User blog:Smurfynz/Rockstar declares war on GTAV Modifications?

There has been quite a bit of 2nd and 3rd hand information flying around over the last couple of days about Rockstar Games coming down hard on any users with modified versions of GTA V (primarily mentioning PC version but obviously applying to the console versions which have been modified too).

The rumour: Online bans for Story Mode modifications.

A few quoted sources I have seen:
 * This Youtube clip
 * This Attackofthefanboy article
 * This Youtube clip

So, the EULA has been changed to align with what I would term a "standard no-reverse-engineering" clause.

This isn't something we're likely to see an official Newswire announcement about, although there have been a couple in the last 18 months to announce their crack-downs on on-line modders.

I've never been heavily into modding my games. I have a few modded installs of GTA San Andreas but they are mostly visual mods (vehicle models, texture replacements, some handling and language file updates etc). It was certainly a long time after I had completed the game a couple of times before I applied any modifications at all.

I have never modded GTA IV and had no intention of modding GTA V.

Rockstar do not have the same history of embracing the mod community that say Bethesda (Elder Scrolls) or Valve (Counter Strike etc) do. There has never been any official suggestion that they would actively encourage mods the same way Bethesda did with the Steam Workshop for Skyrim, for example.

As a victim of early PS3 online modders ($192 million in unwanted shared cash distributed to all lobby players that still to this day has screwed up my main player stats on PS3 which also migrated to PS4 and PC), I support 100% any crack-down on modders in public lobbies GTA Online.

That said, banning players from Online due to detection of Story Mode only modifications does concern me in a "what I do with the software in the privacy of my own home" kind of way. It makes me think there is much less of a disconnect between the two modes than Rockstar would have us believe and anything that can be modded in Story Mode could potentially have impact in Online. This is not altogether a surprise to me, since we have seen mods and glitches to get so-called "exclusive" content from online to Story mode and vice versa.

I personally doubt that the Online bans are solely for having Story Mode mods. I would think that that is an easy red flag to alert the Rockstar support team to investigate the account fully and if there are any Online discrepancies found, only then would the ban hammer fall.