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Fortnite's Summer Skirmish Winner Accused Of Cheating
1 hour ago
Every major game has an audience large enough that there's going to be drama every once in a while. It used to happen (and in a way still does happen) to the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive community regularly. And at a time it seemed like every other week some sort of drama had befallen the Overwatch community. Well, it appears the Fortnite audience isn't immune to the effect of having a community crisis every once in a while. Recently there was a new event that Epic Games hosted for Fortnite called the Summer Skirmish, and it gave gamers an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the game world while winning some cool prizes, but some people are calling foul on the winner who has been accused of cheating.
IGN is reporting that some of the player base have thrown accusations at iDroPz_BoDiEs is being accused of cheating after having won $130,000 during the Summer Skirmish competition, where he managed to eliminate 129 other players over the course of ten matches. In two matches he managed to rack up 40 kills, with 20 kills in each match. These back-to-back scores looked odd to some gamers because they didn't believe console gamers could possess such skill on a PlayStation 4.
Some accused iDroPz_BoDiEs of cheating by using a keyboard and a mouse on the PlayStation 4. There are third-party peripherals available for Sony's home console that enables you to make use of keyboard and mouse controls, with almost identical precision to what you would achieve playing on a PC.
The conspiracies quickly spread from the space of social media accounts to Fortnite's community forums and Reddit threads. Gamers demanded an investigation into the winning player in order to find out exactly how he managed to score the kills he did on a PlayStation 4.
This actually did prompt Epic Games to launch a full investigation into the claims of cheating and discover if any foul play was involved.
According to the results of the investigation, it turns out that there was no boosting involved (which typically involves other players with fresh accounts allowing a friend or teammate to kill them in order to level up quickly. This was quite popular back in the day with Call of Duty and Combat Arms.) Epic also discovered that no third-party cheat utilities were used. The developers were unable to find any sort of use of hardware-based peripherals being used to give the player an unfair advantage, and he didn't appear to be stream-sniping, which is a popular accusation in the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds community.
The investigation concluded that iDroPz_BoDiEs is actually just really good at Fortnite and managed to score 20 kills twice in a row in back-to-back matches.
Even with Epic Games exonerating the user of any wrongdoing, there are still plenty of people who feel as if something is amiss with this fellow who managed to win several years worth of salary out of the blue.
This seems like one of those situations where no one is ever really going to trust iDroPz_BoDiEs until he can prove that he isn't just a one-trick pony, and that his Fortnite wins weren't flukes. Until then, expect the community to stay on edge.
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