Warning- it looks like the 'ban hammer' has started

[zanity]

I know this forum is a back-water, which is kinda strange given the (rightful) importance of The Nexus, but anyway...

 

Reddit is filling up with reports of Fallout 76 players being BANNED whose only 'crime' seems to be using some (unofficial and NEVER officially permited) mod from here or some similar mod site.

 

I did try to warn people here that Todd Howard has clearly stated in public that Nexus style mods will NEVER be allowed for FO76, and also that Howard's first lame attempt at 'anti-cheating' would be a simple inspection of your game files. In other words the game scans your game files, and if it sees ANY unauthorised files or changes to files, it bans you.

 

Now I expect a backlash, and Howard to allow for 'banned' players to be unbanned ***IF*** they give a promise to stop using 'mods'. EA, Activision and Nintendo have all won legal battles in courts across the planet to set the legal precedent that any unauthorised modification of an ONLINE game is strictly illegal. You 'modders' don't have a leg to stand on. And you cannot ref Beth's previous attitude to the modding of their OFFLINE games.

 

It gets worse. Howard's use of 'troll factories'- which in industry speak are called 'PAID reputation management companies'- have purposely seeded all forums where the game is discussed with a very toxic series of concepts that 'loyal' players are expected to follow. This can be boiled down to an 'us' and 'them' psychology - where the great 'enemy' is anyone doing anything Todd doesn't like. And this most certainly includes 'modding' which the new player base of FO76 largely has zero experience with.

 

Already I see horrible things being said against players who dare to try to push PvP or 'raider' roll-playing. And yes, I know Todd has promised PvP servers next year, BUT the loyal fanbase of this game has been trained, like a pavlovian dog, to despise PvP. It is a supreme irony that Todd Howard defended the concept of 'drama' in the months before FO76 released, but Beth's own PAID influencers have been attacking any player who dares to try to create 'drama' after the game was launched.

 

To the average loyal FO76 player (obviously not you people here), only 'bad', 'evil', 'disruptive' 'hackers' use unauthorised mods. So you innocent modders face a pitchfork and torches mob made up of your fellow players. And while like I said, Todd will probably reverse the bans this one time, he wants you to learn the lesson once and for all that if you want a 'new' experience in FO76, you go to the Atom Store and pay their outrageous prices for it.

 

And before you ask, there is no way to 'hide' your mods in an online game. The least competent coder in the world can scan files in a directory and checksum test them. Sadly there are many methods for REAL cheaters to disguise the cheats they are using, for real cheats hack the GPU driver code and/or inject code onto the computer once the game is active.

 

Mods are 'low hanging fruit' that are always detected by lazy incompetent 'anti-cheat' methods deployed by companies to lazy or cheap to pay for proper anti-cheat tech. FO76 does not have any proper industry standard anti-cheat methods implemented.

 

To conclude- let me say this again loudly- if you mod and Beth bans you:

1) you have no legal recourse

2) the main playerbase of FO76 will cheer your ban and call you a 'rotten cheater'

3) the authors of the major modding tools for Fallout 4 etc will have no sympathy for you- they are too busy sucking up to Beth still in the foolish belief that Beth will release moddable games in the future (which it will never do).

4) stating "my mod isn't an attempt to cheat" cuts no ice with a company that thinks the obscene prices of the Atom store are acceptable.

5) you will need to beg Howard to unban you- which I think he will do this time, but only to make it clear that third party modding of FO76 must never again be tried. (just checked- the 'begging' needs to take the form of an 'essay' explaining why you realise you were a disrespectful person for cheating- I kid you not, this is taken from official Beth feedback sent to banned players)

 

Fallout 4 (or Skyrim SE) marked the end of an era at Bethesda. Enjoy Fallout 76 for what it is, for modders will never be allowed to 'fix' this game.

 

Whatever game YOU love, please be safe while playing. Faceless entities like Zenimax love only your money- and only if that money is persistantly sent their way. The big publishers have literally ZERO respect for you. And these big publishers are owned by people and run by top managers who make the most obscene amounts of money while paying the real talent as little as possible. Big publishers follow this motto: our game, our rules. If a game flops, they'll dump it and move onto new projects rather than listen to a customer base and try to fix it. The only 'fixing' a game like FO76 sees is a cynical calculation based on the continuing income from the Atom store- so that really isn't 'fixing' but a standard cynical 'gaming as a service' tactic. But if that 'Atom Store' income falls too low, FO76 will be dropped like a hot potato.

 

Yet spending in the Atom Store only marks the player as a 'prize fool', and who gives respect to 'fools'. This is why AAA full priced games with microtransactions are a cancerous blight on the industry- the only 'good' thing a player does in the eyes of the publisher (waste money on microtransactions) makes the publisher disrespect the player base even more, which leads to even worse behaviour by the publisher in the future. The very worst form of vicious circle.

[ozmods]

wow it looks like a dodged a ICBM on this one, i was going to buy it, but then when i saw it was a "the crew" style of game, where you had to be online all the time, i backed away at record speed, and now they're banning players for using mods.. wow i'm so glad i did not buy this..

[Dark0ne]

The stuff I'm reading on Reddit suggests it's people who have Cheat Engine installed on their PC getting banned.

[HadToRegister]

That's because people are using mods on the main servers when they're not supposed to be.
Also, Bethesda announced from the get-go that Mods would be supported in November of 2019.

So, I really don't feel bad for people who are getting banned by breaking the rules and using unsupported mods on the main game servers, as they willfully are using them against the rules.

Modding will be supported in 2019 for PRIVATE SERVERS

 

I think the best thing to do, since modding will not be officially supported until November 2019, is for the Nexus to "hide" the Fallout 76 part of the site until Mods are officially supported, they're also not officially supported for Fallout VR or Skyrim VR as well.

[HadToRegister]

 

 

Already I see horrible things being said against players who dare to try to push PvP or 'raider' roll-playing.

 

 

And those players were also playing Homophobic "Raiders" who relentlessly harassed a player and ganged up on him and beat him to death (which takes a long time because he didn't accept PVP) in the game.

That's not "Role-Playing" by any stretch, no matter what excuses are made for them, or what Apologetics are used in an attempt to obfuscate the fact that they weren't Role-Playing and were just harassing another player senselessly and maliciously.

[SephDragoon]

Honestly, I have only seen a few reports, and so far as I can tell, the only one who didn't have anti-cheat on their system said they tried to install it (so it likely IS on their system, just running in the background ineffectively). Besides that, the mod he was using is a straight up cheating mod, not just a graphical reskin or something like perk loadouts. It was straight up cheating one of the minigames. So do I honestly think his cheating stopped at the lockpick mod? Once you have that mentality, I don't think you differentiate any longer between mod and cheat.

 

I have not logged in since this news broke though. I am waiting to see where it goes, and if there's more bans, and what for. I use mods, and you know what, don't like it, suck my nuts. It's a Fallout game, that's what you do in a Fallout game. None of my mods give me any advantage, unless you consider some quality of life stuff like perk loadouts to be a cheat. If you do, oh well. I'm not out there trying to PvP anyways.

[vashts1985]

The stuff I'm reading on Reddit suggests it's people who have Cheat Engine installed on their PC getting banned.

yes, and youtubers have confirmed this. the people being banned were using cheat engine, they are trying to imply that it was just the mods, but the evidence says cheat engine was used.

[Deleted54170User]

I can make a mod. :tongue: Can you, zanity?

[TheFriendlyBandit]

Oh what a shock. zanity misrepresenting and deliberately obfuscating information to push his argument. *AGAIN*.

Let me tell you something, zanity. I've been 'modding' online games for YEARS, without any problem. Zippo, nadda. Specifically, World of Warcraft. I have never been banned, never received a warning from admins or a sternly worded email. Nothing. Because all of my 'mods' are nothing but client-side mesh edits with literally zero impact on gameplay, both mine and others. Does Blizzard know that I use mods? I honestly don't know, but the odds are fairly f**king likely. And they don't CARE. And this is Blizzard, who is owned by Activision, one of the great archdevils of the industry. And they have most certainly banned people for modifying game files, but all of those people were not 'modding', they were cheating. Plain and simple. They were modifying game files to gain a distinct and unfair advantage, not giving their blood elf bigger tits and bimbo lips, or turning their orc red.

I know that Bethesda is a different company, with a different corporate culture, but I like to think that the odds of them throwing decades of proven online game management out the window is pretty damn low. Does that mean that a lot of mods common in previous titles will not be possible on live servers? Probably, but to say that if you so much as *touch* a file in the data folder, Bethesda will instantly know, nuke your account, burn your computer, and salt the remains so that nothing ever grows again like the Romans did to Carthage is so absurd and alarmist as to border outright stupidity.