CARY – Tempted to play dirty to win the current Fortnite World Cup at all costs with $30 million in prizes?
Think again.
Epic Games has banned more than 1,200 accounts for some form of cheating during the first week of the globally popular battle royale tournament.
Among the transgressions, 1163 players received a two-week ban for bypassing regional restrictions and trying to play in multiple areas – with 196 forced to forfeit prizes that they’d won.
Another 48 were penalized for account sharing, while eight got in trouble for teaming, or making unofficial alliances with opponents.
The most serious allegation involved one unnamed player who made it all the way to the semi-finals using cheat software. They were permanently banned from the game.
The finals are expected to begin on July 26.
“Our primary goal is to support competition that is fun, inclusive, and in line with the overall spirit of Fortnite,” the Fortnite team said in a security update. “Unsportsmanlike conduct from participants is not within that spirit, and will not be tolerated in Fortnite competition.”
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The violations were detected after Epic Games recently added a real-time teaming detection algorithm to competitive play, including tournaments and Arena games. That’s in addition to the offline teaming detection that was already in place.
It’s the latest crackdown by the Cary-based firm that has been actively working to tighten up its security in recent weeks.
Last week, Epic Games unveiled new security measures to protect users’ accounts from being hacked. Planned features include email verification for new accounts and SMS-based multi-factor authentication.
“Epic’s account system detects many forms of account compromises, and we’re working to add new forms of detection,” the company said at the time. “Throughout 2019, we will be adding additional detection methods to identify attacks and prevent them from succeeding.”
Consider yourselves warned.
