Bethesda’s Fallout 76’s disastrous history is the stuff of legend now, but it seems that despite its plans to improve on the game, Bethesda is still struggling to impress.
Just this week the company hit the headlines one again – this time for banning a well-known player under dubious circumstances.
A small number of players of the game have apparently been testing in-game exploits with the aim of reporting them to the game devs in the hopes of seeing them patched. Arguably, this is nothing but good samaritan work that helps Bethesda out, but it looks like the company doesn’t see it that way.
The banned user also runs a popular Fallout 76 fan website, Map76, which was working on an interactive map project until the ban was issued. Now the website has been closed down, though you can read a thorough breakdown of what happened there still.
On Map76, the user explains what led to the ban, writing: “I suspected that somehow people were custom rolling legendary weapons…I have run the numbers on drops many times, and it was just not mathematically possible for those to be entering the market that early…so I suspected people had figured out an exploit.
“I experimented a bit. I tested altering drop tables, they are all calculated server side, as they should be. Eventually I figured they might have found a way to trick the purveyor. So I tried a lot of things, and finally figured out a way to trick the purveyor to take caps instead of scrip. I was sure that is what they were doing, but at this point, I had messed with the memory so much that I wasn’t sure what all was causing it to work.”
The user goes on to describe some tests they tried to figure out what was happening behind the scenes. When they learned just how the exploit was being implemented is when they received the ban.
“Someone from my group stated that they already reported it to one of the community managers in our group, so I just left it. My account got a ban the next day,” writes the user.
“I dropped the items I got from the purveyor rolls. It is possible a few were still in the inventory when I logged out from the last test, but I am almost certain I dropped them as well. OFC, I cannot log in to check. Unfortunately, the different divisions at Bethesda seem to have little cross communication and the CMs that are in our group have tried to help us, and have had some success, but most of us are still banned.”
In a statement Bethesda responded to the backlash over the ban, writing: “There have been cases where players have used third-party software to take advantage of an exploit usually in excess of hundreds of times. In cases where this has happened, this is a violation of our Terms of Service and in those cases the accounts are actioned. If you find an exploit, you should absolutely report it to us but do not continue use of it.”
At the time of writing, people are still outraged over the Fallout 76 ban and have been condemning Bethesda’s decision. From the looks of things, there’s no plans for the banned accounts to be reinstated.
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Featured Image Credit: Bethesda