When Grand Theft Auto 5 made its way to the PC market after months of delays, the modding community was more than ready to start using the amazing world of Los Santos as a giant sandbox for creativity. Rockstar played along and offered a toolbox of modding support for the game's single player mode, but has been much more strict about Grand Theft Auto Online. To keep the game fair and fun for all players, no modding or cheating is allowed in the game's online mode. Thanks to a new exploit, keeping that behavior to a minimum might be harder than the developers expected.

Rockstar has been setting an example for rule-breaking players by dropping the ban hammer over and over since Grand Theft Auto 5's PC launch. The removal of cheaters and modders from GTA Online should make the multiplayer mode more fun for the rest of the community, but a few resourceful players have spotted a vulnerability in an upcoming change log that may allow banned players to return to the game anonymously and repeatedly.

A modder on the se7ensins forums suggests that when Rockstar introduces its system for creating temporary characters, cheaters will have a chance to capitalize on a vulnerability. LondonTown2004, the modder who identified the possible exploit, explains the opportunity...

“You can create disposable characters, cheat cash and stats and troll other players as much as you’d like and it will not be saved or recorded – this means it’s basically a way to play anonymously.”

The cheat may sound too easy to be true, but we've seen the same problem happen already on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Grand Theft Auto Online. A similar exploit was found in those versions of the game after Rockstar fixed patched in a fix for disappearing characters and loot. Once cheaters found the hole in security, the game's online mode became a nightmarish wild west full of invincible cheaters.

Rockstar will definitely implement a patch to fix the exploit if the company does end up releasing a build with one, but ideally it won't come to that. If the exploit is live for any period of time, the banned players will be able to revert to that build after the patch and continue playing in the world of chaos with other players who want to mod the online component.

Cheaters have been a concern since the earliest days of online gaming and developers know what they are getting into when any game has an online component or a PC version. Although Rockstar has avoided PC ports in the past despite demand (see Red Dead Redemption), it seems like throwing money away when the company doesn't offer PC ports at this point. Maintaining a healthy online community for GTA is a lot of work, but the game's sales across all platforms have more than made up for the maintenance.

Some members of the modding community seem to think this exploit is unavoidable at this point, but time will tell whether or not Rockstar is able to dodge that bullet. We'll keep an eye on the situation and update with the fallout.

Do you think that Rockstar should just offer a separate group of servers for players who want to play with mods and cheats or do you prefer to see those players get banned? Let us know in the comments.

Source: se7ensins forums