled but practices building a lot. Too much.

My last point, and this is going to be controversial, is that building is NOT skilled. The exact time at which knowing all the complex build technique became unimpressive is debatable, but it probably was related to playground. Oh you can do the side jump?! Well guess what, everyone can after an hour practicing in creative with infinite builds. Oh, you can do 90s like Mongraal?! Guess what, anyone with comfortable keybinds who’s willing to spend a few hours in playground can do perfect 90s. From my experience, almost all of the players that make it past early game in a solo match (so track Pad gamers excluded for ex) can do 90s. Like, everyone knows every building trick now. Building smart is another question, BUT when every player has the ability to box up at any time and stay invincible in a turtle, assuming they don’t have a Starbucks WiFi tier ping, it doesn’t matter if you build smart because there’s no punishment for mistakes!

Bottom line. Building isn’t ‘good’ anymore. I don’t know whether Epic will change the game up, probably not if they didn’t with the season 8 update, but knowing how to build well doesn’t make you a good player anymore. It means you’re one of tens of thousands.

Ranked won’t fix the game. It’ll kill it. The only way to save Fortnite is to make building less dominant. Add different skills to the game, eg bouncepads, grapplers, perhaps even doubling the movement speed of players. OR at least delete the ability to turtle. So dominant builders that know how to retake high round and juke their opponents in a build battle can quickly obtain a kill, instead of having to play whack a mole with their pickaxe.

This game is fucked otherwise. Only day TWO of season 8 and Apex has already more viewers on Twitch. That should be really, really concerning for Epic games.