Epic Promises to Fix Cheater Problem in Fortnite: Battle Roayle

As you might know, Epic games recently decided to give PUBG (gee, we’ve been talking about them a lot lately) some friendly competition by releasing their own battle-royale style game in their moderately successful zombie base defense game Fortnite. This new mode, dubbed “Battle Royale” (creativity ain’t their strong suit), is similar to PUBG in that you’re dropped onto an island and must scavenge for everything, but you also get to build your own hideouts, fortresses, and even traps to help you better kill your opponents.

It's been pretty well-received so far. In fact, the biggest complaint people seem to have is the fact that as of right now the entire system is mired with cheaters. A problem Epic has apparently made priority numero uno.

"We are constantly working against both the cheaters themselves and the cheat providers. And it’s ongoing, we’re exploring every measure to ensure these cheaters are removed and stay removed from Fortnite Battle Royale and the Epic ecosystem. We don’t want to give too many clues about what we’re doing, but we are rolling out tools and will continue to do so. Thousands have been banned and we have no plans to stop!"

Following this news, they announced they’ve already banned ‘thousands’ of players, and that they’ll be adding a new way to deter the ‘casual cheater’: character progression. By having perks and benefits that can be unlocked through constant play, people will have a reason to not want to be banned, whereas now it’s merely a mild annoyance to find you have to make a new email to set up a brand-new account to cheat on.

Good that Epic is taking the problem so seriously, but it still begs the question if it’ll be enough to salvage the game’s reputation and make it a proper competitor for one of the best-performing games in recent memory. Time will tell, but fingers crossed - monopolies aren’t good for anybody.