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Getting banned from GTA Online sucks, it does, but it seems that Rockstar is trying their best to completely annihilate any production of multiplayer mods that are completely isolated from Grand Theft Auto: Online.
I’ll start off with a quick anecdote.
Once upon a time I tried a mod for GTA V, and of course, I only ran it in single player. It was cool, but I preferred playing online with my friends. Let’s say that happened several months ago.
Lately there has been a lot of new features added to ENT, so I decided to go compile it and test it out - this was on Tuesday. I then went to bed.
Thursday, at 1:50am I get an email… this email was bad news to me. Yes, I am terrible at games in general - I just play to have fun - but I would never cheat. You can see this from my stats on the social club.
It’s perfectly possible that I had a lapse of consciousness and subconsciously downloaded a patched ScriptHook and remove the anti-online protection from my copy of ENT, but the likelihood of that happening is very low.
So yes, it seems that I was banned for using mods. It was single player, and that’s a whole shitstorm on its own.
Wait a second…
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.
At least I can still play single player…
Nope .avi. You need to log into social club to get to the “play offline” bit. I have had my single player experience taken away from me too, £40 down the drain!
Whatever, you can play FiveM.
There’s more.
Max Payne 3 is a cool game. I bought it on the Humble Store quite a while ago, in April. Like many people, I have the tendency to buy games and not play them. Max Payne 3 is one of the games I never got round to playing.
I asked myself, “no… I cannot be banned from playing Max Payne as well…”. Yep.
Lucky me, I haven’t linked Max Payne with my account yet. I could just create a new account, right?. Look at that playtime, I haven’t even played FiveMinutes of it.
I can’t play any Rockstar game that works with the social club. Ever.
Conclusion
Let’s just count something up here. I have only ever preordered three games: GTA V for PS3, Watch_Dogs (buyer’s regret still burns me here), and GTA V for PC. I’m banned on console (I think) AND on PC.
TheDeadlyDutchi paid 60 euros for his PC version, and he also bought the game on PS3 and PS4 (I think he has sold those ones now, though) - and he, like myself, has had no involvement with the actual development of the mod.
NTAuthority has bought two copies of the game too, and was most likely banned around the same time as we were (I can’t confirm that right now, but I’ll certainly make an update).
See? : “never even played GTAO in the past weeks (let alone months), never cheated, never played with a cheater, and then this?”
I think I have lost complete hope in Rockstar, I never expected them to go this far to try and get rid of a mod. We didn’t make hot coffee! This sounds advertisey, but it’s infuriating to see cheaters in GTA Online, and then you get banned for contributing to a project that will get rid of cheaters more efficiently than GTA Online.
TLDR
don’t make multiplayer mods (isolated from the online aspect of the game) unless you don’t want to play any rockstar games again.