https://www.vg247.com/2017/06/16/gta-5-single-player-mod-suite-openiv-enabled-malicious-mods-in-gta-online-says-rockstar/

GTA Online is full of cheaters on PC, and always has been. Apparently that’s somehow OpenIV’s fault.

The GTA 5 modding community has been seriously bummed out by word that Take Two sent a cease and desist letter to OpenIV creator GooD-NTS. Since the suite underpins an enormous number of popular single-player mods, the end of its development is a real blow.

The news came as a surprise to GTA 5 mod fans, as GTA developer Rockstar has itself promoted OpenIV mods in the past. Now, in a statement provided to PC Gamer, Rockstar has commented on the situation.

“Take-Two’s actions were not specifically targeting single player mods. Unfortunately OpenIV enables recent malicious mods that allow harassment of players and interfere with the GTA Online experience for everybody,” Rockstar said.

“We are working to figure out how we can continue to support the creative community without negatively impacting our players.”

This is all kind of amazing because the OpenIV has been specifically designed for use only with the single-player portion of GTA 5, and not GTA Online, the multiplayer side of things. That’s not to say malicious players couldn’t leverage the tools provided in ways not intended by OpenIv’s creator, of course.

Even so, with or without OpenIV GTA Online on PC is and always has been an absolute cesspool of cheaters and hackers, and Rockstar has never seemed inclined to do anything about it in the past.

What makes all this very sad is that we don’t believe wiping out OpenIV will bring about any noticeable quality of life improvements for GTA Online players on PC – but it will hugely impact the machinima and modding communities who very much keep GTA in our hearts and minds with their amazing creations. These people don’t funnel any money into Take Two via GTA Online’s microtransactions though. One can’t help but remember recent comments from take Two about how it could squeeze even more money out of GTA Online, hey.

Has anybody noticed a recent increase of cheating in the PC version of GTA Online, as Rockstar suggests?

http://kotaku.com/someone-actually-ate-that-famous-and-giant-gta-san-an-1795140941

Last year, some people became obsessed with an old fast food order that happens in GTA San Andreas. And now, a competitive eater tracked down all the food in real life, ordered it, and then tried to eat it all in one sitting.

Matt Stonie is Youtuber who creates food challenge videos, such as eating a giant bowl of Cheerios. At some point, he came across an internet post that detailed exactly what a GTA character named Big Smoke ordered in-game, and decided to use that as inspiration for one 9000+ calorie mega-meal that spans multiple fast-food restaurants. Behold:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVKJfLbz5yQ

In GTA San Andreas, during the mission “Drive-Thru”, you and a few other characters go through a Cluckin Bell drive-thru. Big Smoke, one of the leaders of the Grove Street Family gang, proceeds to order a ridiculous amount of food. His complete order is:

Two number 9s

A number 9 large

A number 6 with extra dip

A number 7

Two number 45s

One with cheese

And a large soda

It’s one thing to figure out what the real world version of this order would look like, but actually seeing it on a table is another thing. Something I didn’t realize when I first played San Andreas is that nearly every item Big Smoke orders comes with fries and a soda. It takes Stonie 35 minutes to complete the challenge!

https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/07/nintendo-playstation-now-runs-cd-games/

It's about as close to a production console as you'll get.

It was no small feat when Terry and Dan Diebold got their hands on a prototype of the fabled Nintendo PlayStation, but there has always been a catch to it: its signature feature, the CD drive, couldn't actually play games. Even a load of repair work barely got the drive to turn on. Well, the end is finally in sight. Professional tinkerer Ben Heckendorn (aka Ben Heck) has managed to get the CD drive working, including games. The solution, as he explains, involved replacing some "questionable" capacitors and "jiggling some things around" -- he was caught off-guard when things started working. The biggest challenge now is finding games to use with the near-mythological system.

As you might have gathered given the hardware's sudden cancellation, no one wrote official games for this Nintendo/Sony hybrid (at least, that we know of). To date, enthusiasts have had to write games based on emulators that can only take vague stabs at what the full console can do. That's borne out in Ben's early testing. One homebrew game had legions of glitches until the developer modified it, while another title just boots to a black screen. You're not going to see some long-lost Super Mario Bros. game, in short. This will, however, encourage coders to write games that could take advantage of Super Nintendo-level processing power and CD storage.

And even with the dearth of software, this latest work might be worth it for the insights into what Nintendo and Sony were planning. For instance, it's clear that the CD drive wasn't casually tacked on -- there's an SNES program sending instructions directly to a relevant controller chip, instead of through an add-on bus. Ben is sending the console back to the Diebolds, but he can be satisfied at having answered some of the video game world's longstanding mysteries.

http://www.gta5cheats.com/gta-online-now-kicks-cheaters-gameplay/

This is what I call an upgrade to the anti-cheat.

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.

http://www.gta5cheats.com/gta-online-avoid-innocent-bans/

They’re rare, but they happen. Here is how to avoid the hammer

One of the hot topics in GTA Online these days is that of false positive bans, wherein innocent players somehow trip the new anti-cheat system built into the game.

For starters, it’s important to point out that in spite of this article, you shouldn’t be too scared of this happening to you. False positive bans are extremely rare, with the vast majority of these claims being BS said by hackers and modders trying to cover their tracks. There is no need to play in fear, or staying away from the game because of this since there’s only a small risk.

That said, the risk is still there. Sometimes, the anti-cheat can get a little trigger happy, and then the banhammer drops on the wrong person. Sure, in most games, this wouldn’t be an issue, as the victim would simply contact customer support and have the problem squared away.

In the case of GTA Online, however, getting banned isn’t that easy to escape. In fact, it’s downright impossible. A recent change in the ban policy of the game has introduced a new clause which prevents the appealing of bans. All punishments are final, regardless of circumstance. Trying to contact support because of a ban, be it false or no, will simply get you an auto-response and nothing more.

The nature of the bans is also pretty damn strict. Instead of simply being prevented from playing the game’s Online portion for a few days, access is restricted for longer periods of time and all of your progress is wiped. No matter how much you played, how high your rank was and how many rides you bought, upon the ban being lifted, you’re back to rank 1, arriving as LSIA. The only thing untouched would be Shark Card cash since you bought that with real money.

With these things at stake, avoiding a false ban is something players are understandably interested in. We can only reiterate – these cases are very, very rare. That said, there are a number of precautions you can take to further reduce the risk of getting slapped with a ban.

While Rockstar’s official stance on single player modding is “okay so long as you don’t mess with Online”, the new and stricter rules made modding much more risky, even in single player. While you won’t be banned in Online for running mods only in GTA 5’s single-player mode, it can be tricky disabling them.

Players run the risk of accidentally joining an Online game with mods still active, thus triggering the anti-cheat system and incurring the ban. Most mods try to be user-friendly by making their files easy to quarantine before going Online, however some others litter your GTA 5 folder with bits and pieces of their files, making it easier to miss something.

Mods are a sure-fire way to get banned in GTA Online. They are, after all, exactly what the system was designed to catch. However, losing years of progress just because you forgot a stray file in a folder somewhere is bound to be infuriating, since you tried to keep up Rockstar’s ToS and only made a mistake.

These cases would be where appeals could come it handy. While it makes sense that actual hackers get slapped with bans, but no way of getting back into the game, it seems unfair not to provide innocent players who made an honest mistake a sort of safety-net to protect their progress and game privileges.

One way to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen even though you’ve modded single-player before is to get a clean install of the game. That way there is a guarantee that no stray mod files stay in the system, and that you’ll be playing with a clear, stock version of the game that the anti-cheat system will recognize as fair-play. This would, however, require you to uninstall and re-install the game entirely.

Another “common” cause of false-positive bans, as far as reports are to be believed, are various third-party programs with in-game overlays. The problem here is that a number of overlays function on a similar technical basis as GTA Online mod-menus and hacks, thus ticking off the watchdog. Not all overlays cause bans, however there is no way to know for sure whether a particular program will trigger a ban unless you have a fantastic grasp of coding principles and access to the source code.

That said, the community has compiled a list of high-risk programs. Discord’s overlay is often implicated, and the Rivatuner overlay for the MSI Afterburner program is almost guaranteed to get you banned. Teamspeak, Bandicam and OBS are suspects, though many claim to use them frequently without any issue.

Funnily enough, the official Windows 10 Recorder is said to be a high-risk program, as is Fraps, Mirillis Action and XSplit. If you want to err on the side of caution, stay away from D3DGear and Dxtory, though these fall into the category of being suspect, as again, they are often used with no ill effect.

While the overlays of these programs might tick off the anti-cheat, keep in mind that using them without the overlay is perfectly safe. Sure, you might need to Alt+Tab out of GTA Online once or twice, but they are manageable without the overlays under normal circumstances, so you can still play safely without having to give these utilities up.

Another thing to avoid, no matter how tempting, are certain glitches that pop-up every now and then. It might be tough deciding whether a glitch is safe or not, however a good way to gauge risk is to see how directly it is related to the acquisition of cash. To be clear in the distinction, glitches are errors in the game that arise from programming bugs and do not use third-party tampering, like hacks.

Money glitches, as rare as they are, and duplication glitches, both of which lead to the near instant acquisition of high amounts of cash, are likely to tick off the anti-cheat. There is a general limit to how much cash one can make legitimately in GTA Online in a given time-span without buying Shark Cards, and if this limit is exceeded, the anti-cheat will assume foul play.

Other glitches can be safe. Outfit glitches, which have nothing to do with money and simply allow you to wear special outfits in Freemode, will never get you banned. Various glitches used to circumvent cooldowns, such as this method used in Import/Export, are also safe, since they generally don’t throw large amounts of cash at you.

You might want to keep these suggestions in mind for future sessions of GTA Online, or you might not. Even if you purposefully do the exact opposite of what is written in this guide, but don’t outright hack, you’re still probably going to be playing to your merry with nary a ban in sight. These are just suggestions, not rules. That said, consider how annoyed you would be, should you be wrongfully slapped with a ban costing you all your progress.

Have you ever heard of verified cases of false-positive bans in GTA Online?