Cheating and Cheats

Last Updated: 21 January 2014

After learning about a series of unfortunate Events that saw several members here at SC fall foul of the rules in GTAO -- rules that are both published and NOT published -- we felt it would be a really good idea and a nice bit of what we like to think of as Community Service to cover both sides of the coin so to speak -- that being the cheat actions you can get away with doing, but also the stuff that you can not get away with doing...

First, we should address the Activities, actions, and gaps that are widely being shared but that Rockstar considers to be violations of their fair-play policy and so could easily see a player punished or even banned from the servers...

The following issues, actions, and seemingly system-built choices that appear to be legitimate game play have been deemed to be a violation of Rockstar's Fair Play Rules and subsequently the use of any of these actions or bugs are definitely a violation of the rules and could/will get you banned or at least punished by Rockstar...

The Mission Replay Button: In the course of normal game play there are certain Missions those payout in reward money and/or RP is such that believe it or not simply using the replay feature built into the game could get you in trouble.

The brew-ha-ha was created when Rockstar noticed that players were hitting the Mission Replay button on specific "Contact" Missions because they missions in question, while relatively easy to complete, paid a reward that was disproportionate to the amount of effort that the player puts into it.

Essentially Rockstar has taken the position that the Missions were only intended to be completed one time as a paid Event (ie it was anticipated by Rockstar that the player would complete a making contact mission just the one time, thus fulfilling the spirit of the mission, having made that contact and added that charactet to their contacts, at which point it seemed to Rockstar that the player should understand that the gravy train had reached the station.

Death in GTAO is not free and can be very annoying. At least the first time you are wasted you get an amusing CS for the trouble.

Instead players took advantage of the Replay button in much the same manner in which they would have done in a race or other activity -- the presumption on the part of the player being that Rockstar would not have put the button there if it was not OK to use it. Rockstar disagrees.

The official reaction to this, posted to the appropriate thread on the official boards for the game indicates that if the player "enjoys" the mission so much, they should allow it to completely end, closing it out, so that any subsequent replays once the mission was properly closed out would not result in the payment of the reward associated with the mission -- and which Rockstar drives home the point -- was only meant to be collected once.

The announcement was made that this "hole" in the mission and reward system would be closed in an upcoming update but that until it is in fact closed the mission should be considered by the players to be a one-time-only pay-out, and that abuse of this now widely known (and apparently abused) hole would result in punishment up to and including perma-bans in the case of the most serious abusers.

Roughly translated what this means in a nutshell is that the script to issue the reward for a handful of contact Missions did not properly "close out" the reward phase of the mission until AFTER the player left the mission instance, so as long as the player stayed within that instance (that is to say never properly ended the mission and terminated the instance) they would be able to repeat the mission over-and-over and collect a new reward each time.

The wizards at Rockstar have announced that the in-game money counterfeiting Exploit has been fully identified and they have walked-back the cheat to its principal authors and offenders, and have proceeded to take punitive action against these gamers!

While we will not be detailing how this cheat worked, there were some issues that you will want to know about because the cheaters, in an attempt to muddy the water and obviously in the hopes that by spreading out the benefits of the ill-gotten-gains thought (as it turns out erroneously mind you) that if enough people - guilty AND innocent alike -- were seen to have benefited from the exploit it would be less likely that the powers that be would seek to punish for this egregious violation of the game economy.

Oh man were they wrong!

So basically the Cheaters counterfeited loads of in-game money, and then gifted large quantities to strangers in the game -- which has these otherwise innocent recipients of the counterfeit money worried about what will happen to them. The good news? Nothing will happen other than the money being removed from their bank accounts and wallets of their Characters.

Not only will the innocent not be made to suffer, they will be allowed to keep any Items that they purchased with the counterfeit funds (though again, the actual money will be removed from their accounts.

Here is the official word from Rockstar:

Question: I was minding my own business and suddenly received a huge amount of money in GTA online from a cheater. Am I in trouble?

Answer: To keep the game play environment as fair as possible for legitimate players, we routinely do sweeps to separate out cheaters and modders, and to reverse any illegitimate transactions. These sweeps are based on in-game automated detection, examination of suspicious game play statistics, and also manually-reviewed evidence submitted by the Community. If you were not engaged in any willful cheating or exploiting yourself, you do not need to worry about getting caught up in our work to separate out cheaters from the rest of the population.

Remember, if you encounter a player who you suspect is cheating, or you know for a fact that they are cheating, while you are not required to do so, if you desire to do so you can report them to the powers that be by sending an email to [email protected].

According to the official news posting about this Event they (Rockstar) will be investigating any reports sent to that email address.

While most of the following methods are not really cheats in the traditional sense of the word, they are with the notion that if a player is not aware of them then they cannot avail themselves of them, and so those who are aware of the situation, action, or circumstance wield something of an advantage over the less aware or ill-informed...

That being the case, we still think these are tricks or tactics that are worth knowing and taking advantage of...

Shared Bank Cheat

Unlike the single-player mode of GTA5 in GTAO all of your Characters share the same bank, which means that you can milk the new player Tutorial for very easy money - not fast money mind you but very easy.

Bearing in mind that if you do well in each segment of the Tutorial you should easily be able to bank over $6k so replaying the tute with your second character slot and then depositing the money in your shared bank before you delete that second character and rinse and repeat the process is an easy tactic.

Quick Traveling Cheat

To rapidly move from one side of the map to a place you want to be elsewhere, you can open the map and select a race in teh area that you want to travel to, then enter the lobby, and drop out of it.

When you exit the instance you will return to the world near the start of the race location on the map.

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS