Fallout 76 Player Banned For Too Much Ammo

There hasn't been a lot of good news surrounding Fallout 76, the Fallout title Bethesda released late last year. It launched with an assortment of issues, but even putting those aside, some just felt that Bethesda's latest take on Fallout was boring. Still, some have labored on and made their own fun in the game, and have even gone so far as to put together guides to help other players.

That's what Reddit user Glorf12 did. Knowing the Fallout 76 map inside and out gave Glorf12 the knowledge needed to put together a loot guide, identifying the top loot farming locations. But almost as quickly as he could share the guide with others, Glorf12 suddenly found his Fallout 76 account banned from the game.

The reason? Glorf12 had supposedly taken advantage of an ammo exploit. And there was a pretty good chance that, unless Bethesda patched the issue, Glorf12 might not be able to get his account unbanned.

The player in question has some suspicions about why he might have been banned from Fallout 76. As it turns out, Glorf12 had played a lot of Fallout 76, and thus had picked up an unbelievable amount of ammunition over the course of several months. His time with the game got to be so substantial that, eventually, he started a second character. And as most would probably try to do in that situation, he traded his abundance of ammo from his higher-level character to his newest character. And that's when Glorf12 believes his troubles began.

"My belief is that people see a level 450+ player trading with a level 2 character and immediately think REPORT HIM REPORT HIM REPORT HIM," the player told others on Reddit. "I even get some players who harass me when I'm attempting to trade items."

So it appears that some other players might have thought Glorf12 was up to no good. Still, it seems a little crazy that a few reports would automatically cause a player to get banned from a game. And it seems even more crazy that such a move would take place without any interaction from a Bethesda employee. Banning an account is a pretty dramatic step, after all — especially when it's being done to someone who purchased a game and put 900 hours into it.

Fortunately, Bethesda isn't totally phoning it in when it comes to customer service. According to that very same Reddit thread that Glorf12 posted his issue on, a Bethesda employee has reached out to him directly in order to get his support ticket number and, hopefully, fast-track the restoration of his account. Then again, that interaction took place two days ago. And we've yet to come across any kind of evidence that Glorf12's account ban has been lifted.

It's hard not to see a situation like this as yet another black eye for a game that's already gotten pretty beat up. Fallout 76 is widely considered to be one of 2018's most disappointing titles, thanks in large part to the bugs, the many unbalanced economies, the lack of a compelling story, and the way Bethesda can't seem to fix one thing without seeming to break something else. Things have gotten so bad for Fallout 76, in fact, that Bethesda had to fight off rumors that the game was going free to play mere months after it launched.

When you consider the fact that Fallout 76 has already been discounted substantially (you can get it for somewhere between $30 and $40), and that many players have simply given up on it and moved on to other titles, there's not a whole lot for the Fallout community to be excited about.

Still, there's always an opportunity for redemption. We've looked at many live service games in the past and noted their poor launches, only to see those games come back a year or two later and absolutely kill it. Rainbow Six: Siege comes to mind, as does No Man's Sky. There's certainly a path forward for Bethesda to salvage the good parts of Fallout 76 and build a better experience for players going forward. But before all that, Bethesda has to get better at running a live service title.

That includes not banning the few players who are actually sticking around to play.