Rockstar Games’ servers have been under heavy fire from massive DDoS attacks in recent days, causing widespread login and connectivity issues for players of GTA Online. These attacks come in the wake of Rockstar’s recent implementation of BattlEye, a new anti-cheat system designed to crack down on in-game cheating, sparking backlash from a segment of the player base. Protesters, unhappy with the new system, have resorted to using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to disrupt the servers, escalating tensions between the gaming giant and its community.
Odd, I don’t recall private lobbies being a thing, and a quick google shows lots of people asking for them and a few “workarounds”. Perhaps they are a recent addition or a console thing?
I haven’t played in a few years but this is how I remember the system working: RDO matches people into separate lobbies based on what version of the game they’re running and this check is done by hashing one or more files in the install directory. By adding junk data to one of those files you more or less guarantee that you’ll only ever encounter other people who have the same junk data added. It’s basically the dark souls password system with extra steps.
Maybe I used a mod or something, I dont know, wasnt very memorable aha (well all I remember is excessive amounts of fog), quickly gave up on it.
Before private lobbies in GTA, I remember blocking ports for GTA in my firewall except to my friends’ IP addresses, which worked for a while.