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Epic Games Addresses Accusation that iDroPz_BoDiEs Cheated at Fortnite Summer Skirmish

There was a storm of a different kind brewing after the competitive event held over the weekend.

Charles Singletary Jr

July 27, 2018 12:25 PM

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Epic Games is ramping up competitive efforts for Fortnite Battle Royale with a handful of experiences, one being the return of the Solo Showdown LTM that went live today. Another is the Fortnite Summer Skirmish series and week 2 was held this past weekend, but the victor has stirred up a storm of controversy.

Dexerto reported that player iDroPz_BoDiEs earned a spot in the Summer Skirmish because of his placement in the previous Solo Showdown LTM and won the $60,000 first place reward. He was accused of many different ways of cheating and a Reddit user collected all of them into one post. The post, which called for a full investigation of the victory, received over 40,000 upvotes and Epic Games obliged. The full statement from Epic Games, which is a pretty lengthy one that breaks down all of the accusations levied at iDroPz_BoDiEs, can be found below:

Hey all,

We wanted to drop in with information regarding Friday’s Summer Skirmish and the performance of the winner iDropz_Bodies in an effort [to] clarify some assumptions held by the community.

iDroPz_BoDiEs was unable to stream the event due to a Summer Skirmish rules requirement of a 2-minute stream delay for participants which wish to broadcast. This delay cannot be set on the console capture software and is not possible for non-Affiliates on Twitch. Following the event, he broadcasted replays of his Summer Skirmish matches.

Our rules do not stipulate that a participant must stream the event, as we do not wish to exclude players who were invited based on their own merit because they cannot stream – iDroPz_BoDiEs was invited to Summer Skirmish based off his performance in prior Showdown LTMs.

Now to address some concerns around that performance:

- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

We appreciate the community’s concern around the integrity of the competition, but questioning the results of an individual participant without evidence unfairly tears apart at what should be a crowning moment of achievement for an individual who earned their way there and performed when it counted.

Our primary goal is to support competition that is fun, inclusive, and in line with the overall spirit of Fortnite. Unsportsmanlike conduct from participants is not within that spirit, and will not be tolerated in Fortnite competition.

tl;dr - Epic Games concludes that the player didn't cheat. With this robust breakdown, it looks like the investigation is cut and dry. The events may not change the rules for the Summer Skirmishes, but Epic has a lot to learn and grow from when it comes to this early push for competitive Fortnite. Stay tuned to Shacknews for more updates.

Charles Singletary Jr

News Editor

Charles Singletary Jr keeps the updates flowing as the News Editor, breaking stories while investigating the biggest topics in gaming and technology. He's pretty active on Twitter, so feel free to reach out to him @The_CSJR. Got a hot tip? Email him at Charles.Singletary@Shacknews.com.