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A point bug that occurred during Winter Royale allowed players to perpetually compete in lower skilled lobbies
Winter Royale was the second largest Fortnite tournament by prize pool. Players around the world competed on their respective platform: PC, console, or touch. Three one-day tournaments would divvy a staggering prize pool of $23 million dollars. Despite the size of this operation, nefarious players were able to collapse the integrity of Winter Royale (and possibly every future tournament if not addressed properly)
For the full picture, we must travel back a few days. It’s day one of Winter Royale and a wild bug appears. Occasionally, users would not receive points accrued in Winter Royale games. This would happen seemingly at random
Missing 34 points ??
— Liquid Cented (@Cented7) December 22, 2019
missing 74 points on na would be first ggs
— Ditrxx (@Ditrxx) December 22, 2019
The bug was quickly picked up by Fortnite’s competitive team; they would rectify any missing points after the conclusion of Winter Royale
We are continuing to correct all scores for the Winter Royale 2019 competition.
— Fortnite Competitive (@FNCompetitive) December 21, 2019
We will confirm when this process is complete and the leaderboards are finalized.
We’re sorry for the delay.
And as Winter Royale wrapped up, a final confirmation from the competitive team ensured that any missing points were rightfully applied and the leaderboards were fully updated
The Winter Royale 2019 Leaderboards have been finalized and all scores have been corrected for each server region.
— Fortnite Competitive (@FNCompetitive) December 23, 2019
Please note that placements may have shifted, and any matches played outside of the 15 game limit will not count.
Congratulations to all winners!
The bug is obviously infuriating to many pros, but further implications is even more devastating to competitive integrity. Winter Royale, similar to any other Fortnite tournament, utilizes skill based matchmaking as the event progresses. More points earned means harder lobbies. That’s why when players had games not count, they were receiving an unfair advantage by being able to gain massive amounts of points in relatively easy lobbies
Players who accidentally received the advantage are in no way at fault. The ones that are most definitely at fault are players who found out how to recreate the no point bug and exploited it to the fullest extent
Y’all going to ignore the exploit/Bug that people abused the fuck out of
— Fortnite News (@FNBRHQ) December 23, 2019
HELLOOOO?
What this means is that there are a bunch of people out there who continually played in low point lobbies to artificially raise their score. Their points would show up as zero, but once Epic updated it after the fact - they would be well into the money
For obvious reasons, we will not divulge how this exploit was done. Cheating is cowardly, and doing it effectively steals from anyone who played by the rules. I hope Epic can resolve this issue in a timely manner and permanently ban any user who manipulated the system
If Epic continues to fix points after tournaments concluded, tournaments will still be vulnerable to exploiters. Instead, they need to make sure that no bugs are present during the tournament such that players are matched in the right lobbies. Hopefully swift communication on this issue will dissuade any further instances of cheating as we head into another year of action packed competitive Fortnite
