That’s the takeaway from a recent Fortnite uprising that Epic Games put down over the weekend. A player named iDroPz_BoDiEs stood accused by the Reddit mob of cheating during the Fortnite Summer Skirmish tournament in which he took home $130,000 for his win; the accusers said his use of keyboard and mouse on PS4 was unfair and even theorized that he was paying random players to join and feed him free kills.
Epic Games has shut down pretty much every theory as well as pointed out that keyboard and mouse on console is not against the game’s rules, more or less shaming the players engaging in “unsportsmanlike conduct” in their accusations.
“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.”
Did I say the takeaway was “people don’t need to cheat to be better than you”? It’s actually that someone named iDroPz_BoDiEs just won $130,000 playing internet hide-and-seek. This is real life.
