Grand Theft Auto Online PC players receive numerous bannings after latest update

Grand Theft Auto Online’s community is reporting a wave of bans, either mistaken or for no good reason, following the game’s latest update. The bans seem to affect the PC version of the game as opposed to the console editions.

The bans in question, which last for 30 days, seem to coincide with Grand Theft Auto Online’s latest update — the “Southern San Andreas Super Sport Series” that rolled out on Friday and added a new vehicle and stock-car racing events to the open world game. It seems that in addressing a car-selling exploit, some players have gotten banned on suspicion of unpermitted modding behavior despite doing nothing wrong.

“Rockstar’s anticheat seems to have truly failed, as, according to a post in the GTA online discord, a user using their own anticheat detected everyone else in their session was a modder,” says this post hailing attention to the banwave in the GTA Online subreddit. In other words, people doing nothing wrong are being singled out as illegal modders, resulting in a raft of bans without any explanation why.

Naturally, anyone banned always claims they didn’t do anything wrong, but the scope of the banwave in GTA Online suggests something is amiss. In some cases, banned players have less than 10 hours of game time which suggests a mistake or overreach on the part of whatever is moderating the game. Polygon has asked Rockstar Games for comment. But if the outcry in their own forums hasn’t provoked a response over the weekend, I doubt we’ll see one here.

The fact this is limited to PC players has some speculating that an issue relating to a mod menu, and anyone who has it installed is getting the axe. The so-called “tunables” update on PC was updated again early Sunday, which suggests an awareness of the problem and an attempt to fix it.