Rockstar Games released a new set of Community Guidelines on Thursday alongside their GTA Online Event Week Newswire post. Additionally, the company has fully rolled out its GTA Online voice chat moderation system, which has been in testing for the past few months.
Community Guidelines You Must Follow
Rockstar Games noted in their last article that they have released this new set of rules to go hand in hand with their recently updated Terms of Service. It was made to call out various actions that the company deems unacceptable within its community. They then connected to the new set of guidelines.
The new Community Guidelines webpage is guided by the classic Rockstar Games motto “Say Sorry, Be Nice!” It is followed by a statement about their gaming community, not just GTA Online but Red Dead Online and all their games.
To ensure a positive gaming experience — including a welcoming, fun and fair environment for our community — we encourage everyone to follow these basic guiding principles and adhere to our Community Guidelines.
There are four essential pillars that make up the Community Guidelines: Fair Play, Respect, Safety and Consequences.
Fair Play covers things like cheating and bereavement. As GTA Online players especially those on PC will know, hacking and such has been a huge problem. Rockstar has taken measures to stop bad actors but in the end it's not at the level players would like.
Respect goes into detail about how any kind of bullying, discrimination, violence, etc. will not be tolerated. The same applies to promoting actions that can cause real harm to fellow players such as doxxing, scams, illegal actions and more.
As for consequences, Rockstar says that any violation of these guidelines can see actions taken on the player's account. It does vary from case to case. It can go from performance-only suspensions and account bans to reporting the situation to law enforcement. It is recommended to read the new Community Guidelines in their entirety here.
These guidelines apply to all aspects of our online gaming experiences — including voice and text communication or any community-generated content.
We strongly encourage players to report any prohibited/inappropriate behavior and continue to help keep our games safe.
Rockstar Games
Rockstar's Voice Chat is now in game
Another related topic mentioned in the Event Week post are changes to Text and Voice Chat. The game studio says that in recent months, steps have been taken to “reduce instances of text chat spam and abuse in GTA Online sessions on PC”. Another change that was made in a previous GTA Online patch is how voice chat is disabled by default. You can turn it on in settings, but going forward, it will be disabled until you activate it.
Speaking of voice chat, Rockstar has confirmed that their new AI-powered moderation system will be fully rolled out across GTA Online. Last year, Rockstar talked about how they were going to test a new moderation system to help filter out bad actors in GTA Online.
Over the course of a few months, Rockstar slowly rolled it out to the various platforms and amount of GTAO lobbies. With the release of The Chop Shop, Rockstar stated that a 2024 launch was anticipated. That day has now come.
It will be interesting to see how this is used and to what effect. Some GTA Online players have shared some concern about it but so far nothing has come up in the testing period. It's possible we'll only hear things now that Rockstar says it's fully launched.
What are your thoughts on all this? Let us know below in the comments. To stay up to date with every GTA Online news update, be sure to check back on RockstarINTEL and sign up to our newsletter for a weekly roundup of all things Rockstar Games.
