Epic Addresses Allegations of Cheating Leveled Against Fortnite Summer Skirmish Winner

PlayStation 4 player iDroPz_BoDiEs won the recent Fortnite Summer Skirmish, bagging a whopping $130,000 after winning several matches and eliminating a total of 129 enemies. When he killed over 20 opponents in two consecutive matches, the Fortnite community began accusing him of cheating, and claimed that he was using a keyboard and mouse to gain unfair advantage.

Epic Games conducted its own investigation into the matter and found that the player won legitimately, and requested the community to refrain from making assumptions without evidence.

You can find Epic’s entire response over on Reddit but here’s a summary of its findings:

• 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.

Epic concluded its post by warning participants against “unsportsmanlike conduct.”