Fortnite World Cup Week 1 Qualifiers Saw Over 1,000 Accounts Banned

Week 1 of the Fortnite World Cup qualifiers took place on April 13th and the 14th and saw 19 players grab a share of a $1,000,000 prize pool and punch their tickets to the $30,000,000 Fortnite World Cup Finals. However, due to the completely online nature of the qualifiers, a large majority of the community for the popular battle royale were concerned that cheating players would be able to find success in the competitions. In order to show the community that it would not allow these cheating individuals to go unpunished, Epic Games announced on Friday, April 19th that it has banned over 1,000 accounts for the violation of various rules during the Week 1 Fortnite World Cup qualifiers. 

In a state of competitive integrity announcement by Epic Games, the Fortnite developer announced that it had taken actions to punish a large number of players by banning them for various lengths of time. The violations for these bans consisted of a wide range of offenses throughout the Week 1 Fortnite World Cup qualifiers that included the circumventing of region locks and playing in multiple regions, account sharing, teaming, the use of cheat software, and intentionally disconnecting. 

You can find the official numbers for the number of accounts that were banned for rule violations in the Week 1 Fortnite World Cup qualifiers below. 

• 1163 accounts were banned from competitive play for 14 days for circumventing region locks and playing in multiple regions through the course of the tournament.

  • This includes 196 prize winners who will have their prizes forfeited for playing in multiple regions.

    • Disqualified players forfeiting their winnings will result in the tournament results shifting for prize considerations, but won't currently be reflected on the in-game leaderboard.

• 48 accounts were banned for account sharing for seven days.

  • This includes nine prize winners who will have their prizes forfeited for sharing accounts.

• Eight accounts were banned for teaming.

  • One winner will forfeit prizes for teaming.

• One account was banned permanently from Fortnite for using cheat software during the Semi Finals.

  • This account played for less than five minutes in the tournament before being banned.

• One account was given a 72 hour competitive ban for intentionally disconnecting to avoid giving points to another competitor.

  • This is currently a manual process based off of user reports, but we will be detecting this more widely in the future.

Epic Games also explained that "competing on alternate or new accounts to circumvent competitive bans in any way may result in users being banned from all future competitive play permanently" throughout the entirety of the Fortnite World Cup qualifiers. 

With the Week 2 Fortnite World Cup qualifiers set to begin on Saturday, April 19th, competing players are sure to be happy to see that Epic Games is being proactive in punishing players for rule violations in the highly lucrative competitions. However, the fact itself that Epic Games is having to ban these players in the first place lends plenty of ammunition to critics of the completely online qualifiers for the Fortnite World Cup who have warned the developer that this would be a major issue with so much money on the line.