Like some cruel and bewildering joke, Fallout 76 players have discovered that the game’s latest patch accidentally re-broke something that had previously been fixed, and they are not happy.
Bobby pins, used in Fallout 76 to pick locks, originally weighed a ridiculous 0.1 pounds. Earlier this month, Bethesda finally patched them to make them weigh 0.001, something that was both more realistic and helped free up much-needed space in players’ inventories.
After yesterday’s Patch 5, they’re back to weighing 0.1. It might seem like a small problem, but for players who have spent the last couple of months running out of patience, it’s just the latest in a series of discouraging signs that keep piling up.
Many players are also disappointed with a series of tweaks yesterday’s patch made to the game’s perk system. Cards like Demolition Expert, which grants bonus damage when using explosives, was nerfed from 100% at its max level down to 60%.
Other cards, like White Knight and Licensed Plumber, saw similar reductions in their effectiveness. People who invested in those skills now feel they’re at a big disadvantage and have asked for some way to respec when future changes like this happen. Another outspoken group of players feels increasingly turned off by Bethesda’s approach to nerfing items and abilities it sees as being too powerful, rather than making other ones stronger to help compensate.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2018/11/fallout-76s-bobby-pins-are-60x-heavier-than-actual-bobby-pins/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/cy1auxlam1qqrqskaujd.jpg” title=”Fallout 76’s Bobby Pins Are 60x Heavier Than Actual Bobby Pins” excerpt=”You used to be able to carry around as many lock-picking bobby pins as you wanted in Fallout 4, but Bethesda’s newest game has assigned a weight to them. And they are way too heavy.”]
Other players are angry that new microtransaction items continue to get added to the game’s Atom store while all of this is going on, to which a Bethesda community manager responded that the Atom team is separate from the one working on bug fixes and patches.
“I understand that it can be frustrating to see [the Atom store] updated when you’re waiting for game play updates but it’s separate from those working on the code,” they wrote on the game’s subreddit.
People’s dissatisfaction with the continued state of Fallout 76 has been compounded by allegations that the latest patch has also brought back some of the item-duplicating exploits that plagued the game earlier in the month.
In a thread that blew up on the game’s subreddit overnight, user gX-kiD notes that there has been a flood of new listings for rare in-game items on Ebay since yesterday. A quick search shows over a hundred new postings for things like legendary two-shot assault rifles and tri-barrell miniguns, but so far there hasn’t been any solid evidence that duping has made a full-blown comeback.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/01/fallout-76s-bobby-pins-are-no-longer-60x-heavier-than-actual-bobby-pins/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/udv8chmrfkhrzsfadd5b.jpg” title=”Fallout 76’s Bobby Pins Are No Longer 60x Heavier Than Actual Bobby Pins” excerpt=”Amidst all of Fallout 76’s launch woes, one of the funnier stories was how its lock-picking bobby pins—normally a weightless commodity in Bethesda games—were now hilariously heavy, to the point where just 60 of them would weight as much as a mini-nuke.”]
While the studio hasn’t publicly addressed the complaints yet, a community manager said in the comments of one of the Reddit threads that the issue with bobby pins and other feedback on the new patch are currently being discussed by the development team.
One theory circulating among players as to why bobby pins are back to being over-weighted is that the newest update used an older build of Fallout 76 that caused some aspects of the game to appear to be back where they were at the beginning of the month. Bethesda did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.
In response to the latest missteps, there have been renewed calls for Bethesda to implement a beta server where players can test out new patches before they go live in the actual game, to which one player responded “Good news! You’re already in the beta server!”
Comments
20 responses to “Fallout 76 Players Throw Up Their Hands At The Return Of Heavy Bobby Pins”
How does that even happen, pure incompetence.
People working on bugs would be doing that over a period of time. Some of them would have been working on a specific bug since before the bobby pins issue was corrected. Which means they would be working with outdated code. You cant just change over to the new code halfway through the process, that’s not how it works. If you did, you’re starting all over. Given that patches happen more often than people realise (many are serverside that players never see), you’d end up restarting every other week.
It may simply be that the code they were fixing was inadvertently tied to the bobby pin data and it was accidently ‘corrected’ back to what it was as part of the other bugs update. It shouldn’t happen, but its happened in other games. MMO’s have reverted back a couple of patches just for specific things a few times.
The fact that item duping seems to have resurfaced suggests it was a wider reversion than just the bobbypins as well.
You’re partially correct.
Bobby Pin weight is just a value in a record for a single item type – it’s not “tied” to anything else.
However, Bethesda has responded to the community today to tell us that they somehow managed to merge this latest patch with an older version of the game, then push that to the live game – hence the return of a number of previously fixed issues.
They are releasing a hotfix today to resolve some of the issues.
But I have to say, after 3 months of issues like this, it isn’t filling me with confidence that this dev team is up to the task of realising the potential of multiplayer fallout.
This is one of the problems with storing records directly in their binary format, which the Creation Kit does. It makes it impossible to automatically merge changes with the default merge tools in VCS because they only support plain text. There is a version control subsystem in Creation Kit but it’s very basic and works (as I understand it) by locking checked out records rather than merging on commit.
It’s an understandable mistake, but it’s a big and avoidable one. There are third party modding tools that can diff archive metadata; if Bethesda isn’t using one now as part of change review before branch merging, then they need to add it to their workflow. Doing binary merges manually is highly error-prone.
Good info. As you say, its an understandable mistake, but an avoidable one. To use an analogy, Microsoft Word has track changes, which lets you merge the changes into the parent document, either individually or wholesale. Its not like the concept is new.
Or SharePoint, where you check documents out while you work on them, effectively locking it out to others. Might not be the best idea in a programming world, but a variation would work – locking down a function as you work on it would be just as effective.
Point is, there are methods proven to work, so its avoidable. But in reality, that’s not always as easy to put into practice as people think. I know I rarely use track changes with Word for example, and when doing SharePoint stuff I’m more likely to have an offline version I save over the top rather than check it out from SharePoint and work on it.
The problem is that locking just doesn’t scale well for version control. As a team grows, you’ll eventually hit a point where one person has a change to a file/function/whatever that is not ready to land, while someone else can not proceed until they can also modify that piece of code.
At that point you’ve got two options: (a) the second person needs to wait an indeterminate amount of time until they can continue with their job, or (b) you break the lock and let the second person land their changes. If you go with the second option, then the first developer will need some way to merge those updates back into their working copy. And if you will need some way to resolve conflicts anyway, why not do away with locks and require everyone to resolve conflicts on merge? That is essentially how all popular large scale version control systems have worked for decades (CVS, Subversion, Git, etc).
I feel Bethesda may be in real trouble as a business.
I guess it would depend on how much they threw behind FO76.
If they put all their chickens in that particular basket then yeah, I imagine it would be bad news for them.
(Let’s hope the new ES and Starfields aren’t killed off because of it)
Nah, this game couldn’t have cost much to develop, but they are definitely on notice and can’t afford a repeat of what can fairly be described as a clusterfuck.
The real reason the game has price dropped to $25!
its being given away for free when you buy a used controller by gamestop stores in germany according to a post in r/gaming
Stop it! You’ll make me feel sorry for them.
Yeah using an older build will do it. Been there done that myself with my modding 😀
Might be worth updating this article with the Bethesda post addressing this issue. Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/fo76/comments/alie1l/hotfix_coming_for_issues_introduced_in_patch_5/
Apparently their merge of dev builds failed to work…and I guess nothing tells them that it failed and they have no checks in place to query it…? Seems odd to me but I’m not a programmer.
I can only comment from my own experience, but this kind of merge error not being picked up before release is a major process flaw. Either they did no change review, or they didn’t do it properly in a rush to get the patch out.
There are acceptable errors in software development, but if their explanation is accurate then this isn’t one of them.
Far out. Will I ever hear anything good about this game?
This rivals the time Bioware dropped a major patch revision for SW:TOR and then the next night patched all of the game interfaces changes back to the pre patch state.
I’m sure it’ll all work out fine or something.
The Bethesda shit show continues.
Ill be surprised the day i wake up and they haven’t fucked something up in soon to be f2p Fallout 76
Lame, their reasoning seems to be. We have a broken game not a lot of people want to play. Lets spend man hours on Micro transactions instead of fixing the game so more people want to play.