GTA Online cheat program creator ordered to pay $150k in damages - Sensationalist Headlines

Creating a multiplayer game with what is essentially 0 security or even a shred of effort in trying to prevent cheaters deserves to be cheated in. Like even when you look at games like CS:GO where the anticheat is just pitiful, at least you can see they are TRYING. With Rockstar, it's like they don't even give a shit.

People not properly preventing someone else from doing something bad doesn't mean they accept the responsibility for the thing that person did. Nobody forced this moron to sell cheats for a multi-player game. It was his decision to actively make money off of a product the sole purpose of which is to ruin the game experience for legitimate players. He's a parasite.

I'm not saying that. I'm saying from a development perspective, Rockstar should NOT solely rely on suing people as their main defence against cheating. A decent anti-cheat would keep all the noobs way and expose the more talented programmers in that specific field, and would then leave Rockstar with less of a problem to deal with manually. If someone owns a huge cheat site, send a C&D and pretty much guaranteed they will take it down unless they are offshore, in which case the only option is to improve their AC anyway. If it's a smaller site or independent, they can usually just bully them into stopping by flexing their resources and just threatening to sue with a C&D. Not to mention, maybe doing it this way would expose them to some decent programmers who could actually HELP them improve their anti-cheat/deal with the cheating situation. I've talked to many programmers in this field and even have some friends that do it, and a majority of them name the same exact reasons consistently. Because it's fun to break games that have been developed poorly. It makes them a very good amount of money to a point where some of them don't even have to work. They know a majority of the companies wont do anything about it. To quote my friend, “It's free money for certain games because I can make a cheat in a couple of days due to how poor their security is and maintain it for years and earn 3x what I would make at a regular programming job.” Note: One of my friends who's involved in coding cheats even told me if a games company actually offered him a job in security/anti-cheat development he would take it since morally he'd feel a lot better about it and his dream is actually working at a game dev company. So if you look at those points, you can pretty much see that if the security was improved, some people probably wouldn't even bother. Obviously SOME would still tackle it, and like I said before, those are the ones Rockstar could then deal with manually by sending C&D's, etc... So yeah, call them parasites, call them whatever you want, fact is, companies could be doing a HELL of a lot more to prevent cheaters, especially Rockstar in this case. There are so many "easy" patches they could implement to fix a majority of the griefing issues. Once again, companies NEED to do this because if you seriously think people in general will stop trying to get unfair advantages against others, you are living in a delusion. We are human, whether it be casinos, games, relationships, people are always looking to "cheat" the system and that will never stop.

Just a minor correction - it's T2 sending the C&D's, not R*. T2 also seem to love going overboard (hiring PI's to spy on mod developers like FiveM and GTAMP for example) probably to get their name in the headlines and for their stock price to jump a notch as a result. I completely agree with you on your points though. I feel R* have tried numerous times to prevent modding online but it's come down to bad initial design (everything is P2P, so is piss easy to do something on your end and have it appear on the other connected clients as well - all whilst being unverified by the server) which the only fix for would be to tear it down and start again (which may have happened in RDR2, but we'll soon see). It just looks like T2 have decided to spend some of that $3 billion+ profit from GTA sales to target mod developers instead because it's now easier to do that than to make an actual AC which works (or to license out another AC like Battleye which is known to work). Ironically enough, I'm guessing a large portion of their "continued" sales of GTA are modders buying new accounts after the old ones are banned - which just ends up putting more money in T2's "let's sue everyone" pot.

Actually, there are no "easy" patches to fix GTAO. The entire game is fundamentally broken because it operates on a console-style P2P session system instead of dedicated servers. No dedicated servers and a peer architecture means the following things are unfixable without R* reengineering GTAO for PC to use a client-server model, which they're never going to do for GTAO and RDR2O: Any session change, including loading any kind of event/minigame lobby or leaving it, forces a >20-second wait while your client reconnects and resynchronizes with everyone else in the session. Every single time. Some car races take less time to complete than the loading screens before and after the race. Anyone can cheat because whatever their client says is going on is what other clients make happen, because every client is a peer with equal authority. You're a flying toilet shitting out 15 grenades a second while exploding every other player in the server? Sure, no problem, your client is sending that info to the other players in the session and their game clients happily let it happen. Installing a hack is as easy as dropping one DLL file into the GTAV folder. Anyone hacking can choose to block hacker reports made against them, because the hack report first goes to the hacker's own client and their own client reports the report to the server, and it's trivial to mod the client to just not let any reports against yourself be sent. R* cannot stop any of this at a fundamental level, because hackers are merely using the built-in game commands that are absolutely necessary for managing peer sessions. R* cannot distinguish, in the general sense, between an unmodified game client doing its thing and a hacked game client doing hacky things, and it would be almost as tedious and time-consuming as implementing dedicated servers to write rules to tell what is "normal" execution and what is abnormal and hack-related. All R* can do is apply supervisory anticheat to rabidly scan for cheat menus, hurting performance. GTAO is fundamentally insecure and nothing short of reengineering the entire network side of things there is no fix for griefing. If R* could apply effective anticheat against this problem Take Two wouldn't need to threaten the modding/cheating community with legal consequences. All T2 can do to "improve" the security of their game is to try and kill off the hacking ecosystem externally via legal intimidation and using the court as a mace, because it's unthinkable to them to have paid for the expenses of dedicated servers and do a proper job in the first fucking place.

Damn. I think that was the cheat menu I bought. Doesn't matter much anymore, I guess. I already dropped myself like 800 billion or some shit. I play fivem more anyway It was a really good one, too. You signed an agreement before you bought it that you'd only use it on people who wanted it, and you wouldn't go around shitting up lobbies. It had a way of seeing if other hackers were using the same menu, and you were actually able to report (with proof of course) people using the menu and shitting up lobbies with instant kills and stuff. Lots of people got their menu licenses revoked for doing that kind of shit. Really dumb he's getting fucked that hard, though. I'm sure the fine is far more than he ever made from the menu. Funny how they're putting far more effort into fucking over the menu makers than they are actually patching the exploits the menu used.

They'd have to rewrite GTAO's networking and deploy dedicated servers to actually fix the problem. The time to do that would've been before the GTAV PC launch, and since they didn't all they can do is apply bandaids by trying to shut down menus through legal intimidation.

Man, the majority of hackers I've met in GTA:O have enriched the experience. All the fun stuff is locked behind many hours of grind to coax you into buying overpriced shark cards. Some hackers are complete asses who just wants to grief, but most of the ones I've met have spawned vehicles and money, leading to a better experience. It doesn't help that Rockstar uses peer-to-peer instead of paying for actual servers. I do get though that this is a breach of ToS and all that, I personally think they went waaay too hard on this guy.