A Fallout 76 player named NathanTheHicc has been permanently banned from the game after threatening a group of players.
Player AJpls has led the charge against NathanTheHicc, posting gameplay video to Twitter after failed attempts to report via official channels.
The players originally met in-game, with one of AJpls’ friends saying NathanTheHicc’s character looked cute. Nathan took offence at the comment and later returned with his own friends to grief AJpls and his group. Nathan’s group called itself “The Gay Eliminators” and threatened to kill the other group alongside a host of homophobic slurs.
AJpls tried to file a report on Bethesda’s official site but found he couldn’t attach a video of the incident. As such, he took to Twitter instead.
So @bethesda, how do we report people in @Fallout? @ChipWhitehouse @Handsandhead and I literally had our characters hunted down and killed by homophobic players. I'll post more of the video in a thread. Strong language warning. pic.twitter.com/gN1rsRFz1h
— AJpls 👽🛸 (@AJpls_) November 16, 2018
“The tweet was forwarded to some community managers for the game and they were very kind and helpful,” AJpls said, speaking with 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.”
NathanTheHicc also spoke with Eurogamer and seems to think nothing was wrong with his actions.
“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,” he said. “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.”
NathanTheHicc has uploaded his own capture of the interaction to his YouTube channel with the title, “Cleansing of the queers.” No, we’re not linking to it.
Bethesda initially banned NathanTheHicc for three days but has since upped the punitive measure to a lifetime ban.
Fallout 76 is available now on Windows PC, Xbox One and PS4.
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