In just about every competitive game ever, there comes a time where players learn a way to exploit a games programming to their advantage. At that point, it is up to the developer to decide whether the exploit is clever and hard enough to accomplish to keep, or if it breaks the game too much and needs to be fixed. Fortnite has finally found itself in this debacle as FaZe Clan's professional Fortnite player Turner 'Tfue' Tenney discovered a glitch in which players can use the wave emote in between swings of the pickaxe to effectively shorten the time between pickaxe swings and ultimate harvest materials faster.

Admittedly Fortnite is at a crucial time in its existence. The game is slowly dipping into the world of esports and they are at a point now where they have to decide whether they want to cater towards their competitive gamer audience or whether they want the skill cap to be much more inviting for a wider pool of players.  Epic Game’s decision to make this new glitch a bannable offense makes it seem as though they are leaning towards the latter. When it comes down to it this glitch is a fairly simple one that to be honest wouldn’t change all that much when it comes to the competitive Meta. However, letting this technique continue would undoubtedly start to create a bigger skill cap between casual and competitive players. Currently, the building mechanic is the main technique that separates a pro player from the average Joe. This means that by allowing Pro players to have a technique that lets them gather materials quicker it’s essentially going to mean that pro players will be building circles around normal players significantly earlier in the match causing casual players to have even less of a chance to earn a victory royale that they can post on their Instagram story.

You can expect to see this idea of skill gap to be a highly debated topic when it comes to fortnite over the course of the next few months. Fornite is going to have their hands full trying to keep Fortnite accessible to a wide variety of players while also keeping the game exciting and challenging for competitive players. At some point, Epic Games is going to have to decide what they want Fortnite to be. Do they want it to be the next competitive sensation akin to League of Legends and Overwatch?  Or are they looking for something more casual and user friendly? Soon a decision will have to be made but from the looks of things they might have already made one.