A new patch for the ever-troubled Fallout 76 is poised to anger some gamers, while making some happy. This new patch focuses on a major exploit which allowed many players to duplicate a bunch of items in-game, completely disrupting the economy and making looting and gathering much less important.
As a result of this glut of high-end loot, players even started listing the items on Ebay and other sites hoping to make some cash off of the exploit. The player community also got somewhat toxic while trying to hunt down these cheaters.
Take this Reddit post in which TGriff97 introduced his girlfriend to the game, and built up a camp, only to have four high level players sweep through and trash everything.
“Upon messaging the guy to figure out why he leveled this base he said, ‘I’m not stupid, I know it was a stash’ and proceeded to treat me like I am one of those dupers who are ruining one of my favorite games,” he writes.
In response to all of these issues, Bethesda had to act, and act they did. The company identified hundreds of items which players most-often duplicated, and removed many of these items from player inventories. It amounts to a small minority of accounts having excess copies of high-end items removed from their accounts. During the investigation, it was determined less than 1% of all Fallout 76 accounts combined across all three platforms needed to have duped items removed.
“Players who had multiple copies of any of these duped items, whether they obtained them using an exploit or by acquiring them from another player, will find that all but one of each of those items have been removed from their characters,” reads the post. “Additionally, if a player had multiple copies of duped items removed as part of today’s actions, we also performed a follow-up search of their account for very large amounts of Nuka-Cola and removed those, as well.”
But that’s not all, Bethesda is also teasing the next major update to Fallout 76, Patch 6. And while the full patch notes are due next week, Bethesda has teased a few changes and new additions which are incoming.
A really big change is an increase in the sizes of stashes to 800 items, which is something players have wanted since the game launched. Player icons and other UI elements are getting tweaks too. Various fixes to bugged quests, gameplay mechanics and containers are also being addressed. Things like players no longer being able to accidentally transfer items from their inventories into these quest containers.