Fortnite: Epic Games Addresses Cheating Allegations During Summer Skirmish

The Fortnite Summer Skirmishes were off to such a bad start during Week 1 that they were cancelled entirely. Now Week 2 is in full swing, and Epic Games has found themselves in a pretty sticky situation. When the winner was crowned and awarded $130,000, players and fellow players alike accused the Victory Royale winner of cheating and now the studio themselves are addressing these concerns head on.

The player in question goes by the tag 'iDroPz_BoDiEs' and he came under fire fairly quickly in the Reddit boards. The player took his winnings while playing on the PlayStation 4 platform, though many are alleging that he used a keyboard and mouse set up during his time in-game. According to those saying he didn't fairly win, he used a set up that gave him an unfair advantage against other PlayStation 4 players and that choice brought "collusion and corruption in his win."

Of course, that put his previous streams under intense scrutiny which ultimately led to Epic Games's full response:

"Our internal Summer Skirmish analytics kept track of all opponents which participants eliminated. iDroPz_BoDiEs had 129 eliminations during the event and every single elimination was on a different opponent. This is not indicative of him having been intentionally fed eliminations and/or collusion with other players.

Our analytics events also noted when players left the match prior to the bus deploying, and recorded those matches. iDroPz_BoDiEs did not join more than the specified 10 matches for the event, the narrative that he was leaving if the server wasn't full or the bus wasn't on a favorable path is false."

They added, "Stat tracking sites are unreliable for recording historic performance, as they only update when the website requests stats for a user from the API. This makes any 'Most Eliminations in a Single Match' records on an account unlikely to be correct, as multiple matches in a time period are combined into one update. iDroPz_BoDiEs has achieved more than 20 eliminations in a match multiple times across his Fortnite career.

In previous Showdown LTM's which followed a similar scoring format on public servers, there has been no discernible difference in final score between top performers on PC and Console platforms. During this event we saw 11 matches break the 20 elimination mark, with 8 of them on PC and 3 on Console."

Epic Games ended their statement with, "There is no evidence that would suggest to us that iDroPz_BoDiEs played the competition using a mouse and keyboard. Furthermore, we do not restrict input device for players on our platforms in an effort to promote accessibility for our entire audience."

Other well-known Fortnite players, like Ninja, tweeted their support of Epic Games' thorough investigation and not succumbing to Twitch chat and its "toxic" rumor spreading. Others added on to that support by saying these "witch hunts" don't solve anything and only seem to sully the gaming community as a whole.

The reaction still seems split, however, and not everyone was happy with what Epic Games had to say. Where do you fall? Did he cheat? Or is the community overreacting?