Bethesda Permanently Banned Fallout 76 Players For Homophobic Assault

FALLOUT76 Banned Anti-Gay Gamers

  According to what Eurogamer reported, the Bethesda has banned a group of Fallout 76 players for life after a harassment incident littered with homophobic slurs that went viral over social media. And we have to say that group of gamers took things too far.

  The whole incident started a group of Fallout 76 players targeted and harassed another group of players, saying over proximity chat: “we have come to eliminate all gays.”

  Fallout 76 takes proximity-based as a chat system, that which means, in default status, you can hear and speak to other players when you are near them. This is designed by Fallout 76,  a multiplayer-only game, and Bethesda hopes to spark interesting players interactions by using this system.

  A group with higher-level gamers proceeded to follow and kill the other group of players in about 10 minutes. The ringleader of that group, the username is NathanTheHicc, is heard saying “Eliminate the queers. We’ve got to decontaminate the AIDS.” and something like that.

  One of the victims, named AJ from Chicago, posted this video of the incident to Twitter on Nov. 15, 2018, to publicize this disturbing video footage, and now it has been viewed over 32,000 times.

  In the next-up interview with Eurogamer, AJ revealed more details about this whole incident, he said the harassment began slightly earlier, when NathanTheHicc got to the group and ask for a Disease Cure item.

  “The three of us were really having a nice time and talking to him and then one of us made comment on his character or his character’s outfit is very cute, then he replied, ‘I do not fuck with that homo shit’ and then he left”

  About 10 minutes later, NathanTheHicc returned and this time he brought some of his friends to harass AJ and his group. In the game of Fallout 76, player versus player (PvP) system uses an anti-griefing mechanic, which means if you do not fight back when you’re attacked, your attacker does negligible damage.

  “The game notified me that if I didn’t fight back, they would do limited damage so I didn’t fight back and hoped they would just get bored and leave,” said AJ “They stuck with it and even joked about how ‘this is the strongest queer I’ve ever seen’.”

  But finally, AJ’s character still get killed by NathanTheHicc and his friends. “After we respawned we changed the servers,” AJ said, “Just so it wouldn’t happen again.”

  According to what AJ said, he has exposed and highlighted this incident on Twitter, because there’s no in-game player report feature in Fallout 76. The developers of the Bethesda community sent AJ a link to Bethesda’s website-based player report feature, but then AJ found it did not work properly.

  “This tweet was retweeted to some community managers for the game and they were very kind and helpful,” said AJ. “We were offered a link to report the players but had issues with it. The site asked for a video file of the incident but the accepted file types weren’t video files. So we couldn’t send one. For me, the page would not even load. It seems very difficult to report players.”

  On the side of NathanTheHicc, he even uploaded footage of his initial encounter with AJ and his friends to his own YouTube channel. And then he even gave that video such an annoyed title: “Cleansing of the queers.”

  Eurogamer got connection with NathanTheHicc over Email, and he confirmed that Bethesda had been contacted with him and he has to be banned for three days and he was also been told: “this would be our only warning.”

  Here comes to NathanTheHicc, he is a senior student in high school from the United States. He said:  “My version of the incident is more or less the same as the public has taken it, the only differences being the fact that I don’t hate gay people. It was just a late night of having fun and after the first encounter (seen on my channel) we felt it would be fun to offend them somehow. You can call that evil but I think it’s just playful immaturity… I do not regret the incident. I will not apologize given the opportunity. I don’t plan on doing anything like this in the future but to be fair I didn’t plan the initial incident, I just found them and decided to go through with it.”

  Now, NathanTheHicc will not have the chance to repeat this incident. Cause now Bethesda has banned him and his friend friends from Fallout 76 eternally.

  A Bethesda spokesman told Eurogamer: ” “We gave an initial ban of three days while our CS team looked into the matter further to verify the individuals involved and what took place. After additional review, we have now permanently banned the players we’ve identified.”

  AJ told Eurogamer how he felt at the time of the attack and meanwhile he also claimed he worried how this might have impacted on younger gamers had it just happened to someone else.

  “In the moment, I was just totally in shock,” he said. “It was really disgusting. The three of us stream and put ourselves out there on the internet and are not strangers to homophobic comments but this was so extreme. We talked about what happened, made sure we were all Okay, and kept playing. The rest of the night I just felt drained. It was a weird feeling… I got really angry too. These guys were running around targeting people and what if they targeted a kid playing that was struggling with their identity? What if they said all those things to someone that was playing solo and didn’t have anyone to talk to? That can really mess someone up. Playing a game to escape reality and then that happens. That’s why we need to be able to report these people and why companies need to do something about reports.”

  However, Fallout 76 is not the first video game to come under fire for not having an in-built player report function. Back in August 2017,  Blizzard was criticized for not including a player report function in the console versions of multiplayer shooter Overwatch. And then it was added to the game.

  The Bethesda spokesman said “empowers players to permanently block other players‘’ and then pointing to the reporting tools on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Bethesda.net. “We all will not tolerate this kind of behavior by any players, nor this behavior towards any of our players. We’ll proceed to investigate claims of misconduct or abuse – along with Microsoft and Sony, and we’ll take action when needed”

  According to AJ said, “Reporting in-game is necessary, just simply blocking someone from a session is only temporarily protecting yourself, but not stopping anything from happening again or to other people. For 76 specifically, non-PvP servers would be great. Maybe things would have been different if they were not able to kill us. Despite all the bugs and glitches, the game is fun when you’re with friends and can casually explore and play.”

  Fallout 76 give us a large space to explore and relax, and allow us to have the maximized freedom, but we can not let this be the breeding ground of having racism, sexism. That’s not what Fallout 76 try to express. We hope in this game, we can get as many as Fallout bottle caps or Fallout 76 weapons. It’s a wasteland full of joy, not a wasteland full of hatred and discrimination.