Red Dead Online might be full of outlaws, but cheating is still frowned upon. Like in any multiplayer game, there are rules in place to ensure that Red Dead Online is balanced, fair and welcoming to all players. Besides relying on prevention, cheating is also severely punished.
With the impending release of the PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2, and thus Red Dead Online, the discussion around cheating, modding and punishments has become more relevant than previously. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are still uncracked and cheating on those platforms is virtually impossible.
Conversely, the PC is an open platform. Users have greater access to the game files and more opportunities to alter them. Employing cheats and hacks on PC is going to be much easier and therefore unfortunately more common than on consoles, so it was important for Rockstar to clarify some details about how cheaters will be handled.
Those fans who also play Grand Theft Auto Online are familiar with Rockstar's policy on cheaters, and for the sake of ease, the exact same rules and punishments will apply to Red Dead Online as GTA Online.
When it comes to cheating and altering the game, Rockstar applies three punishments - corrections, suspensions and bans. In cases of smaller infractions - first time offenses, players who haven't altered their game but asked hackers to provide them benefits, users of exploits - the account won't be banned, only suspended or corrected.
Correction is mostly applied in cases when the player in question hasn't actually altered the game but benefited from an exploit or from another cheater. In this case, the unlawfully gained money, items and ranks are removed, resetting the account to its state before the infraction.
Suspensions mean that you won't be able to log into Red Dead Online with your account for a certain amount of time. You will also lose all of your progress, including items, unlocks, ranks and currency. Essentially, your account will get a factory reset.
Bans are pretty self-explanatory. If you are caught modding or committing a suspendable offense more than once, your account will be banned from Red Dead Online permanently. You won't be able to access the multiplayer portion of the game with that account ever again, only the single-player mode.
The full list of suspendable or bannable offenses, according to Rockstar Games, is as follows:
- modding in online games
- exploiting or abusing game mechanics in online games
- participating in “money lobbies”
- account boosting
- account “recovery”
- promoting methods of abuse/glitching
- promoting modding of online games
- manipulating protected game data and code,
- interfering with other players’ gameplay experience.
We're interested to see how these rules will apply (if at all) to single player modding when the game is released on PC.
