What’s this? Chaos in the realm! The servers of GTA Online run rampant with dastardly rogues, making use of underhanded tactics to intrude upon the good nature of the fine citizens of Los Santos.

But seriously, GTA Online has a bit of a hacker problem, and Rockstar is getting a tad angry about the whole thing. Here’s the thing, cheaters fail to understand how much damage GTA 5 cheats, like those for those Xbox 360, actually cause. Let’s look at it this way: you’re a cheater. You have an aim-bot activated and some sort of invulnerability hack. You go online, play a few matches, rack up the kills and point and whatnot, get called a worthless cheating punk a few times, and you ruin what is probably a large chunk of a few dozen people’s relaxation time for the day. But who cares, right? You got the points, you got the achievement, you got the rewards, and the only thing that happened was that a few players logged off annoyed that day, right?

Wrong. Firstly, and this is me speaking, not Rockstar, but what’s the point, eh? You didn’t achieve any of that, the hacks did. You’re still bad at GTA V! You’re still crap! Why do people play games? For fun. If you’re not putting any effort into the bloody thing, how will you derive any enjoyment from it?

Secondly, and this is a longer one, you’re doing a hell of a lot more damage than you might think. This is best depicted by Rockstar’s recent crackdown on cheaters. See, a while back, when GTA V first launched, Rockstar’s wasn’t all over the cheating issue, because it was not that much of an issue. They had some basic cheat-detection going on with hidden stats and a report system, but cases that required bans were few. Of course, the fact that hacking and cheating on consoles is a tad more difficult than it is on PC might have contributed to this, but recently console cheating is on a rise as well. Rockstar played things cool for a while. They adopted the rather humorous approach of grouping hackers into cheater-only lobbies instead of outright banning them, which gained the company quite a bit of praise. Then they pulled that stunt with the Duke’O’Death. The Duke was a unique vehicle added to the game as a reward for existing GTA V players who made the jump to the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One from a last-gen version of the game. The Duke was a ticked out muscle car with insane melee damage and speed, making it a extremely over powered and thus a balance issue, which is why Rockstar restricted it to the single-player portion of GTA V. A few players thought it would be a hark to smuggle the car into GTA Online and plough through the opposition with the Dukes, and then store the vehicles in their garages for later use. Obviously, Rockstar realised what was going on as the whole internet went nuts over this. Now, instead of simply plugging up the hole, Rockstar opted to sneak in a little new feature with the next update. To the surprise of anyone who exploited the loophole, after they logged in to GTA Online after installing a small patch, anyone who sat into a Duke was turned into a pile of guilty ashes, as all of the vehicles were rigged to blow.

All of this was in good fun, however, unfortunately the hackers stretched Rockstar’s patience much too thin, and recently, the crackdown began. The brunt of the attack came with patches 1.27 and 1.28, which effectively shot down mods on PC entirely. GTA V enjoys a vibrant modding community on PC, and Rockstar has stated on multiple occasions that they have no issue with single-player mods being created for the game. However, they’ve also said that they will not jeopardise the safety of GTA Online in favor of PC modding. 1.27 added a host of hidden stats to the game as well as altering the way scripts worked in the game, which broke all mods. After modders managed to get their creations working again, 1.28 dropped wherein Rockstar went all out and ended up breaking the game as a whole with a bunch of dead code.

So, basically, if you cheat, you don’t only hurt a dozen or so other players, you hurt the modding community, the sanity of the game developers, and the gaming industry as a whole. Good job.