No good deed goes unpunished for one Fallout 76 player who found a significant exploit regarding legendary weapons, reported it, and got summarily banned by Bethesda the following day.
According to the creator of Map76, a “datamined map of every object, resource, vein, and deposit in Fallout 76” according to its site description, legendary Fixer and Bear Arm weapons were entering the market with some very suspicious combinations of effects just weeks after the weapons were added — combinations that seemed mathematically impossible. Following his hunch, the dataminer discovered a way to trick the Purveyor legendary vendor into taking Caps (the common currency) instead of Scrip (a currency only attainable by breaking down legendary items), which meant that players could keep purchasing legendary weapons at will until they got the combination of legendary effects they wanted.
After reporting the exploit as well as testing, confirming, and reporting a secondary method of performing the same exploit to Bethesda community managers, the dataminer’s account was banned. The ban has been in place for about a month now, with explanations to customer support going unheeded. What’s more, the dataminer’s request to have his Fallout 1st subscription refunded was outright denied due to the fact that he spent Atoms in the cash shop, but that decision was since rescinded as “an exception” and a refund is being processed.
As one can expect, the Map76 dataminer is pretty incensed at the whole situation, and has shut down the website indefinitely. Whether it goes back online or not is entirely on Bethesda, according to him:
“The longer I go without getting any response from Bethesda’s customer support is the more my faith dwindles in their ability to respond to their playerbase. I do not think it is a problem with the dev team or the community managers, but specifically an issue with their customer support. At this time, they would need to do a complete 180 on customer support and the importance they place on the community. A lot of my reasons listed here are the symptoms of a problem. Taking cough syrup may help your cough, but it does not fix your illness.”
