‘Fallout 76’ banning homophobic players exposes a bigger problem

When AJ from Chicago found himself face-to-face with homophobic Fallout 76 players who threatened to “eliminate all gays,” he seized the only option that was available: he captured video of the incident and posted it online.

To its credit, Fallout 76 developer and publisher Bethesda Softworks responded swiftly. The homophobes and the leader of their group, a man playing under the username NathanTheHicc, were investigated and subsequently banned from ever returning.

“We gave an initial ban of three days while our [customer support] team looked into the matter further to verify the individuals involved and what took place,” a Bethesda spokesperson told Eurogamer, which first reported the news. “After additional review, we have now permanently banned the players we’ve identified.”

You can see some of their behavior in AJ’s tweets below, but take heed of this content warning: the clip is filled with offensive and openly aggressive homophobic remarks.

There are rules in place to prevent players from attacking and killing other players if there’s not a mutual desire to fight. But no one in Fallout 76 is invincible. Peaceful players who don’t fight back simply take less damage from the attacks of other human players. 

In this case, the homophobes stuck with AJ and eventually did enough damage to kill his character. He and his friends switched to a different server after that and got on with their night. Then, Bethesda eventually responded thanks to AJ’s tweet and took action against the offending players.

By all appearances, a happy ending to an unpleasant story: Once their behavior was investigated and confirmed, the toxic players were shown the door. But there’s more to this story, and it has everything to do with Fallout 76 arriving in less-than-stellar form.

The new game, which released on Nov. 14, takes the popular post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting into an online world for the first time. Stripping away the player-influenced story and cast of characters that normally form the backbone of a Bethesda RPG, Fallout 76 focuses instead on social experiences: playing with friends and strangers in a completely online version of a vast Fallout world.

It’s not a bad thing, conceptually. Proximity-based voice chat lets total strangers interact and talk to each other directly, even when they’re not squadded up. Such a setup allows for spur-of-the-moment alliances and/or clashes. It’s largely the point of the game: the written story is stripped away to make room for the ones that players come up with themselves.

But what’s missing, as AJ realized once NathanTheHicc and his friends began their verbal assault, is any kind of in-game reporting mechanism.

Most online games and gaming networks include built-in options for filing a report about various forms of bad in-game behavior. Verbal harassment is one of the most common forms of attack, so these reporting features give victims a simple and quick process for letting the powers-that-be know about bad eggs.

Unfortunately, no such feature exists in Fallout 76. Worse, the game is only available on PC through Bethesda’s own online service, Bethesda.net. It’s similar in lots of ways to Ubisoft’s Uplay and Electronic Arts’ Origin, but it’s much younger. 

Fallout 76 is really the first major new Bethesda.net release. Features like friends lists and player reporting aren’t yet built into the Bethesda.net software client, and most of the items you can click on in the app simply redirect to Bethesda’s website. You can link up with friends only when you’re in-game, and there’s no reporting feature of any kind.

Bethesda does have a browser-based alternative for flagging bad behavior in its games, but it’s not clearly advertised (or even accessible) from the Bethesda.net client. And as AJ learned firsthand, the in-browser reporting mechanism isn’t entirely functional.

“The tweet was forwarded to some community managers for the game and they were very kind and helpful,” AJ told Eurogamer. “We were given 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.”

With no in-game reporting features and a seemingly broken browser-based alternative, Fallout 76 players on PC have very little recourse when they’re faced with harassment. (PlayStation and Xbox users can at least turn to each console’s built-in reporting, though that inserts Sony or Microsoft into the middle of a situation that Bethesda should be handling.)

It’s a big problem, and one that speaks to what Mashable’s own Alison Foreman wrote on Friday about Fallout 76 arriving seemingly unfinished and in sore need of meaningful updates. Clearly, in-game reporting should be one of Bethesda’s top priorities at this point.

“Reporting in-game is necessary,” AJ told Eurogamer. “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.”