Bethseda has confirmed that Fallout 76 ‘cheaters’ can appeal to reverse their ban by writing an essay about ‘why cheating is bad’. Lol.
The full essay title is: “the use of third-party cheat software is detrimental to an online game community”.
Emails were sent to players who have had their account banned over the last few weeks.
It was first flagged in this YouTube video by JuiceHead, which he recorded after contacting players that had been banned for using what Bethesda referred to as a “third-party application”.
JuiceHead explained that it looked as though most bans resulted from the use of either Cheat Engine (a memory editor) or Reshade (a post-processing tool).
In its email to the banned accounts, Bethesda said: “If you would like to appeal this account closure, we would be willing to accept an essay on ‘Why the use of third-party cheat software is detrimental to an online game community’ for our management team to review.”
In this Resetera thread, Bethesda’s community lead confirmed that it was genuine. Using the account Gstaff, they said that the “essay request happened”, and that the team would “talk about it more” after Christmas.
Gstaff explained that Bethesda flagged the use of third-party applications “because we do not want players exploiting the game in ways that provide a competitive advantage or negatively impact the servers & gameplay experience of other players”.
However, some players have said that they’ve been subject to a ban simply for using visual enhancement mods. The community lead confirmed that those people should contact the Bethesda support site, and that you don’t “need an essay for this” to be reversed.