Rockstar bans GTA5 modders who made their own multiplayer

A bunch of modders have been banned from their GTA 5 accounts for creating their own multiplayer service, according to Eurogamer. Alas, Rockstar’s banhammer has struck them down anyway.

We will bring you any new information on GTA V, new mods and more as soon as it becomes available.

The user provided evidence that their Steam account (permanently linked to their Rockstar account) is now banned from all Rockstar games which require a Social Club log-in – including GTA5’s single-player mode.

FiveM is an in-development mod allowing Grand Theft Auto V owners to play together on dedicated servers, separate from the centralized, semi-persistent competitive/co-operative space of Grand Theft Auto Online.

FiveM project was used to incorporate basic versions of maps from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and GTA: London in the GTA 5 Engine.

Update: Qaisjp has put up a blog post clarifying several points about the mod. First, he insisted that using the mod will not lead to bans, as it is strictly single-player, despite the online component.

The modding group argues that its project should be allowed to remain, because it uses single-player code and even includes piracy protection. “FiveM is the only thing out there on the GTA modding scene to do so”.

The developers not only banned the guys who created the mod, called FiveM, but also banned a number of other people that they think are affiliated with it for instance the moderator of the subreddit related to the game. “So when modders make their own third party client, they get angry and ban them”.

It may be that Rockstar’s anti-piracy tech is simply flagging up a mod that interacts with Social Club as an attempt to modify the game’s online portion. This could either be an automated banwave or a manual ban, but nobody else but those close to the mod have been banned. In fact (and ironically), one of the primary purposes of FiveM was to comply with restrictions on modding in GTA Online, which Rockstar warned in May “could give players an unfair advantage, disrupt gameplay, or cause griefing”. That wording is vague enough that it could apply to the creation of online workarounds like FiveM, but thus far it seems that merely using the mod has not drawn Rockstar’s ire.