Esports infrastructure company eFuse has announced a partnership with data analytics firm MeasureOne to introduce automated student verification to its leagues.
eFuse said the collaboration aims to make student verification both more efficient and more accurate, saving hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars per season in manual verification costs.
While the scale of the problem of ineligible students competing is largely unknown, an eFuse representative told Esports Insider that bad actors often only got caught when they win, and that they had anecdotally seen an ineligible student application rate of 10%.
Fraudulent players can pose a substantial risk to leagues, robbing genuine students of fair competition, and making the sponsorship environment risky through potential involvement with scandals. The prohibitive cost of pre-vetting students is a large consideration for platforms like eFuse.
MeasureOne has experience in analysing consumer permission data and its clients include a litany of colleges across the US. Its automated verification system is an opportunity to decrease administrative fatigue and up security in what used to be a more informal college environment.
eFuse said its MeasureOne integration is now live and is actively offering universities, brands, students and publishers the security of automated, deep-link student verification.
University leagues in Europe run by Amazon and Spanish organisation GG Tech often use logins to university emails in order to verify competitors, but that method does not prevent genuine students collaborating with non-students to get a better player on their team. Online leagues are almost impossible to perfectly police for fraudulent players.
eFuse is an infrastructure company that operates College COD (CCL), the College Carball Association (CCA), and the collegiate Fortnite league on behalf of publisher Epic Games.
The startup expects to process more than 5,000 individual student applications in 2023’s fall semester. eFuse struck a partnership with American esports organisation Version1 at the start of 2022.
