Fallout 76 has been muddled with bugs and glitches pretty much since launch, the most recent of which include players accidentally glitching into sealed Vault 63. Bethesda is on constant damage control, releasing patches to remove glitches, but one of the more recent ones actually introduced previously fixed glitches, namely item duping. After fixing the duping glitch once more, Bethesda was left with players running around the Wasteland with duped items.
Bethesda took the game offline earlier today for a period of time for some “spring cleaning,” according to a forum post. In the post, community manager Valseek stated that Bethesda created a list of more than 400 items they believed to be targets of the duping glitch. The list, which was comprised of both weapons and armor, was then compared to player inventories. Players who were found to have more than one copy of those items, by means of exploiting the glitch themselves or trading with other players, had the extras removed. The players identified to have duplicated items also had their Nuka-Cola stock scrutinized and removed if determined to be in excess.
While the act of bringing the entire game offline and removing items from player’s inventories may be viewed as extreme, the forum post reports that “less than 1% of all Fallout 76 accounts combined across all three platforms needed to have duped items removed.” The post assures that most players did not have any duped items at all, and therefore had no items removed from their inventories. Today’s spring cleaning took care of duped weapons and armor but excluded power armor potentially duplicated with the glitch. “Power Armor was exempt from today’s item removals, but we are actively discussing another wave of action to target these items in the future.” Players should keep an eye out for another service outage in the near future while Bethesda finishes cleaning up their duplicated mess.