Cheaters apparently aren’t scared after Damion “XXiF” C received a 14-day ban from Fortnite: Battle Royale competitive modes last week. He was banned for teaming during the week three World Cup Solo qualifiers, but this doesn’t seem to be enough to convince other players to avoid doing the same thing. New accusations of teaming have arisen in the most recent Solo qualifiers, this time against players Yermpy and Oro. A Twitch streamer, Philldown, who was the duo’s victim, caught two clips of them playing a match in which they avoid shooting each other and focus on him when he lands near them. Philldown says that the first clip shows Oro purposely missing shots on Yermpy, while the second video shows Yermpy and Oro landing close to each other and ignoring themselves to focus on Philldown. From the streamer’s perspective, it feels like he’s playing duos alone. But Yermpy and Oro failed twice. Not only were they caught with suspicious behavior, but they also couldn’t qualify for the World Cup Finals. Other players on the competitive Fortnite subreddit agreed that these two were intentionally playing bad against each other to instead focus on other players who could take them down, which falls under collusion, according to the tournament’s rules. Yermpy and Oro’s case is different than what happened to XXiF, though. In week three, he was reported and then banned for having his friends feed eliminations to him across more than one match, which gave him enough points to qualify for the Fortnite World Cup Finals in New York. Since it granted XXiF an unfair competitive advantage, he lost his World Cup spot and prize money. Epic has yet to comment on Yermpy and Oro's situation. It’s likely that the company won’t address their case in detail as it did with XXiF since none of them made it to the Finals. What players should expect is a new competitive update coming early this week in which Epic will detail its efforts against cheaters in week five. When Epic banned XXiF, it included 698 other players in the punishment list for various forms of cheating. If the cheating allegations are true, it’s likely that Yermpy and Oro will be added to this growing number.<doc-sep>Epic Games has disabled all vehicles for the rest of this week’s Fortnite World Cup qualifier finals. "Due to an issue where players can become stuck in a vehicle and unable to exit, we will be disabling all vehicles for the remainder of this week’s tournament—all regions will play the Sunday Finals with vehicles disabled," Epic tweeted. Due to an issue where players can become stuck in a vehicle and unable to exit, we will be disabling all vehicles for the remainder of this week’s tournament - all regions will play the Sunday Finals with vehicles disabled. — Fortnite (@FortniteGame) May 12, 2019 The problem, though, is that competitive Fortnite players around the world are already counting down the minutes until they get a shot at qualifying for the Fortnite World Cup. And many of those players utilize vehicles as a core component of their strategy and how they approach the game. With vehicles removed for the rest of this week's competition, these players are immediately at a disadvantage and will be forced to scramble to find a new way to beat their opponents, now with the added stress of millions of dollars on the line. The bug, where players can get stuck in vehicles and be unable to leave, turns players into cannon fodder for the first person to arrive and pick them off. Instead of taking an immediate effort to preserve the qualifier's competitive integrity by fixing the problem, Epic has cut out the issue entirely at the risk of jeopardizing the nature of the tournament. This also follows Epic scrambling to fix the points given to players in the online leaderboards leading up to tomorrow’s finals. While the developer claims to have fixed this issue and said that it won’t affect qualification, the conjunction of these problems doesn't bode well for the future of Fortnite esports. Many fans will be curious to see how disabling vehicles affects tomorrow’s results.<doc-sep>
Despite being one of the most popular Fortnite: Battle Royale players in the world, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has struggled to qualify for the game’s biggest esports tournament. Ninja failed to make it to the finals of the week five Solo qualifier for the Fortnite World Cup earlier today. Honestly.... I just played some of the worst Fortnite of my life. Felt completely out of my element and w/o the pump I froze in about 5 fights late game when my combat shotgun would not shoot out of shadow mode. Did not qualify for Sunday 🙁 — Ninja (@Ninja) May 11, 2019 Over the past few weeks, the Fortnite World Cup qualifiers have been taking place on Saturdays and Sundays. The semifinals are held on Saturday, and the top 3,000 players in each region at the end of a three-hour period earn a spot in the qualifier finals on Sunday. This week, Ninja didn't play well enough to place in the top 3,000 on Saturday in the North American East regional qualifier. "I just played some of the worst Fortnite of my life," Ninja tweeted after playing his qualifier matches. He said he "felt completely out of [his] element" without the Pump Shotgun, which was retired to the vault earlier this week with the launch of season nine. Despite saying that he played poorly today, Ninja did experience a strange bug in one of his first games. While trying to land near Lazy Lagoon, he fell to his death after gliding over a tree. But it seemed like he didn't actually touch the tree, which means he should have been able to continue gliding to his landing spot instead of dying. Although Ninja didn't qualify for the finals tomorrow, he still has more opportunities to earn a spot in the Fortnite World Cup over the next few weeks.