Rockstar Games issued a new set of Community Guidelines on Thursday alongside their GTA Online Event Week Newswire post. Plus, the company has fully launched their GTA Online voice chat moderation system that has been in testing over the past several months.
Community Guidelines You Must Follow
Rockstar Games noted in their latest article that they have published this new set of rules to go hand in hand with their recently updated Terms of Service. It has been made to call out various actions the company deems unacceptable within their community. They then linked to the new set of guidelines.
The new Community Guidelines webpage is headed up by the classic Rockstar Games motto “Say Sorry, Be Nice!” It is followed by a statement about their gaming community, not just GTA Online but Red Dead Online and all of their games
To ensure a positive gaming experience — including a welcoming, fun, and fair environment for our community — we encourage everyone to follow these basic guiding principles and to adhere to our Community Guidelines.
Rockstar Games
There are four key pillars that make up the Community Guidelines: Fair Play, Respect, Safety, and Consequences.
Fair Play covers things such as cheating and griefing. As GTA Online players especially those on PC will know, hacking and such has been a huge problem. Rockstar have taken measures in an attempt to stop bad actors but ultimately it is not at the level players would like.
Respect goes into detail on how any sort of bullying, discrimination, violence etc will not be tolerated. Same goes for promotion of acts that can cause real harm to fellow players such as doxxing, scams, illegal acts and more.
In terms of consequences, Rockstar say any violation of these guidelines can see action taken on the player’s account. It does vary on a case by case basis. It can go from just feature suspensions and account bans to reporting the situation to law enforcement. It is recommended you read the new Community Guidelines in full here.
These guidelines apply to all aspects of our online game experiences — including voice and text communication, or any community-created content.
We strongly encourage players to report any prohibited/inappropriate behavior and to continue to help keep our games safe.
Rockstar Games
Rockstar’s Voice Chat System is now in play
Another related topic mentioned in the Event Week post are changes to Text and Voice Chat. The game studio say that in the past few months, steps have been taken to “reduce instances of text chat spam and abuse in GTA Online sessions on PC.” One other change that was made in a previous GTA Online patch is how voice chat is disabled by default. You can turn it on in settings but moving forward, it will be off until you activate it.
Speaking of voice chat, Rockstar have confirmed their new AI-powered moderation system has launched across GTA Online fully. Last year, Rockstar talked about how they’d be testing a new moderation system to help out filtering bad actors in GTA Online.
Over the course of a few months, Rockstar slowly rolled it out to the various platforms and amount of GTAO lobbies. With the release of The Chop Shop, Rockstar stated a 2024 launch was anticipated. That day has now come.
It will be interesting to see how this is used and to what effect. Some GTA Online players have shared some concern over it but so far nothing has arisen in the testing period. It’s possible we’ll only hear things now Rockstar say it has fully launched.
What are your thoughts on this all? Let us know down in the comments. To keep up to date with every GTA Online news update, make sure to check back to RockstarINTEL and sign up to our newsletter for a weekly round-up of all things Rockstar Games.
