Fortnite Players Shocked By 7,000-Year Ban

There aren't many ways for video game developers to truly keep toxic players in line. A cooperative game like "Helldivers 2" can devise its own unique strategies to deal with toxicity, but for competitive games like "Fornite," sometimes the only real solution is a ban. In most cases, a player might get suspended from the game — or even just the game's social functions — for a few days after saying something particularly nasty in chat. Getting suspended isn't really something people brag about, but one player shared their ban on Reddit because it's anything but typical.

Redditor u/2-345 has nearly 3 million days left on their ban. The player got banned for a total of roughly 7,980 years, which means the entire history of human civilization could repeat itself and 2-345 would still need to wait a bit longer for the ban to expire. Epic really wasn't playing around with this one. The good news for 2-345 is that it's only a social ban. They can't talk in chat or add new friends, but at least they can still continue playing the game for the next several millennia. Naturally, commenters are coming together to try and piece together what 2-345 could have done to deserve the ban, but in this case, the OP is playing coy.

When they aren't actually playing the game, fans are usually piecing together the baffling "Fortnite" timeline or watching their favorite streamers play through a few matches. 2-345's post, however, caused some fans to put aside their usual pastime and start putting their heads together to figure out what could have earned a multi-thousand year ban.

"You channel your inner early 'CoD,' 'BG,' or 'Halo' lobby voice?" asked one commenter upon seeing 2-345's ludicrously long ban. It's certainly fair to say that the way people used to casually talk in lobbies would earn instant bans these days, but some commenters had other thoughts on what could have caused the punishment. "Did you declare war to a country?" guessed another Redditor. Others assumed that OP must have been acting like a true agent of chaos, with one writing, "Bro posted the nuclear launch codes in chat."

Some have joked that nothing short of global-scale terrorism or truly heinous hate speech could lead to a ban like that, and 2-345 has hinted thatit's best to keep what they did a secret. They responded to all the speculation by writing, "If I revealed what I said, I might lose my Reddit account too." At the very least, 2-345 isn't alone. Some big-name players have been banned from "Fortnite" over the years, and they've all managed to find something else to do. If 2-345 gets sick of playing "Fortnite" without being able to talk to anyone, they could always take a cue from those other banned players and try their hand at another game.

Believe it or not, 2-345 is not the first person dealt a near-eternal social ban from "Fortnite." Not that long ago, another player was hit by a mega-sized social ban that's actually longer than 2-345's jaw-dropping ban.

Redditor RinnyPk's ban had an extra 219 days tacked onto it. After waiting several thousands of years to finally use the chat function, what's another few months? Commenters on RinnyPk's post were just as baffled as you'd expect, but Rinny was a little more forthcoming about what they did to get banned, simply saying, "I raged."

These absurd bans really make us wonder if "Fortnite" players are becoming increasingly toxic, or if Epic has some kind of glitch kicking players out for inhumanly long amounts of time. Maybe the silver lining in all this is that the banned players can focus on meditation or whatever they need to quell their inner rage.