Ten years ago, then-Daybreak-president John Smedley created some fun MMO drama when he went on Twitter and ranted his heart out over the nearly 25,000 cheaters and hackers the studio had just banned from H1Z1. As part of his rant, he said that anyone banned could make an apology video – to the players, not to the studio – and post it publicly; if the cheater was convincing enough, Smed would unban him. And believe it or not, people did indeed post those videos.
Just a few weeks before that, also in 2015, Guild Wars 2 studio ArenaNet banned a notorious cheater and then posted video of the team logging into said cheater’s character, stripping off his gear, throwing him to his death in Divinity’s Reach, and then deleting the character.
All of this is to say that ritual humiliation of cheaters in MMOs has a long history, but it’s been fairly tame since the Obama years. Maybe that’s about to change again, as Epic Games has gone several steps further in its pursuit of the worst cheaters in Fortnite.
As confirmed by Epic, a player named Morgan “RepulseGod” Bamford was caught account-sharing in a $4M Fortnite tournament back in 2023 – cheating, according to the tourney’s rules. Epic actually sued Bamford, forcing him to relinquish his ill-gotten tourney gains as part of a “monetary settlement” being diverted to charity, though we don’t know how much it was. He was also required to post an apology video, presumably intended to deter other would-be cheaters in the future.
“Cheating in tournaments ruins the fun for the players who earned their spot in tournaments,” the video says, “and I apologise to the Fortnite community for my actions.”
