Fortnite Battle Royale isn’t getting any love from UCLA after the game gets removed from the 2019 – 2020 Season.
UCLA Club Sports
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Competitive Sports Program is a division within the Department of Cultural and Recreational Affairs. It consists of both Intramural and Club sports. The Club Sports program sees 55 different teams consisting of 2,500 members from sports, co-ed sports, esports, etc…
The Esports division has teams for:
- League of Legends
- Overwatch
- Dota 2
- Hearthstone
For the 2019-2020 season, UCLA Esports announced that they will be adding a Rocket League team. However, one game they didn’t seems to be getting more of the attention.
UCLA Esports Axes Fortnite From Their Game Line-up
With the addition of Rocket League, UCLA Esports announced that they will be removing Fortnite from their 2019-2020 season. Taken via uclaclubsports.com:
“After a secondary internal review, Fortnite has been removed from our upcoming season lineup due to the lack of a consistent collegiate organizer and issues with competitive Fortnite game balance, among others.”
Fortnite has many esports tournaments throughout the year, the biggest happening next week at the Fortnite World Cup. However, one of the reasons UCLA Esports decided to axe Fortnite was their lack of “collegiate” events. Essentially, there is a lack of tournaments involving schools to compete in, and to have a Fortnite team that won’t compete much throughout the year doesn’t make sense. On top of it all, after an “internal” review, there are issues with competitive Fortnite game balances.
Reason For Removing Fortnite
Although UCLA Esports didn’t go into specifics, it can be a number of things such as the random weapon spots on the map. Basically, teams don’t have complete control for most of the match given how weapons and loot are scattered throughout the map. Even though you might be an amazing Fortnite BR player, if you drop into a location and cannot find any decent weapons, you’re already at a disadvantage.
We’ve seen some of the best players, like Tfue, get eliminated early on in Qualifiers due to the lack of weapons and items he’s able to find from the start of the game. UCLA Esports does have an argument here as every other game in their line-up is equal across the board. For example, in Overwatch, teams will also start off, mostly, with the same characters who all have their specific weapons and abilities. Neither team would have to go searching for a weapon in order to start fighting. So this is fair-play.
It also seems like UCLA Esports had other reasons to cut the game from their 2019-2020 line-up, but they just mentioned those two points. It’s unclear if anything will change in the future, but if Fortnite esports can add more collegiate tournaments, perhaps we might see a return of Fortnite Battle Royale to the University’s game line-up.
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