[2022] A word of caution from a veteran player.

This game had put me though an emotional blender this week, so as a veteran player who has been participating in this game since official launch back in 2018, I just have a bit of advise for any current and long time players. I know this may seem like a long read and I'll apologize for that, but I think this is something new and old players alike need to see.

Long story short, try not to get to attached to your characters and your account. Why? You might ask?Well for me at least, I was hit with the notice that my account (that has well over 6800+ hours on the clock) was now permanently deactivated.

I give a word of warning to anyone who runs any background or 'third party' type program on their system. That anything from a different game launcher like Epic or Origin, Corsair iCUE, Discord, Nvidia GeForce Experience or even EVGA Precision to name a few.... that there is a chance that these programs can cause interruptions with your game files and then lead the collected data on Bethesda's back-end to flag your account on a ToS violation and thus lead to a ban.To put more clearly in their words “showing evidence within our system for injecting third party applications in the game client.” ..of course they can't disclose what triggered it, but my educated guess is that it was one of these programs – as in the past I have read and heard of other players having a similar experience to mine and have met the same fate as me.

This is something I have been dealing and trying to rectify all this week.I have always run this game 100% vanilla since day one. I don't care for mods or anything of the sort. I don't know how to or where to even begin as far as how to modify game files, and I've never used anything like cheat engine or any other program as such even on other games.

Its just been a really, really sad week that my account that had almost every item from the atomic shop, had completes every season up until recent, I had collected every possible plan one could know in the game, had one of every rare and uncommon outfit you could get ..and I had also completed every lifetime challenge and collection aside from hitting that 7600 hour goal. All my wonderful camps are are gone and only some video and photos remain. Its all gone now and I feel like a large chunk of my heart and soul is gone as well.

If I had anyway of knowing that something that most people have running on their computer would have lead to this, then I would have done everything in my power to have made sure I didn't end up with this bad outcome. I wouldn't never actively do anything to compromise my game and that much effort and life hours dumped onto an account if I even knew this was a possibility.

I'm still going to play this game though, as I had/have an alternate account that was just sitting on the sidelines. So its literally square one for me. However this time I won't be subscribing to 1st or even putting anymore money into this game then I have over the past several years. I can't. I can't risk the same amount of time and effort in case this happens again ..also my heart and feelings toward this game have changed since this occurred.

What keeps me around is the community. Its one of the best I've even been apart of and I love the interactions and dumb things friends and strangers get up to. I also still have a lot of friends who still play this game and I don't want to abandon them over something out of my control.

I still have hope that Bethesda fixes this issue so that this doesn't happen to any other legit players. I also hope that maybe someone on the support team or the community devs read this and perhaps try to help. I've done all the proper tickets and at the ends of the day the decision they have come to is the one they are sticking to and there is nothing I can do in my power to change that. So yeah that's my words to you all and I hope to see you guys in game on my new character where perhaps some good memories will make this whole thing seem a little less unjust.

Edit: Just want to say thank you to everyone who is/has taken time to respond and try and give advise of share experiences similar to mine. I still have hope and I'm still working on trying to get my account back. I will try and keep you all updated if there is any progression on my case.

Edit 2: A player suggested scanning with malwarebytes to see if there was any sus things happening and the report came back as clear with zero issues. I always have Norton running so I'm not surprised that I have nothing evil lurking in the shadows of my computer..but it was good to check regardless.