I am basing my opinion off an understanding of the game (particularly the crafting system) and the player. It's my opinion that he's full of shit and database queries don't tend to lie.
An I'm basing my opinion off the understanding on the game engine. It's quite possible that Bethesda implemented a system that counts how much ammo/items you pick up or get given, not the number of ammo you actually have (that would have to make a script run permanently and would be very harmful for the game performance, specially in a game where there are several players on at the same time).
This is not only very plausible, but it would have been the easiest way of quickly implementing a way of tracking people with large amount of items. But it also does not account (and can't) for where the items come from or if they were obtained by duping or any other illegal way.
What Bethesda needs to do is make a totally new system that redflags any item you get "illegally". But this is very hard to accomplish in this engine, and it would take a long time to implement such a system (and it would hit performance for sure, specially when players acquire items or when players have a lot of items). This system would also not work with already existent items, so if those where obtained illegally, this system wouldn't be able to tell them apart from legal ones.
In sum, a system like the one I described should have been implemented before the game was publicly accessible (or at least before the public testing phase ends).
I can't tell which logical fallacy this is but it's probably somewhere between a
strawman or an
appeal to hypocrisy because Bethesda having done something wrong means they must have been wrong about this. You've used a poor analogy particularly by trying to use "a guy" as a representative for an entire company with multiple people/departments and "punching" as a singular equivalent action to a varied set of actions and decisions made by this group (
apples and oranges). It is impressive to fit that many fallacies into a single example though, almost as impressive as how much ultracite ammo that guy fit into his stash :-p
Yep, it's a strawman or appeal to hypocrisy not believing a company that said so many lies in the last few months, got caught lying and still kept lying some more.
Ok, then I will use a different example. People are considered innocent until proven guilty in most or all first world countries, I don't see any proof this guy cheated. If Bethesda has proof why not share it? Why keep quiet and made look like the "bad guy"?
If this was a court case, the guy would win easily unless Bethesda showed proof. Also why would he put so much time and effort into writing giant walls of text and replying to any questions (always very politely), making guides, getting screenshots, and so on, if he knew he would be unbanned later?
Most (if not all) people proclaiming "unfair ban" do not go to this effort if they are really guilty, and specially if they know they will be unbanned anyway. They complain for a bit (usually quite rude), because they get angry they got caught, but then they just shut up. They know if they keep pushing it, they might not get unbanned after all. This guy isn't behaving like most "unfair ban" people I have seen since 1998.
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Only if I was a fool.
