Yesterday after 2 moths of silence, I got a response from Epic player support that they investigated and decided that sanction was inaccurately applied and my case will help improve the moderation process and training for moderators.
It does need improving and not only the moderation part, I suspect a couple of times publishing failed due to the software issues and then just picked a random reason for rejection. It happened even before IARC.
I now try to avoid publishing any time near scheduled updates and wait for the review to finish before uploading a new private version.
Any useful investigation details were not shared with me, so I still do not know if there was anything in my map that triggered them to issue such a grave rejection reason. For some time, I was thinking it is my current approach to disable certain missions.
I have a list of security and science missions, where I define which mission can happen on the spaceship. So if Epic releases a new Fortnite update, where it is not possible to know if a prop is destroyed or not, I can simply exclude all missions that rely on this functionality and quickly publish.
It gives me time to come up with a workaround or I can leave them disabled until the official fix.
What happens if I completely disable all combat missions? Then if I answer all IARC questions truthfully, there will be no violence. But there are weapon item granters present in the project and though they are never granting anything because the mission can’t even happen, their presence potentially could trigger rejection if the detection system is not sophisticated enough.
And though Epic fixed all the issues they introduced quite quickly, I could not reenable all missions, my project became locked and we could not work on it, and players could not play the new [plastic] mission for two+ months.
And did I mention it was my most popular map?
Can you imagine your most popular map cut for no reason and not available for months?