Update: Epic games have now denied they banned the player because of Ninja’s report directly. More information below.
Epic Games have begun issuing compensation to some Fortnite fans who were incorrectly banned, amid backlash from the community after a Ninja incident went viral.
Ninja, the most popular Fortnite streamer, found himself in some hot water recently after he wrongfully reported a player for stream sniping him.
This sparked a debate around the misuse of the report feature, which is intended to be used for players who cheat/hack/stream snipe.
Ninja later apologized to the player, and said that despite being such a popular figure in Fortnite, that just because he reports someone, doesn’t mean they will automatically be banned.
However, a new incident then surfaced showing Ninja report a player for “having a higher ping than me”, and this player was indeed banned (although Epic has now claimed it was not directly because of Ninja’s report.)
Cheraxo, the player who was banned, shows that he was later sent an email from Epic, stating
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“We’ve become aware that our processes for reviewing accounts may have led us to incorrectly ban certain accounts. We’ll be unbanning your account and compensating you for our mistake.“
Update: A staff member from Epic Gaming responded to the thread which accused Ninja of having a player banned for having high ping.
We take the reporting and actioning of accounts very seriously. We treat every report the same and follow the same process to determine what action is necessary.
There are two accounts involved in this: Account A which was the account originally reported by Ninja and Account B which is tied to a YouTube video we discovered
- On Oct 2nd, Account B was disabled for reasons unrelated to player reporting.
- On Oct 3rd, Account A was reported by Ninja. It was investigated and not actioned due to lack of evidence.
- On Oct 4th, Account A changed their display name away from the name reported on October 3.
- On Nov 13th, Account B was re-enabled based on a review of the underlying system.
- On Nov 17th, account B changed their display name to match the display name of account A at the time of Ninja’s report.
We became aware of a YouTube video claiming that we banned (and then unbanned) account B based on Ninja’s report, which is false. We hope this clears up the sequence of actions.
On November 14, some players began to share that they had had their accounts unbanned and were compensated with 2,000 V-Bucks for the error on Epic Games part.
In addition to compensating wrongfully banned players, Epic Games will be looking into the system for reporting players, as it seems to be causing more problems than it is solving in its current state.
How exactly Epic Games are determining that counts were banned incorrectly in the first place however is unclear, but if you have been banned and feel it was undeserved, you can contact Epic Games support.