Rockstar Banning Single Player Mods In Grand Theft Auto V PC
It looks like people playing the single player portion of Grand Theft Auto on PC are getting banned too.
A lot of players have left negative reviews for Grand Theft Auto V on the game’s
official listing on Steam. Some of them were banned for using mods on GTA Online, but others were banned using mods while playing the single player mode.
One Steam user named Sumner said:
“Single player is where it’s at! No wannabe ‘Rockstars’ to ruin your fun and give you a ban for the simplest things… Apparently there are people getting banned for modding in SP.”
Another user named Sangre said:
“If you thought you were going to get a GTA optimized for PC, forget it. Rockstar once again is doing everything in there power to stop single player mods and 3rd party patches, despite all of the aspects where the game is lacking”
Other users were more specific as some players have been using a mod called “FOV” in Grand Theft Auto V. FOV stands for “Field of Vision” and is a mod that allows PC gamers to fit the game properly on certain monitors.
Steam user Ronald McRegan explained it perfectly:
“Being the “definitive edition” I expected it to take into account the strengths of PC gaming, including the ability to mod games. The worst example of this, and the main reason I gave it a negative review is the FOV mods. The default FOV is not natural for PC gamers, even at maximum settings it’s only able to see half the windscreen and half the side window when driving, and you have little awareness of your surroundings in first-person. If you try to fix this yourself with simple mods, your account is banned without warning for an unspecified period of time.”
Most of the negative reviews for Grand Theft Auto V were made recently. Hopefully Rockstar stops banning people for using simple graphical mods used during single player.
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GTA V PC Mods Officially Blocked by the End User License Agreement
As
we reported yesterday, many players have found themselves getting banned from GTA Online for using mods. This would be understandable, but the mods in question only impacted the single player portion of GTA V, leaving GTA Online untouched. Many wondered why Rockstar would do this, and what justification they had to ban players for using mods, however it seems that the End User License Agreement (EULA) that players agree to
explicitly prohibits the use of any mods within the game.
The specific text reads “You agree not to: reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, display, perform, prepare derivative works based on, or otherwise modify the Software, in whole or in part”. This part of the EULA has been used as a reason for many of the bans that players have been reporting over the last few days.
Normally this section of an EULA would be standard stuff, with the developer choosing to ignore it in favor of a bustling mod community. However, Rockstar seems to be leveraging it to get players out who simply wanted to change their single player experience. The big question is, how long has this text been present in the EULA. Many online are reporting that this was a recent change, but the notice at the top lists the last revision to the document as October of 2013. Checking the page’s source info yields a change as recent as this morning though, but there is no way to tell what that change was. It could have been simple formatting or some other innocuous alteration.
The fact is that the EULA now explicitly prohibits the use of mods, no matter what mode of GTA V you are in. It is still up to Rockstar to decide if they want to enforce this policy though. They are currently deciding to enforce it fairly heavily, but they could easily change course if enough fans speak out against the bans.