Fortnite “Illegal Restart” Explained

Fortnite players have recently run afoul of a new rule for the latest season, which limits the number of events players may enter.

A wave of warnings for ‘Illegal Restarts’ was issued to players based on their competitive activity in recent events and not in your games played today. Some may have received this in error. If you have not entered the same event multiple times please disregard the warning.

— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) February 3, 2021

If Fortnite detects that a player is attempting to enter a competitive event in more than one region, or is caught entering on multiple accounts, they will be given an automated warning for attempting an “illegal restart.”

Given that many players were unaware of this rule change, Epic has chosen to be lenient about it, and clarified what the rule is and how it affects Fortnite players, on Twitter.

Fortnite rules update

What does that mean if you can only do tournaments once pic.twitter.com/c2INUmgVi1

— DaBear (@DaBearBA) February 3, 2021

These rules are new to the current season of Fortnite. The rule in question is worded as:

“3.7.4 Players may only have one (1) entry (using one (1) Epic account) into the Event for a given session. Players are expressly prohibited from having additional Event entries using additional or secondary Epic account(s), and/or participating from more than one (1) server region.”

The purpose of this rule update is to keep players limited to only one region. Though not too common, some servers suffered from having a high number of multi-server competitors flood their regions and effectively drive out local competition.

This is especially problematic on servers with competitive schedules that are drastically different from the more populated servers, as players would then be able to compete in both without too much discomfort.

This rule won’t affect the vast majority of players, but it will help maintain server health for smaller servers like Oceania and Middle East. One thing to note is that this rule doesn’t limit players to just their home region. Technically, a player who plays on the US-East server can still play on any other server, but they will only be able to compete on one.

Where to compete?

While some Fortnite players might still consider playing on other servers, most won’t find it worth the trouble. When competing on a far away server, players will experience more severe latency, and struggle to compete with locals who play with much lower pings.

Given the small chance of making it to the finals under these conditions, most Fortnite players will find their chances of success, and fun, greater, if they play on the server closest to their physical locations.

While everyone hopes to make it to the finals and win, the truth is that only a very select few will even qualify, and only a handful of those qualified will earn enough in prize money to consider it worthwhile.

For most normal Fortnite players, competing in these kinds of tournaments is just for fun, and these rules will keep them from having to play against highly skilled server hoppers hoping to improve their odds.