GTA Online has hit the headlines once more – over its crackdown on hackers. The company said that a fairer game will be better, but some players think that blocking off exploits is contrary to the criminal nature of the game. Other gamers who don’t use exploits are worried that they’ll be penalised for receiving hacked cash without asking for it.
Rockstar explained its measures at some length on its support page: “We have received complaints over the past few weeks about cheaters gifting large amounts of GTA$ to others, setting bounty rewards outside game limits, or otherwise attempting to tamper with the GTA Online economy.”
“We have deployed several hotfixes to prevent this type of activity, and will be adding further cheat protection in future Title Updates as well. Players who willingly cheated to create this illegitimate influx of in-game currency will be separated out from the rest of the population.
“If you were the unwilling recipient of an impossibly large amount of GTA$, you do not need to worry about disciplinary action against your account. However, please be aware that we will be making community-wide automatic adjustments to players’ account balances to remove the modded money.”
Rockstar will be using automated alerts along with manual inspections in the hope of catching hackers. Rockstar said they wanted “to keep the gameplay environment as fair as possible for legitimate players, we routinely do sweeps to separate out cheaters and modders, and to reverse any illegitimate transactions. These sweeps are based on in-game automated detection, examination of suspicious gameplay statistics, and also manually-reviewed evidence submitted by the Community.”
Some gamers worry that they’ll end up banned through no fault of their own, but Rockstar had this to say: “We are able to tell the difference, automatically through gameplay data, between the cheaters and the players who received this money innocently. Players who were willingly cheating are notified about any action taken against their account. If you were not cheating, you do not need to do anything further.”
By removing counterfeit money, Rockstar has said it’ll be taken from bank accounts, then from inactive character wallets as well as active character wallets. The company said it knows some people have spent the funds, and it will let them keep these items, but their accounts might be debited by unpredictable amounts.
“Players have been gifted cash where applicable so they still have enough to play with,” Rockstar said. “For accounts that would have been left with little or no GTA$ after correction, we added sufficient funds to continue playing and enjoying GTA Online, taking into account whether a player intentionally created and distributed modded GTA$ versus or received modded money innocently.”
As you’d expect, GTA cash bought with real-life money will be left well alone.
Rockstar can’t remove funds from an account just because the player asks it to, but developers have asked people to be alert to suspect activity: “If you have any information about methods people are still using to try to ruin the GTA Online experience for others, please submit concrete proof (video tutorials, guides, links to mod files, etc.) to [email protected] and we will investigate.”
