Part of today's DLC, which introduced the Infernus Classic and the Resurrection Adversary Mode to GTA Online, is a new upgrade to the game's anti-cheat. While the hacking situation isn't quite as bad as it was about a year ago following a massive cleanout operation late last year, the issue on PC is still present.
Cheats and hacks have unfortunately followed GTA Online like a stormcloud ever since it released, but the issue has been particularly volatile since the PC release. By nature, the PC is infinitely more vulnerable than consoles in terms of hacking, and the peer to peer nature of Online's server architecture makes thing even easier to exploit.
There was a time when every lobby had at least one hacker if not more, games were being constantly crashed by spawning infinite props until the other players' machines couldn't handle it, kills were pinned on other players, props were attached to character models and boats were flying through the sky.
The anti-cheat has a history of going through different phases. It broke single player mods at one point and the whole game at another. The insurance and bad sport mechanics had to be deactivated temporarily. Things were pretty bad.
However, today the situation is a lot smoother with far fewer hackers around, which is thanks to the several upgrades the anti-cheat got over time. Sure, we could still use another ban wave soon, but things are better than ever, and with this newest upgrade, cheaters will be ever rarer.
One player spotted and posted a new prompt that appeared on his screen today, which declared that another player was caught cheating and removed from the session. In the past, players who got banned had to first leave the game, and then they would not be allowed back in the next time they tried logging-in.
Active bans like this are a godsend, since theoretically if you had a good enough connection never logging off (until the next server maintenance or power outage, of course) was something of a safety net. Not anymore though, as players who trip up the anti-cheat will get banhammered on the fly, cleaning out lobbies on the go. Hopefully this means that the anti-cheat got another pass of upgrades to its detection algorithms too, resulting in more hackers getting slapped with a permanent ban.
We'll see how this new feature performs in the coming days, but we're confident that his is a sign that GTA Online is well on its way to becoming a clear platform on PC as well. Of course the PS3 and Xbox 360 are lawless lands (hence no more transfers), whereas the current gen consoles haven't been cracked yet.
