GTA Online PC players up in arms over bans

Following a recent update to the game, GTA Online players are reporting a sharp rise in the number of bans being enforced by Rockstar.

The problem appears to only be affecting players in the PC community, with a growing thread of Reddit users reporting that they’ve been banned following the Southern San Andreas Super Sports Series update.

The key thing about these complaints is that the players are saying they’ve been banned unfairly and given the recent spike in negative Steam reviews for the game, their ire is clear. The bans last 30 days with no appeals system and players who have just started the game as well as those who have clocked up thousands of hours of play are claiming to have been affected. 

Grand Ban Auto: Autoban

It’s not unusual for players who have shown bad behavior in online games to protest they’ve been unfairly punished but the sheer number of players claiming the same thing in the same period of time does suggest something has indeed gone wrong here.

With no comment from Rockstar on the matter yet, those impacted have taken to theorizing about what could have gone wrong. The popular opinion seems to be that a change to the game’s tunables in the most recent update has triggered the anti-cheating system and people are being flagged up as using mods when they’re not. 

Players on the Reddit thread are taking their complaints to Rockstar by raising official complaint tickets on the game and reporting the problem to their various social media channels. We’ll update this article with more information as it becomes available. 

Emma Boyle

Emma Boyle is TechRadar’s ex-Gaming Editor, and is now a content developer and freelance journalist. She has written for magazines and websites including T3, Stuff and The Independent. Emma currently works as a Content Developer in Edinburgh.