Some Fallout 76 are reportedly attacking Fallout 1st subscribers in-game, griefing those who have chosen to purchase Bethesda's new Fallout 76 premium subscription. Bethesda announced the $12.99-per-month subscription, which adds useful new functions to the game, shortly after it delayed the Fallout 76 NPC update.
Fallout 1st provides subscribers with a number of benefits, including private servers, unlimited scrap storage and a unique, Fallout: New Vegas-inspired Ranger armor set (which was perhaps ironic, considering Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian's The Outer Worlds has been heralded by some as a better Fallout-like experience). The subscription's major benefits didn't actually work for some players, however, who found their scrap boxes were deleting their stuff and their private servers weren't actually private. Bethesda responded to the fiasco, saying fixing these issues was its top priority. Players are apparently still angry about the subscription's addition to the game, however, even with Bethesda promising fixes.
Fallout 76 Reddit user u/jimmyjamesjr86 claimed in a post yesterday that Fallout 1st players were being targeted in the game's Adventure Mode by others who saw their Fallout 1st subscriber icons. The post has since gained more than 8,000 upvotes, with commentors comparing the subscriber-versus-non-subscriber conflict to a class war, a faction conflict and even a deliberate, Vault-Tec-style social experiment by Bethesda. Another Reddit user, u/Potato_Seduction, played into the apparent conflict, calling for Fallout 1st members to establish a gated community to defend against their "piss poor" attackers. These posts, and another by a Fallout 1st subscriber who claimed to have been beaten up in-game by 5 to 7 people in teddy bear costumes (which seems to have been deleted from Reddit), were noticed by Twitter user FreyjajaErlings, whose initial tweet about the posts has almost 35,000 likes as of writing.
This in-game violence isn't the first action players have taken to protest Fallout 1st. In-game, one player created a billboard that encouraged players to boycott Fallout 76 and Bethesda in order to protest the Fallout 76 subscription. Additionally, someone bought the "falloutfirst" domain name before Bethesda could get it and used it to call out Bethesda, criticizing the subscription with plenty of colorful language.
Of course, Fallout 76 is no stranger to controversy. The game was seen by some as the most disappointing game of 2018, and further updates did little to help the game become something better. Bethesda added microtransaction items with high prices in the Atom Shop, and later updates added new bugs and glitches, making Fallout 76 worse. It appeared Bethesda was going to make Fallout 76 an actual Fallout game with the Wastelanders NPC update, but with that delayed and Fallout 1st here in its stead, the fate of Fallout 76 is uncertain.
Source: Reddit