Summer Skirmish winner iDropZ_bodies accused of cheating

A Reddit user accused iDropz_bodies for cheating, but Epic came to his rescue.

Fortnite’s Summer Skirmish Week 2 day 1 came to an end yesterday. The Friday tournament concluded with iDropZ_bodies winning the tournament, who ended up winning a massive $130,000.

But it was not all good news for the winner. A Reddit post accused him of cheating. Among them, the user accused him of getting free kills from his friends, leaving matches, using keyboard and mouse input. What prompted the Reddit user top investigate was the fact that the stats showed a 1000% increase in his KDA ratio in the tournament as compared to his matches.

Epic later released an official statement on Reddit. They refuted the claims and defended him, saying:

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.

When contacted by Kotaku regarding the allegations, iDropz_bodies replied, “I’m not sure what to say about all the negativity. I was given an opportunity and made the best of it. Today really showed me that you really cannot succeed without hate but I was not alone. I had the Destiny community at my side. Without them I’m not sure if I would’ve been able to take it.”