Sometimes, you have no choice but to fight fire with fire.
That is essentially what a man called Rev Drucifer has been telling me over the last couple of days. Drucifer only plays one game: Grand Theft Auto. Specifically, GTA Online, the multiplayer version of the extremely popular GTA V. He really loves the game; he estimates that heâs spent nearly 80 days playing it across various accounts on the PS3. Recently, though, Drucifer says he got into a complicated situation involving GTA, cheaters and the gameâs developer, Rockstar. Hereâs what he says happened.
âI wanted to start a new character/account that specifically focused on killing and keeping a high [kill/death ratio],â Drucifer explained to me over email. He did this about four weeks ago. One day, however, this character had the bad luck of entering a GTA Online lobby where a modderâsomeone who has hacked their game in order to gain access to various cheats in GTA Onlineâwas playing.
âIâm in a car with this guy and money bags start raining down,â Drucifer said. âI realize my account is filling up FAST, so I jump out of the car…money is shooting out of my characterâs ass. Iâm yelling on the mic for him to stop, [but] heâs not stopping then all of a sudden [he] starts killing everyone in the lobby over and over.â
For those of you that donât play GTA Online, this story might sound unbelievable. How could someone force someone else to take money in a game? Why would that be a bad thing, even? Oh, and why would money be ejecting from a game characterâs butt?
Curiously, forcing money on other players is a very specific form of griefing in GTA Online. Cheaters can do things like spawn money on other players, and they can shoot money from guns, too. The reason anyone would do something like this is simple: making money rain causes pandemonium. Some players will want to pick up the moneyâbecause hey, itâs free money! But Rockstarâs system also flags anyone that gains too much money as a cheater, making âfree moneyâ scenarios into a sort of trap that some players might fall into without realizing it.
Hereâs a video by HDCommentary showing a cheater who is shooting bags of money straight at players who are running away from him. Eventually, the player in the video decides to leave the lobby, as he doesnât want to risk being flagged by Rockstarâs system, despite not actually cheating:
Thatâs no isolated incident. At this point, savvy players donât stick around when a money-spewing cheater appears. Drucifer, however, says he may have been spewing money but wasnât the actual cheater causing it. It wasnât long, though, before he straight-up got kicked out of the gameâs lobby.
âNormally, youâll get a warning when other players start voting to kick you, but there was no warning, I was just OUT,â Drucifer said. âWhen I hit X to continue, it brought me to a Bad Sport lobby and I had $102,000,000 in my account. I had maybe a couple hundred thousand previously.â
GTA Online has two special lobbies, both of which are reserved for problem players. Thereâs the Cheaterâs Pool, where people who exploit the game go. There youâll find people who use cheats and hacks, like âGod Mode.âThen thereâs the Bad Sport lobby, which is where players who are jerks tend to go to. The Bad Sport lobby seems like a silly concept, for sureâisnât GTA made for people who like to cause chaos? But if a player happens to, say, blow up too many vehicles, then they might find themselves in the Bad Sports lobby nonetheless. Bad sportsmanship encompass other things too, like leaving too many matches.
GTA Onlineâs cheat detectors might flagged Drucifer for receiving an impossible amount of money, despite his assertion that it wasnât his doing. Accused of a crime that he says he didnât commit, Drucifer says he contacted Rockstar Support over the phone. âA guy on the line listens to my story and really just kind of asks softball questions as he fumbles around a keyboard, then tells me he sent an e-mail and we should be all set,â Drucifer says. âI open the e-mail and it states that Rockstar cannot adjust Bad Sport settings.â
Hereâs that email:
You are receiving this automatic reply because you recently submitted a ticket to Rockstar Games Support with the term âBad Sportâ found in the text. If your tickets is not related to Bad Sports or you believe you are receiving this message in error, please feel free to respond and we will address your question.
We are sorry to hear that you are having a problem related to the Bad Sport pool in Grand Theft Auto Online. The Bad Sport pool is triggered by things like quitting games early, blowing up other peopleâs vehicles, and being reported manually or voted out by other players from the in-game pause menu.
The Bad Sport pool is temporary and ends after a certain period of time that is displayed when entering GTA Online. Please note that the duration of the Bad Sport period may increase if further violations occur while in the Bad Sport pool, including being reported by other players.
Rockstar Games
I contacted Rockstar to ask about Druciferâs support ticket, as well as the general cheating situation in GTA Online and didnât hear back in time for publication. As such, we canât confirm the veracity of this letter, but there are many like it floating around online.
Rockstar does know about a lot of these free-money tricks, too. Way back in January of 2014, the studio said that anyone who found themselves in Druciferâs situationâgifted hacked bags of moneyâwould not be punished. But thatâs what Drucifer says happened to him, and he got sent to the Bad Sport lobby as a result.
Bad Sport lobbies are supposed to be a temporary penalty. Every player gets a timer for their âsentence,â and once that time is up, theyâre free to start playing normally again. Drucifer says that instead of having his timer go down, however, it started going up. While he couldnât offer me any evidence of this, I can at least confirm that many players have encountered issues with the Bad Sport timer before (usually the timer gets stuck or increases), so that part of the story doesnât seem unusual to me.
Once again, Drucifer says he contacted Rockstar. Once again, he says they sent him an email that was no help. âWe are sorry to hear that you are having a problem related to the Bad Sport pool in GTA Online,â the email says. âWe are not able to adjust Bad Sport stats.â Drucifer says his timer kept going up, eventually reaching eight days after having started at just three.
Exasperated, Drucifer decided to take matters into his own hands. He knew that there were modders who offered services that could help him…for a price. So he sought out the most trustworthy-seeming GTA Online modder he could find, gave him his account information, paid a fee, and voila.
âI shot him a message telling him the situation,â Drucifer says. âHe said heâd give it a try but didnât promise anything. Fifteen minutes later, I was out of Bad Sport.â
Curious about this apparent GTA Online underworld, I sought out the modder myself. I was surprised to find someone who not only advertised his services openly, but who also seemed to care a great deal about appearing professional. On the modderâs Facebook page, I found a flier that advertised different âpackagesâ that players could purchase. Each package represented a different âtierâ of services for GTA Online, including new-gen consoles and PC.
For $20, you can get money, rank, gun camos, tattoos, max stats, mods, and DLC weapons. For $45, you can get all of that, plus a Liberator vehicle, infinite ammo, and full garage editing. Those are just two packages out of many, each one with its own price tag and catalog. Each one promises a âLifetime Warranty.â The modderâs flier itself looks like something a start-up might make; itâs very clean, with an eye for graphic design and typography. I would include a picture but the modder requested that I keep them anonymous. The flier boasts that the modder is very experienced, has the âlowest ban rate,â and it even includes customer testimonialsâall to try to assure a prospective buyer that you could trust a modder with your account information. According to this modderâs Facebook page, thousands of people have done exactly that, and the modder estimates that others are making up to hundreds of dollars a day from services like these.
I reached out to the modder on Skype, and a day later, he responded to me. I told him I wanted to chat with him for a story, to see if Druciferâs tale was true. Shortly afterward he told me my IP address in what I assume was an attempt to scare me, or at least to convince me of his bona fides. âI had to do some research on my end :),â he said.
The modder confirmed to me that he got Drucifer out of the Bad Sport lobby. Typically, he claims that he provides this service a couple of times a week, and itâs usually the same players who continually need to be taken out of Bad Sport lobbies. That is to say: it doesnât seem like he usually does this sort of thing for innocent players.
âModding itself is pretty easy if you have the right tools and the understanding on how it works…creating the modding tools is the hard part,â the modder claims. âBad Sport is just a stat in the game, just like everything else pretty much. You send functions to change the stats in the game memory.
âBad Sports stats can pretty much only have 2 values tied to it -Yes the account is in bad sports, -or No the account is not in bad sports.â
The modder then shared this screenshot with me, which he claims is some of the code that makes up GTA Online (click to expand/read comfortably)
âThe way the game is written, you pretty much have access to all those stats that are in the game (they are all nicely organized on a couple documents),â the modder claims. âSo itâs just a matter of doing lots of research and testing to figure out what works and what doesnât.â
The modder made cheating in GTA sound easyâwhich is probably not surprising, given all the horror stories floating around about GTA Online
