Fortnite: Server issues and exploits invalidated multiple tournaments

The past few days have not been good for competitive Fortnite. Recently, the Fortnite Champion Series had to completely restart its Oceania and Middle Eastern regional tournaments, and the experimental Fortnite Box Fight tournament had its results completely invalidated due to a “scoring exploit.” These setbacks raise serious questions about Epic’s ability to run a successful tournament, leaving many players upset.

Fortnite Box fight tournament completely thrown out, Epic promises another one when ready

I 100% don’t deserve to be payed out at all, this is fully understandable, obvi it sucks but I feel bad for the people that got top 15 legitimately. I don’t think a tiebreaker should ever be by a “epic Id” it ruins the competitiveness of the tournament and makes it depend on luck https://t.co/kIZ0xVBMk8

— outcast joji (@jojiFN) October 29, 2020

The Wild Wednesday Fortnite Tournament attempted something new by creating a 1v1 tournament mode which would have players attempt to out build and out gun their opponents without the variability inherent to the Battle Royale format. While the Fortnite tournament structure used for this tournament had some obvious issues, for instance ties were reportedly to be decided by the participants Epic ID, Epic went ahead with it anyway.

Unfortunately, an exploitable bug was left in the game mode which compromised the integrity of the tournament. If a player left the match moments before their loss, the game would fail to count the match as a loss and they would be able to try again. Using this bug, multiple players were able to score perfect runs through the tournament illegitimately.

This was apparently discovered too late to fix, and with Epic’s competitive schedule already filled with the Fortnite Champion Series they decided to simply invalidate the scores and promise to run another one.

Epic did not say whether there would be any kind of compensation for participants, or what would happen to the event’s prize money.

Fortnite Champion Series OCE and ME tournaments restarted

We're restarting and moving ME FNCS Grand Finals for both PC and Console to tomorrow (October 31) at 8pm GST. Day 2 of Grand Finals will now be played on Sunday, too. The results from the Wildcard matches today are final.

— Fortnite Competitive (@FNCompetitive) October 30, 2020

Due to an error, we will be invalidating the Match 1 results from OCE Console Heat 2 on Day 1. To make up for this, players will play 7 matches in Heat 2 Day 2.

— Fortnite Competitive (@FNCompetitive) October 30, 2020

In addition to the mistakes that led to the Box Fight tournament being invalidated, two regions in the Fortnite Champion Series had to be restarted due to an unstated reason. As the premier tournament of the season, Epic is obviously much more invested in making sure these tournaments do complete legitimately.

Unfortunately, these setbacks are starting to pile up, and serious doubts are being raised about whether or not Epic can run its own competitive scene. At the very least, Epic did provide a response by rescheduling.