#50vs50

There's a new mode called 50v50. It's goofy and normally ends up with huge random buildings everywhere, so I found a way to turn it on its head a bit.

All I do is build and heal, and when I build, I build a lot. At first it was just to have a gigantic imposing ceiling. It was entertaining enough on its own for a couple matches, until I noticed what the other players were doing.

People were joining me up there and building shit by themselves. Better yet, the enemy team would find ways to get up to my platform and start building on top of it. I had created new viable land for fighting.

Before I go further, here are some mechanics that are at play and important to understanding how this works. A structure must be tied to the ground. A stairway to heaven is foolish because some dick (usually on your team) will shoot the first platform down, thereby chain-destroying all the others. When you fall, you're incapacitated and probably dead soon. Having an impeccable base is absolutely vital.

So what I started to do was build things for my team. I'd get the bare minimum of resources going, and built a huge connecting point between two hills that nullified the valley. Once I had a strong base that was eye catching for my team, I kept building up until I had the highground.

Another aside: highground is necessary. The chances of you getting headshots goes way up when you are above them. What's more, you see everything they're doing if you built right. In fortnite you make your own sniper nests and doing it fast is important.

Once I had built up to a sufficiently high point, I made a floor. A large one, and one that was 6-8 panels deep. It's easy to kill one panel, but that many is a huge tax on your ammo and no one on the enemy team is at all eager to do that. Everyone's starved enough as is trying to get to the fight fast. What this ended up with was a gigantic cliff that I made in order to get my entire team highground advantage.

The structure was easy to maintain, too. People are already seeing this huge structure that's going to wipe half their ammo, but they realize that my team is getting highground. If we all fall, that's a ton of kills. This train of thought always happens, and I'm always ready for it. I just went back and reinforced any panels that were dying. It was easy, and discouraged them immediately.

Planning how to get your team onto the platform is a very strategic decision. The fight's location is random so the terrain is always different, and how my team gets there is like watching ants find food. Because of how the map is structured, I can usually plan 3 waves of people that will get to the fight. Sometimes the waves come in from different angles, and I have to plan for building two bases to get them all up. I have to rush to get materials, and rush to build before too many of them run to their deaths. If I can find a choke that a bunch of them would die in, I build something convenient for them to get up, and they get on top because everyone knows highground is victory.

The beauty of this strategy is this idea is simple enough for people to instantly understand and contribute to. People build up with me after I get a good start. They build structures on top of my shit. Some of them try to kill it, but it's easy to repair stuff that they destroy. Everyone instantly knows that the structure is important and that someone on the team is making an impact.

There are people that paraglide to kill me specifically. I'm easy to spot: the guy standing in the middle of this huge ramp replacing parts. Fortunately it's easy to protect myself. They're usually on a suicide mission, and I can stall by building walls and running to my team. The building and the gunshots is an easy sense-indicator to people that something's wrong and will at least look if they're not actively sniping the enemy. They devour the enemy by collapsing on them. Then I take the dead people's materials and use it to replace the hole in the floor my team just shot.

Special modes in fortnite don't last very long. I hear it's a week, but might not even be that. If this mode were to stick around, I think there would be more crossover between the sides that split the map in half, in an attempt to search and destroy the engineers. Or people will start carrying C4, meaning huge structures get punished more easily, but require the risk of reaching key points of the structure. My hypothesis is that afterwards, there would be lots of smaller structures that were still wide enough to support 5-10 people but a lot shallower. If there were communication, people would also pool launch pads for the engineers to enable easy movement between spaces. Those developemnts won't come if 50v50 is only a week long, though.