There was apparently a new
Grand Theft Auto V exploit that allowed other players to kill you during single-player.
As
Kotaku reports, last week a Twitch streamer "FriendlyBaron" was notably streaming a
GTA V
single-player speedrun, when, all of a sudden, his vehicle stopped
working and came to a complete stop. And then his player character, as
if possessed, exited the vehicle and then just randomly died.
According to FriendlyBaron, who took to
Reddit
to share what had just happened to him, a modder had previously been
harassing him and some friends playing with him. The streamer assumes
that the same modder eventually upped the harassment and used hacking
and mod tools to kill him during single-player.
It perhaps could have just passed a bizarre bug, but other streamers
and players have reported a similar thing happening to them, and the
problem/exploit can be
traced all the way back to September.
Here's Tex2 -- a Twitter account that covers Rockstar/
GTA news and who is a known
GTA V data miner -- explaining how it works.
Luckily, not long after word of the exploit started to make the rounds, Rockstar Games patched it.
That said,
it's insane to think this exploit ever existed in the first place,
though, perhaps it's not surprising given the history of
GTA V with hackers. What makes it even more surprising though is is that it took a month for Rockstar Games to fix.
Curious about how such a thing came to be, Kotaku reached out the
GTA datamining and modding community, and found out that the exploit has actually been in the game since launch.
Speaking to Kotaku, the aforementioned Tex2 revealed that modders
were using in-game tools that were built by Rockstar Games to remotely
kill players in the game. Further, they were supposed to serve as an
instant way to squash unwanted players for the purposes of events and
streaming. These tools were supposed to only be for devs, and for
awhile, this was the case. But that recently changed.
Modders were able to get their
hands on the tools after a new modding tool allowed them to find
players' Social Club ID numbers released. With the ID number, players
could use the admin tools to tell the game to kick or kill any specific
player they wanted.
The
only hurdle was that the targeted player had to be connected to
Rockstar Social Club. If they weren't, the command was useless.
As mentioned above, the hack has been addressed. Modders can actually
still issue the kill or kick command, but now it does nothing. Whether
Rockstar Games has any ways of tracking down the abusers of these tools,
who knows. At the time of writing this, the developer hasn't commented
on the issue.
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