Ninja, perhaps the most prominent Fortnite streamer of all time is going under fire for allegedly getting a player banned after getting killed. In the Twitch community, Ninja is certainly revered as one of the superiors in the community. On November 10th, whilst streaming, he encountered a player in the top 15 named “IcyFive” that killed him. He was extremely infuriated and instead of leaving the game and accept the occasional loss, he felt the need to go out of his way to report the player for “stream sniping”. The term “stream sniping” means that a player would join a game or a lobby at the same time as a streamer with the intention of killing the streamer. Ninja was so convinced that IcyFive was stream sniping because just as Ninja’s friend, Dr. Lupo, says, “Here comes the emote!”, IcyFiive starts emoting. And of course, he wasn’t stream sniping.
To make matters worse, people in his live stream started to fire back at him claiming that it was an unnecessary action which sparked a hostile reaction from Ninja. Ninja exploded saying if the viewers were oblivious to the fact that the player was stream sniping, they can leave. People were enraged at Ninja’s behavior so when they found out that Epic Games actually banned IcyFive, they were mad. The community started to accuse Epic Games of banning whoever Ninja reports without further viewing the incident simply because it is Ninja, the literal face of Fortnite. IcyFive uploaded a video explaining his side of the story: how he was just playing Fortnite until killing Ninja which gained him six views in the game, making him want to emote. Ninja claimed that the reason he was convinced IcyFive was stream sniping was that after Dr. Lupo said to emote, IcyFive started dancing. This was especially unpleased with the community because emoting and dancing is just part of the gameplay and now people are mockingly saying that we can’t emote anymore in the game.
Several days later, Epic Games addressed that there as a mistake and they definitely review every player before banning them. In this situation, however, there was another factor or story that must be accounted for (but we’ll get to that later). The next few days on Ninja streams, he talks about how the entire incident was just a “troll” and he had no intention of banning the player and everyone needed to calm down. Clearly, Ninja had taken enough damage; until users on Reddit started to claim that IcyFive got banned. The truth is that IcyFive didn’t get banned, but instead was someone who changed their name to IcyFive and framed Ninja by saying he got banned! The next event of him getting banned was actually fabricated… Ninja took a severe hit on his reputation and even after Dr. Lupo tweeted out that Ninja was being framed, it was too late because his “slander” had ruined Ninja’s already damaged reputation.
Ninja went on an interview on DramaAlert with Keemstar or “Keem” recapitulating the whole incident. It seems as though the situation has begun to settle down. Lately, Ninja hasn’t been one of the most Respected players anymore because of his borderline cringy persona and a lot of people in the community finds him to be different because of his newfound fortune and influence, known as clout.
PLAYR CENTRL 