Word on the net is hackers (or in any other beth game, modders) have been just utterly taking the piss out of the game. They figured out how to spawn-in things from FO4 like Preston Garvey, and... the PRYDWEN! The whole goddamned blimp lol.
https://kotaku.com/hackers-find-way-to-add-npcs-to-fallout-76-1840466712
There are also rumors that they can even spawn weapons and armor that shouldn't even exist. Like legendaries with 9 friggin legendary status effects, as opposed to the maximum, very hard to get 3. Guess they don't have an item query system that checks to see if they're legit built in? What kind of MMO wouldn't just zap an item with such blatantly fudged stats? People on the fo76 reddit, where there are still people who like that game, are reporting seeing them... players that insta-kill everything, giant player character models, and other just strange things.
Players have unique id's. That's how they've been banning reported dupers. Once they have that id, they can see where the player's been, their stats, their inventory... so you see a lvl1 just created yesterday loaded down with rare stuff, you know that's a mule. But what about the items themselves?
It really makes you think. Back when the duping thing was going on, they were banning people who never duped. Or they would ban people they suspected... or people that saw it and said something. That makes me think they don't have a way to know other than if somebody tells them...
...ooo NOOOO. They DON'T have a way to tell! If all of the items had unique id's, recovering the items legit players lost to bugs would've been as easy as autobanning dupers should've been! Am I wrong?
Remember that nasty Fallout 1st bug where people's containers would just devour all of their stuff? Well, their answer to all of the pissed off customers was to give them a special container with buttloads of every crafting material. I guess somebody figured out how to spawn it. The article from Kotaku mentions that some scripts were dropped that would make that possible.
Or, you could use it to make an army of underwear-clad npc companions to fight your battles. Maybe an army of Preston Garveys? That actually sounds fun.
I guess they've been wreaking all kinds of havoc, spawning in monsters, gear, whatever. Bethesda hasn't said anything yet. People are speculating that it won't be addressed till next year with the holiday's being basically here already... which would really tank the whole experience, because now you've got all of these crazy weapons floating around with nothing in place to even tell what's legit or not (if they had a surefire way, you'd think it'd be automatic already - something like that doesn't work if someone still has to go through it all.) I wonder if they can make something so powerful that you can kill other players without initiating the PvP handshake. You CAN do damage without them firing back... just too little to be worth the trouble. If they could figure that out, then damn, man... ...if I were them I might try to make some kind of silver bullet weapon that drops any player.
I will say they have formally announced a patch for tomorrow, where they'll be bringing it all down for a bit. Whether that's to address this or not is anybody's guess. I'm betting it will take more time, though. You'll know, because there will probably have to be a client update...
Given that it's their first MMO, not surprised. I want to believe it's all schadenfreude, but out there on the net, pretty easy to find (like shockingly so... usually this would be more underground or it would be over in a day,) is the thread where the exploits first came out... and people are still contributing and finding more exploits so it may actually be more than rumors. And if it's as bad as people are saying, it's looking like they are missing fundamental contingencies... like they just thought people wouldn't find a hole in their code or something. If that's true, all they can do is roll back. But how far? And then what? How many more times are people gonna put up with losing thier stuff?
Normally I think I would be more skeptical, but there's always been something in me that kinda thinks that taking an engine that's basically been set-up to be wide-open for people to mess with and trying to make it into an MMO where people just can't do that might've been a terrible idea.
My bet is they're doing it all client-side. I don't trust bethesda to make a tight server system. For the most part the server dictates. But might there be some circumstances where the server takes the client at its word? Places where they might not anticipate someone tampering with that information? Does anybody expect that attention to detail from their keyboard monkeys?
All of these fixes are pretty huge and touch on the entire game's functionality, if they ever fix this it will still be a bandaid and it will still be shit.
