Fortnite professional ‘FaZe Jarvis’ has been banned for life by Epic Games for uploading videos of him cheating.

There has been a lot of conversation over the past week over Fortnite’s ban handed to FaZe Jarvis.

FaZe Jarvis is a 17-year-old professional Fortnite gamer for the esports organization ‘FaZe Clan’. He decided on making a youtube video, now deleted, showing the unfair advantages hackers and cheaters have when playing this game – and these players are often unpunished.

According to Fortnite’s developer Epic Games, none of what he did was OK. This week, the publisher hit Kaye with a lifetime ban, citing a “zero tolerance policy for the usage of cheat software.”

This ban has led to a lot of controversial discussions in the community as to whether or not public content creators should be held to a different standard than everyday players. He has since uploaded a video where he admits he wasn’t thinking of the potential consequences that might follow showing off a Fortnite aimbot has racked up 10 million views.

There has been support from professional players for Fortnite to reduce this ban, with Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, claiming the game’s celeb players shouldn’t be barred from playing because they deserve special treatment. Other members of FaZe Clan have spoken out in defense of Khattri, suggesting that Epic Games took less drastic action for players who have cheated with greater consequences – whereby another recent cheating incident that involved two competitive “Fortnite” players receiving a 14-day suspension after they were caught colluding with other players to place in a championship. After the suspension, the two players were able to advance and win monetary prizes.

Whereas the majority of the community Fortnite fans think the life ban is justified.

• One user wrote: “Not fair? Well don’t do dumb things to ruin other people’s game.”
• Another said: “Him being a public person makes what he did worse…and he should be held to a higher standard.”

This brings up a greater issue for esports athletes, there are no universal rules for games and cheating – rather full authority is given to the game developers to had out decisions at their will. This will come into greater scrutiny if Epic Games decide to reduce the severity of the game. Another example is in CSGO where members of iBuyPower were permanently banned from competition or involvement in Valve-associated events due to a match-fixing scandal, yet this ban was partially lifted a couple of years later.

Articles:

• https://www.tubefilter.com/2019/11/05/fortnite-faze-jarvis-banned-youtube-videos/
• https://www.polygon.com/2019/11/11/20959591/faze-jarvis-youtube-fortnite-lifetime-ban-controversy
• https://www.insider.com/faze-clan-wants-fair-compromise-epic-games-jarvis-fortnite-permaban-2019-11
• https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/10321527/fortnite-ninja-faze-jarvis-ban/