Yesterday, Bethesda announced and rolled out a new, paid service for Fallout 76. They are calling it Fallout 1st and for $13 a month or $100 for a year, players are able to enjoy features like private servers, unlimited storage for your crafting scrap, a tent, and some other bonuses.
As we noticed yesterday, fans are pretty upset about the paid service. For one, private servers were something that were promised even before the game was initially released last year. There was nothing to suggest that the promised private servers would have an additional fee attached to them when they released. Fans waited for nearly a year to finally get those promised private servers and when they got them, they were locked behind a newly launched monthly subscription.
Sadly, this story gets worse. If you paid for a Fallout 1st subscription in hopes of finally playing on a private server where you and your friends could have a good time, well uh, we have some bad news. According to a new report from Forbes, those private servers are not exactly private.
Players have found that a "newly created" private world isn't actually new at all in a lot of cases. Players have reported finding dead NPCs and areas that were already looted before they got there. This seems to imply that these private worlds aren't new at all, but rather just old instances that have been re-used without any sort of refresh.
Those private servers may not be all that private to begin with either. Players are finding that they are unable to prevent people from joining private servers. Players are able to see your instance via their friends' list. From there, they can just join directly on that person and enter their "private" server. There is no invisible mode. There is no way to block this from happening. As you can imagine, this can become a major issue for those with large list of friends. Soon those private servers could be full of players that are a friend of a friend of a friend of someone that was actually allowed to be in the server.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the second major feature of Fallout 1st seems to be incredibly broken. The Scrap Box perk for Fallout 1st enticed players with the promise of unlimited storage space for all of their scrap.
Fans have long requested additional storage space for months now. Bethesda had said that due to technical limitations they were unable to expand the storage. So when Fallout 1st came out with unlimited storage for scrap, fans were once again upset that something they were told was impossible to implement was not only feasible but was now going to be locked behind a paywall.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the unlimited scrap storage is apparently super broken to the point that it's completely deleting any and all scrap players put into it. Multiple players have reported that the scrap they put into storage has a habit of just disappearing. The scrap disappears from the server instance and cannot be found again no matter what they attempt. So far, a resolution to those who have lost their scrap has not yet been provided.
This is the statement a customer service representative gave to one of the players that lost their scrap.
Our developers are investigating reports of items going missing from the Scrapbox under certain conditions. At this time I have gathered all account and character information regarding your report and forwarded this over to our developers to assist in our investigation.
