Rockstar's latest attempt to combat hacking in GTA Online is causing unwarranted bans for innocent players
Seeing as the hacking issue has been more than a bit of a nuisance in GTA Online, the online component of GTA 5, Rockstar has been hard at work to find a way to eliminate the issue. They've attempted to revamp the anti-cheating systems in the game several times now, usually with the use of hidden stat tracking, however most of the hackers are still at large.
Rockstar's attempts were always met with mixed results. Occasional ban waves sometimes clear the streets for a day or two and the odd hacker gets banned all the time, but there are simply way too many of them to clear out completely and they always come back, usually by stealing accounts.
Hackers are really only an issue on the last-gen consoles and PC, with the Xbox One's and PS4's anti-cheat systems having yet to be broken. Some of Rockstar's older methods of getting rid of the hackers managed to shoot over the target a little, forcing them to be rolled back.
The most notorious such example was the anti-cheating method implemented during the Ill-Gotten Gains Part 2 update, which not only prevented hacking, but killed off mods altogether and broke the game by lowering performance to near unplayable levels on PC.
It seems that Rockstar's latest attempt to rid GTA Online of cheaters caused some overkill yet again. The anti-cheat method implemented in Further Adventures in Finance and Felony is a tad trigger happy and issues unwarranted bans to players who weren't hacking, but rather ran system utilities which had in-game overlays.
Some programs frequently used by PC players while gaming, either to monitor their frame rate or to communicate with friends, include special interfaces which can be accessed while playing without having to alt+tab out of the game. This is achieved with overlays, which places the metrics or options on the screen above the game window.
Since these are no doubt in some form of communication with the game client, the heightened sensitivity of GTA Online's hacking watchdog might mistake them for some method of cheating and therefore issues a ban to the user.
Many of these programs are entirely innocent and unfortunately many players have gotten their Online rights suspended. If you have yet to log-in to GTA Online since the update was released, or have so far avoided a ban but use these programs, here is a list of programs the overlays of which might get you in (hopefully temporary) trouble.
It should go without saying that you need to deactivated mods, trainers and any other game-altering files before going Online as well.
Allegedly accounts wrongfully banned are being progressively unbanned and while some claim the issue has been fixed, reports of unjustified bans are still coming in.
On the flip side, while the massive influx of Finance and Felony themed discussion may just be drowning out the malcontent, there has been practically zero complaining about hackers since the update dropped. We'll have to wait for a few days for things to return to the status quo before it can be definitively determined if the new anti-cheat measures work.
Then again, the hackers will probably find a workaround after some time. There is the factor of Rockstar using peer-to-peer servers, which basically reduces security to a fraction of what internal servers have.
Have you been wrongfully banned from GTA Online since the update launched?
