Players in Red Dead Online, the online mode of Red Dead Redemption 2, saw strange things over the weekend: Mountains of dead, burnt horses piled up everywhere and the NPCs seemed to have vanished. Ghost towns full of dead animals remained.
What was going on in RDO? Over the weekend, many players of Red Dead Online reported horrific scenes: The streets of the digital Wild West were littered with the corpses of burnt horses.
Other players spoke of completely empty worlds. No animals would spawn anymore and the NPCs had disappeared from the settlements.
The servers themselves also seemed unstable. Players reported frame rate drops and strange graphical bugs.
Why is this happening? This is not confirmed, but players assume that the problems are the result of a duplication exploit.
Players can use a special trick to duplicate items and sell them multiple times. This way, they can make much more money than would normally be possible.
Some players believe that the missing animals and empty towns are a temporary fix by the developers. If there are no animals to duplicate and no NPCs to sell the duplicated creatures to, Rockstar could calmly work on this bug.
What does Rockstar say? After the US site Polygon reported about the strange conditions on the RDO servers, Rockstar responded with a short email. It only stated that the problems from the weekend had been fixed.
Bug occurred before: This is not the first time that dead animals have piled up in the streets of Red Dead Online. Already in March, mountains of dead pumas caused chaos on the servers. An exploit was behind that as well.
Burning horses occurred in the single-player mode of Red Dead Redemption 2: A bug caused horses along with riders to catch fire near the town of Rhodes.
Last week, there was a major update for Red Dead Online:
