Being salty when not doing well at video games is a fairly common sentiment amongst those in the competitive gaming community. However, especially when directed at those who run that game, there are lines that shouldn't crossed, something one pro Fortnite team has come to learn the hard way.
Epic Games' popular free-to-play battle royale is currently wrapping up its fifth season of Chapter 2. The crossover-heavy season brought a wide variety of characters to the island, including God of War's Kratos, Halo's Master Chief, and more. Set to begin tomorrow, Fortnite has been steadily releasing bits and pieces of information, with a unique solo experience kicking things off for Season 6.
Epic Games has reportedly kicked out a Fortnite team from competing in the ongoing Fortnite Championship Series, or FNCS. The teamwide boot stems from a particularly nasty tweet from one of the teams players, Wrigley. While the tweet has since been deleted, along with the deactivation of the entire account, Eurogamer managed to view it beforehand. The profanity-laden tweet reportedly told Donald Mustard to go kill himself. For those who don't know, Donald Mustard is Fortnite's director and Chief Creative Officer at Epic Games. Basically the last person any scorned Fortnite competitor should attempt to call out.
The Fortnite tournament organizers responded quickly. Teammate Dictate posted a tweet which appears to be a screenshotted email from Epic, spelling out the team's consequences. The email says that the team would be disqualified and removed from the FNCS effective immediately due to a violation of tournament rules. More specifically, Epic cited Section 8.1.2, which states, "Players must be respectful of other players, Event Administrators, spectators, and sponsors," leading to a somewhat similar situation of when another Fortnite pro was banned from a tournament over inappropriate comments.
Wrigley's ban is indicative of competitive titles cracking down on its participating players' bad behavior. Additionally, Valorant pro Sinatraa is facing sexual assault abuse claims, with his own team and sponsors actively distancing themselves from the player. However, his Valorant team, Sentinels, was allowed to sub him out for another player in the respective tournament, a point Dictate brought up in a later tweet. Dictate is now calling on Twitter to get ahold of competitive Fortnite's account in order to work out a similar solution, but it's currently unclear whether the FNCS will make an exception.
While it us unfortunate an entire team suffered because of a single person, it appears Epic Games is setting a zero-tolerance precedent for this kind of talk going forward. Hate speech of any kind should be banned on social media, although gamers have also been getting banned on Twitter for typing "memphis," showing that social media moderation still has some ways to go.
Fortnite is currently available for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source:Â Eurogamer
