Creating Your Own Fortnite Scrim Snipes

The Guilded Fortnite Scrims team hosts over 400 events each day to help facilitate Fortnite scrim snipes for players across console and PC, for NA West, East, and EU. But these scrims were scheduled using a simple set of tools all of you have access to. If you're looking to organize your own scrim snipes, here's a quick breakdown of what you need to do:

The first step is, of course, to give your event a really good name. Also, if you're looking to create a recurring event, make sure you do so here. I've set this event to Every Day, but you can do these weekly or monthly or whatever you want.

Under the Advanced tab, make sure you go over a couple of the options here. Allow RSVPs is a must, as this will let members of your Discord server join the event and be notified appropriately.

You can also limit attendance to these events, so you're not overbooking your matches. This one is set to automatically fill open slots, so if somebody drops out of the event, the next person in the queue will be added to the event.

You can also restrict the event by role. On this server, we assign all users a role that determines their platform and region, so they can only join events they can actually participate in. This is optional, but really comes in handy.

Under Notifications, we use the Override Channel Notification option because we don't want these notifications to appear in the same place we have all our standard events. This is optional, but recommended.

We've also disabled the RSVP Notifications option here, since we don't need or want to get a message every time somebody joins these events.

As for the Recurring Event Reminder option, we actually keep this one disabled on our server, but it may come in handy for yours. This just posts a reminder for the event 24 hours ahead of time, and allows you to garner more attendees in advance.

By turning on Event Countdown, you'll generate a countdown timer that will be attached to the 30-minute and 2-minute event alerts. This is a synchronized timer that is used to coordinate the participants' timing when hitting PLAY in-game.

It will look like this, and you'll hear the last ten seconds count out, so you don't need to worry about keeping this visible when getting ready.

You'll also see the option to mention roles for this event. This is not used on Guilded's scrim snipes, as anybody who RSVPs to the event will be mentioned in the 30-minute and 2-minute alerts. However, this option is available to you if you wish to do so. You can also use the Mention Everyone option (if you like to live dangerously).

And that's it! Give it a whirl and start organizing your own snipes!

8 Things We Need in Fortnite

In only a few short months, Fortnite Battle Royale has gone from a humble and barebones free-to-play mode for a base-building horde defense cooperative game, to a massive cultural phenomenon with tons of content injected into the game at a constant rate. Epic Games has shown a willingness to throw anything at the wall, from quirky power-ups to entire game modes. Their willingness to try pretty much anything makes Fortnite a great creative experiment, and it’s an exercise I’m happy to indulge in. Some of these might be pipe dreams or sound like the dumbest ideas ever, but here’s my Fortnite Wishlist:

1. Large-Scale Objective-Based Modes

While it might seem a little silly to be asking a battle royale game to be not a battle royale game, hear me out: Fortnite is a game that can dump 100 people into a map with a ton of gameplay systems working in tandem without a hitch. It seems almost wasteful to take that infrastructure and squander it on merely large-scale death matches. Games like Battlefield 1942 have proven that large-scale versions of classic game modes (Control, Capture the Flag) can be a ton of fun, and give everybody something to do to keep them invested. Fortnite’s experimental 50v50 mode feels like a test run for more complex game modes like this. But where 50v50 seemed to lack a strong unifying goal that demanded everybody’s participation, dividing the action into smaller skirmishes across the map would give everybody’s role real value. I don’t just think this is a good wishlist item — I think it’s the natural destination of the existing game mode.

Pipe Dream Level: 1/10

2. Teleporter Pads

With Season 5 in full swing, players are having a blast experimenting with the teleportation portals dispersed randomly throughout the map. These rifts spit players through tears in the sky, sending them gliding back down to the map. They’re a little chaotic and a lot of fun. But there’s another feature that was already in the game, hiding once more in the Save the World mode, that could (and should) also find its way into Battle Royale: Teleporter pads.Teleporter pads as they are in Save the World allow players to place two pads no more than fifteen tiles apart. These instantly transport the player from one pad to the other. They’ve already got a cooldown and a use count, so it isn’t hard to imagine introducing these to Battle Royale in a fair and fun way. These pads do require more planning than the average BR player may have time for, of course, so maybe treating the end-point of the teleporter as a throwable will give it the chaos factor it needs to keep things spicy.

Pipe Dream Level: 2/10

3. Zombies Mode

This seems like a real no-brainer to me (hue hue). Fortnite’s Save The World mode is already infested with zombies, so it only makes sense that they might be inclined to extend that foe to Battle Royale — albeit as a player character.Zombies would take inspiration from modes in other games, like Halo’s Infected, where down players are respawned as Infected players, and it’s a fight to be the last man standing. This would keep everybody in the match engaged to the end, and would play out everybody’s zombie apocalypse fantasy. And better still, it wouldn’t require a lot of new assets or anything from Epic, since all that content is already in the game (and otherwise unused by Battle Royale).

Pipe Dream Level: 3/10

4. Custom Matches

The absence of custom matches in Fortnite is so notable that there’s probably a strong reason why they haven’t yet done so — either from a business perspective or (less likely) a technical one. Still, the prospect is exciting, and one that a great deal of players are clamoring for. The prevalence of cobbled-together Discord-coordinated scrim snipes is indicative of the appeal of organizing custom, private matches for competitive Fortnite scrims. Especially given Epic’s $100 million push to make Fortnite the esports game-changer of 2018, players are eager to practice and compete with competent and organized opponents.I suspect we will see these at some point, though Epic probably has good reason not to just yet.

Pipe Dream Level: 4/10

5. Pets

Anybody who’s played an MMO is sure to be familiar with pets. Whether they provide minor gameplay boosts or are just purely cosmetic, pets are an exciting item to unlock and collect, and Fortnite’s ever important loot draw would be enriched all the more if these guys were added to the mix.I can tell you, I’m not much of a sucker for microtransactions, but I’d drop a good couple of bucks to have a mini piñata chasing me around. It wouldn’t even have to do anything, though I wouldn’t say no to it picking up nearby ammo and resources, or sniffing out chests in the vicinity.

Pipe Dream Level: 5/10

6. Gear Pieces

Look, costumes in Fortnite are awesome. It’s one of the biggest drivers with every new season to burn though the challenges of your Battle Pass. But you know what’s even more awesome? Customization. I’d love to have a Bunny head, a black sportcoat, and some chicken pants. Or a pair of Cupid wings sticking out the back of my gold cuirass.Fortnite’s bombastic aesthetic lends itself well to the mix-and-match fun of conflicting pieces of gear, and working towards a full set (or away from it) would compound the amount of time invested in the game’s cosmetic library.I’m not optimistic that this will ever happen, as much fun as I think it would be. I can’t exactly lecture a company making $300 million a month on how to get people to play for more cosmetic items. But I can still dream.

Pipe Dream Level: 6/10

7. Destructible Terrain

Fortnite’s bread and butter is the construction and destruction of structures in the game world, and it’s a blast. But then that sort of activity encourages the player to test those boundaries and figure out what can and can’t be destroyed. The environment, you learn, is the latter.Now, I don’t want Epic to put Minecraft into Fortnite. But maybe let us dig a fox hole in the ground, or burrow under our opponent’s defenses and collapse the ground beneath them?This is certainly too much to ask, but it would undoubtedly add a fun new wrinkle to the game’s mechanics.

Pipe Dream Level: 9/10

8. Physics-based Structure Damage

Speaking of things that will never happen… Adding physics-based structure damage to Fortnite is probably literally impossible — at least if they still want the game to run on iPads (hint: they do). Nonetheless, the prospect of taking out the foundation of a tower and having that tower fall, as opposed to systematically vaporizing in place, would be a game changer. Battlefield 5’s battle royale mode will supposedly toy with collapsing environments, but I won’t hold my breath.

Pipe Dream Level: 10/10

That’s all I got. Did I miss anything? Are all my suggestions dumb and bad? Let me know! (or don’t — just don’t yell at me)

Fortnite Scrims Can’t Come Soon Enough

With over 45 million total players and a steady 3 million concurrent, Fortnite is the reigning champion of the battle royale genre (sorry, PUBG). But while pretty much everybody is playing, Epic Games is still dragging its feet to give a lot of gamers the experience they’ve been begging for. I’m talking about the competitive Fortnite experience, and what needs to happen in order to keep this game on top for years to come.

Fortnite is a game with a very high skill ceiling. Anybody can drop in and figure out how to pick up a weapon, take out an enemy, and maybe build a shed along the way. But look at any top Fortnite streamer and you’ll see structures manifesting from the ether as characters fly along evaporating floors, seamlessly juggling between SCAR and blueprint, landing headshots on opponents you didn’t even see. It’s the perfect combination of depth and simplicity in its mechanics that make for an experience that’s very easy to get into, but impossible to master. It’s an experience that would benefit from those playing at a high level to square off against others in their league. This is unfortunately where Fortnite begins to run out of track for their best players to ride on — and what they need to fix before somebody else does.

When I talk about the competitive experience in Fortnite, I’m talking about something that’s more or less imaginary. While some communities may take their sessions and their performance seriously, Epic treats them the same as the kid playing in the back row of Precalculus on the iPad he just got for his birthday. Your cosmetics may change, but your opponents won’t. For the seasoned players, this limits the volume of viable competition in any given round considerably. For the rest — well, we’ve all landed fresh off the bus to a shotgun blast to the back of the head.

For Epic to adequately serve these players, they would be wise to introduce ranked, competitive modes to the game. With a skill cap as high as Fortnite’s, it only makes sense to give those players an arena that pits them against equally skilled opponents. In fact, it’s unlikely that we won’t see such a mode in the future, given the esports implications of any game this size. But even if it takes a bit more time in the oven before competitive play reaches Fortnite in an official capacity, players would be more than happy to engage in their own unofficial version in the meantime — if Epic would let them.

Custom matchmaking, which allows players to create keyword-protected private matches, is already in Fortnite. That is to say, it’s physically there… you just can’t do anything with it yet. You can see that some custom matches are out there, and you can join them with one of their elusive codes, but creating them seems to be reserved for streamers, mystery players, and probably Drake. Nobody actually knows if the ability to create custom matches will ever be fully made public, but it would be absurd not to. This has pushed Discord servers full of players into literally coordinating their Readying in hopes of being dropped into the same match. Scrim snipes are an admirably robust workaround to Fortnite's fenced-in matchmaking lobbies, but it's a shame that Epic has made this a prerequisite for its most dedicated players.

Whatever Epic’s reason for holding custom matchmaking back — whether they want to make it a premium service or something else — they should get it out there to players as soon as possible. Even (or perhaps, especially) without an official Competitive mode in the game, custom matchmaking would give players and communities the opportunity to host their own Fortnite scrims, organized with opponents befitting of their skill level, and even following their own unofficial ranking systems. This is all good for Epic and good for the Fortnite community, but they’re stifling its potential. Enabling custom matchmaking for everybody is low-hanging fruit, and Epic would be wise to pick it as soon as possible.

Shortcomings like these to Fortnite’s competitive presence has not gone unnoticed by its competition, and it could spell trouble for their dominance if they aren’t more proactive. PUBG, while no longer the king of the battle royale genre, is not a slouch by any means: it’s still reaching 1.5 million concurrent players each day, making it the most popular game on Steam. Considering the cost of entry for PUBG is $30 compared to Fortnite’s $0, it’s an incredible feat. Strangely, PUBG is also yet to make public the ability to create custom matches, though they have made far more substantive steps in the competitive scene. It’s because of those improvements that battle royale fans have been returning to it recently, in spite of its many technical shortcomings. It’s not hard to imagine PUBG adopting a similar free-to-play strategy all while doubling down on their competitive angle, wooing a swath of Fortnite’s power players.

In due time, I’m confident that Fortnite will get custom matchmaking, and it will get competitive play, and it will get dedicated hosting, and it will get comprehensive scoreboards, because not doing so would be insane. Epic is not stupid, but I fear they’ve rested too long on their laurels, and I just hope they’re not too late.