GTA 5 Online is once again causing controversy and this time it’s over the crackdown of hackers by Rockstar and come 24 hours after the end of the anti-cheat maintenance period. Rockstar said that a fairer game will be a better game but some gamers have said that walling out exploits is contrary to the criminal ethos in GTA 5. Gamers who are upstanding in the GTA community have worried that they will get penalised for being on the receiving end of large amounts of unsolicited cash.
Rockstar explained the measures they would be taking in depth on their support page. They said “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$, you do not need to worry about disciplinary action against your account. However, please be aware that we will be making community-wide automatic adjustments to players’ account balances to remove the modded money.”
Rockstar will be using automated alerts along with manual inspections in the hope of catching hackers. Rockstar said they wanted “to keep the gameplay environment as fair as possible for legitimate players, we routinely do sweeps to separate out cheaters and modders, and to reverse any illegitimate transactions. These sweeps are based on in-game automated detection, examination of suspicious gameplay statistics, and also manually-reviewed evidence submitted by the Community.”
Some gamers are worried that they will be dragged into the bans but Rockstar had this to say about that. “We are able to tell the difference, automatically through gameplay data, between the cheaters and the players who received this money innocently. Players who were willingly cheating are notified about any action taken against their account. If you were not cheating, you do not need to do anything further.”
In removing any counterfeit money Rockstar have said that it will be taken from the bank accounts and then from inactive character wallets along with wallets of active characters. Rockstar said that they know some people have spent funds and they plan on allowing people to keep items but the balance could be lower than it was before the maintenance before funds arrived.
Players have been gifted cash where applicable so they still have enough to play with. Rockstar said For accounts that would have been left with little or no GTA$ 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 expected any GTA cash bought with real money has not been removed.
Rockstar cannot take funds away from an account by request but the developers asked for people to watch out for suspect activity. They said “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.”
