A group of modders who created their own version of GTA Online have been banned by Rockstar, with the developer saying that the mod “contains code designed to facilitate piracy”.
Unsatisfied by the official online multiplayer for Grand Theft Auto V, a group of modders banded together earlier this year to form the FiveM project. The mod, which has been active for several months now, was designed to allow users to play their own custom multiplayer modes and create custom multiplayer maps for the game, all running on dedicated servers.
But despite the group’s claim that the mod in no way interferes with the official GTA Online servers, Rockstar today banned a number of users associated with the project from connecting to Rockstar Social Club - preventing them from playing not just Grand Theft Auto V, but also other Rockstar games like Max Payne 3.
On the official Grand Theft Auto V PC subreddit, user qaisjp stated that even those not directly responsible for the mod’s creation have also been banned:
It seems that NTAuthority and TheDeadlyDutchi were also banned. Dutchi has used mods before (but a very long time ago) and (as far as I know) NTA has never used single player mods (besides creating FiveM, of course). I found this out today, not too long before I started writing this post.
I am not a developer of FiveM, I am just the mere moderator of the subreddit, but yes, I have some sort of affiliation with the mod. I was skeptical that we were banned (screenshot) for being contributors (in some way) to the FiveM project.
NTAuthority and TheDeadlyDutchi was banned on Thursday as well… surprise surprise. I asked Dutchi what time he got the email… 1:52am. We were banned within two minutes of each other. It was certainly a manual ban. This completely rules out the possibility that I was banned for single player mods - the good news is that Rockstar doesn’t seem to be banning people for just using single player mods. The bad news is that Rockstar is trying to stifle the modding community.
Rockstar is standing by its decision to ban the individuals. “The FiveM project is an unauthorized alternate multiplayer service that contains code designed to facilitate piracy,” the developer said in a statement passed to Kotaku. Our policy on such violations of our terms of service are clear, and the individuals involved in its creation have had their Social Club accounts suspended.”
When the PC version of GTA V was released back in March of this year, Rockstar made it clear that it was perfectly happy for players to make single-player mods, but that for security reasons it would ban any users attempting to mod the multiplayer version of the game. “You should not worry about being banned or being relegated to the cheater pool just for using single player PC mods,” Rockstar stated earlier this year. “Our primary focus is on protecting GTA Online against modifications that could give players an unfair advantage, disrupt gameplay, or cause griefing.”
Here’s how the mod looked in action a few months back.
Dale Morgan
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