The introduction of a new anti-cheat for GTA Online on PC was met with surprise and excitment by the community. Rockstar Games stunned players on Tuesday by adding a 3rd party kernel level anti-cheat to the PC version of GTA Online a short 9 years after launch.
Whilst some fans were overjoyed, there was a decent amount of scepticism given how cheaters have prevailed for nearly a decade. There truth of how GTA Online is now lays somewhere in the middle. Let’s start with some positives.
Free Mod Menus Ending
According to a Discord message sent by someone on behalf of popular free mod menu Kiddions, it is over for it. The new anti-cheat has caused Kiddions to no longer work and the developers behind it to stop development. The subreddit dedicated to the mod menu has many posts from users upset they are unable to mod GTA Online.
According to the spokesperson, the future of the “Modest Menu” is very uncertain and this is most likely the end for now. We will keep you all informed as more news arrives. For now, you are able to disable BattlEye if you wish to mod offline in Story Mode, or enable BattlEye and simply play GTA Online without mods or menus safely.”
Anti-Cheat Bypassed Already?
On the flip side, some community members are already talking about how BattlEye has been bypassed. This was inevitable but it has been less than 24 hours… Ultimately, BattlEye is raising the barrier to enter for cheaters. Free mod menus such as Kiddions will be gone, at least for a bit.
The new anti-cheat also features hardware banning. GTA V is so cheap these days that if someone is banned, they simply buy a new copy of the game. Rockstar will now be able to ban on a hardware basis reducing the ability to hack as frequently. It will take people spending money on new game copies and PCs to get into hacking again.
GTA V Player Count Plummets
A side effect of BattlEye now live in GTA Online is a huge drop in player count. GTA V has seen its lowest average concurrent player count in a long time. It has maintained 140-160k players during peak times for a while now. However, GTA V dipped as low as 82,000 yesterday in a similar period.
The reason behind this is a combination of BattlEye preventing cheaters but also innocent players. GTA V is hugely successful on Valve’s Steam Deck device and among Linux players. Whilst story mode is still playable on Linux-based devices, it appears many were playing GTA Online. You can learn more about the Steam Deck and Linux issues here.
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1 Comment
come on this is bull,… the update is causing mayham allready. Players cant login to servers, and on top of that there is still a menu working ,and many will soon follow. Why doesnt rockster put in some real effort for the safety of the original playerbase, the pc players???