This is a continuation of the series of a 64 year old pops (that’s me) blogging my journey to see what level I can achieve in this season’s Fortnite Ranked Battle Royale Build (Chapter 5 Season 2). Each week, I share my progress, observations, and learnings.
This Week’s Progress
The sledding keeps getting tougher. This week I progressed from being midway through Diamond II, to midway through Diamond III. I played a total of 34 ranked games.
Week 3 – Journey & Learnings
- I miss my explosives! Usually Fortnite has hand grenades, dynamite sticks, and rocket launchers that are great equalizers for lesser skilled players like myself. Explosives can easily tear down forts and invoke tremendous damage while allowing me to stay at a safe distance. This season, none of the explosives that I mentioned are present. The only 2 explosive-like weapons are the Thunder of Zeus and some plunger like explosives that can be thrown. The Thunder is a fun weapon but suspends me in the air making me too vulnerable to skilled players. The plungers, eh, not a big fan.
- At Diamond Level III, I find myself paired against some of the best players in the game. There are Champion, Elite, and Unreal level players in my games now. Other than tournaments, it probably doesn’t get any harder than this.
- It’s becoming increasingly difficult to hide from very highly skilled players. A few times this week I was hiding in a bush with less than 10 players left. I was not moving or making any sounds. Still they found me and attacked the bush. The water too is becoming a more dangerous place to hide. Better players seem to be inspecting the waters in search of an easy kill.
- I tried lowering my health to a minimum to see if limiting the amount of damage taken from other players would help me rank up but could not find any data that substantially supported it. I believe at this level, surviving the longest and dealing damage to other players are the biggest factors that help to improve my rank.
- The first 4 storms or so, all tend to limit the amount of running that one has to do to stay out of the storm if I’m positioned on the “dead” side of the storm. The problem is, the later storms in the game really make players move. Having to move out in the open is not highly recommended when playing against the best players in the game but it’s unavoidable.
- Surviving to at least the top 25 players is a must. This week I only had 3 games where I was outside the top 25 and those games moved me backwards 5-7% each game. This is brutal as my average rank up for a game is now about 2%.
- Playing Fortnite Ranked at this high of a level can be confidence shaking. This made me wonder, have my skills really taken a turn for the worse? Apparently not. I played 6 Unranked Fortnite Battle Royale games. The first game I went crazy aggressive and had a 2nd place finish and had 10 kills. I also had 2 wins (Victory Royales) in those 6 games so guess I’m still improving.
What’s Next
Reluctantly, I will continue my adventure playing Fortnite Ranked this season. I’ll keep recording the data to see what works and what doesn’t and see how high I can rank up. I seriously doubt I’ll do this again. I find playing Unranked so much more fun. Unranked allows me to explore, experiment, and play fairly assertively without incurring any real penalties other than needing to restart a new game.
