Since the release of Fallout 76, players have continually found new ways to perform unintended actions inside of Bethesda's multiplayer RPG. Indeed, duplication exploits, glitches that circumvent some of the game's primary systems, and more have not been uncommon in Fallout 76, but none of these cheats have been quite as malicious as a particularly troubling one that materialized just days ago.

In essence, this new Fallout 76 exploit allowed players to interact with others as lootable containers, giving the cheat's user the ability to steal items from unsuspecting fans' inventories. No trades needed to be initiated in order to use this Fallout 76 hack, and it could be executed at a distance of up to 200m, meaning that anyone that had the misfortune of sharing a server with someone using the glitch was vulnerable to having all of their items taken.

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Unfortunately, many players did indeed have this misfortune, and a video that was uploaded to YouTube last Sunday shows a myriad of fans losing a great number of their items to the exploit. Full sets of Fallout 76 Power Armor, legendary weapons, and much more were among the stolen gear, and fans that watch the video will see armor literally stolen off the backs of unwitting players.

Understandably, this all led to quite a stir within the community, with some fans asking Bethesda to take the Fallout 76 servers offline until the hack had been addressed. On Monday evening, the developer complied, and after a short maintenance, a fix for the glitch had been deployed.

Bethesda preceded this action with an apology to those that had been affected by this nefarious Fallout 76 cheat, indicating that it was exploring possibilities for compensating these victims. Exactly how this compensation will materialize is currently unknown, but hopefully impacted players will at least see some of their items returned.

While many fans will appreciate Bethesda taking the matter seriously, and acting upon it quickly, the mere existence of this glitch may raise some concerns about the future of Fallout 76. Certainly it has now been proven that the infrastructure on which the game is built is highly exploitable, and it remains to be seen what other kinds of malicious hacks players come up with.

Fallout 76 is currently available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

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Source: Kotaku