If you want the GTA 5 news highlights of the past week without having to scour through previous posts, our weekly news roundup posts are for you. Published every Friday just before (or after) City of the Week, we'll collect everything worth knowing that happened in the past seven days in one neat post.
The massive RDR2 hype had quieted down a bit by this week, though it still made the news and is continually captivating community discussion. News was pretty frantic this week actually, with the biggest splash having been made by the absolutely draconian crackdown on GTA Online hackers dished out by Rockstar.
The first piece of news following our City of the Week post looking at the urban region of Hampton Roads was the reinstatement of that one video on YouTube showcasing the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 sticky bomb mod. It was taken down by Samsung with a DMCA copyright claim, only to be later put back right up by YouTube following the refusal of the claim.
Incidentally, this was followed by our scheduled Top Videos of the Week post, wherein we notably featured the above mentioned video just to spite the humorless manufacturer that slammed with with a claim. Obviously, there were many other entertaining and high quality GTA themed fan videos on the list — take a look for yourself.
We also addressed some concerns voiced by the community over the predictable death of GTA Online at the hands of Red Dead Redemption 2's multiplayer mode. Now, we elaborate on this in the post at length, but there are several reasons why Online isn't going away just because RDR2 is eating resources and manpower. Don't worry, you'll be frolicking about Los Santos for a good long time yet.
Rockstar dropped a surprise mini-expansion for Bikers alongside the announcement of this year's Halloween Specials DLC. This came unexpectedly since the massive hubbub around RDR2 has diverted everyone's attention from the fact that Halloween is fast approaching, meaning that an in-game celebration is imminent as well.
And that's when it happened. The skies darkened, the earth cracked, and the voices of a million hackers cried out in juvenile rage. The correction, also known as the "great demoneying of 2016", hit, removing literal billions from the in-game accounts of hackers, cheaters and modders. Naturally, many claimed innocence, however chances are the vast majority of these claims were bull.
The banning and suspension policies were also updated — read: made über-harsh — to discourage unsanctioned activity in GTA Online. Getting a temporary ban will reset all of your progress, and any second ban will automatically be a permanent one. Even so, major offences will get you permabanned even if it's your first time.
The winners of the Bikers Snapmatic Competition were announced soon after, with several extremely impressive shots on display. The winners of the GTA $1,000,000 prize more than deserved their reward. Obviously, the main stars of these shots were the bikes themselves.
Somewhat related to the post about RDR2 killing GTA Online, was a post covering a pretty major rumor dump regarding the future of the game, posted by someone who has proven to be a legitimate source of information in the past. While this isn't official news, and therefore cannot be taken at face value, the picture of the future the predictions paint is a very nice one indeed, including things like police DLC and map expansions.
Most recently, having happened just today (and thus pushing City of the Week over to tomorrow), this year's previously announced Halloween DLC was released, bringing the LCC Sanctus and the all new Lost vs Damned Adversary Mode to GTA Online.
Which of this week's news stories did you find the most interesting?
