Table of Contents[Hide][Show]
Rockstar may need to add more moderation tools and measures to Grand Theft Auto Online’s Mission Creator.
As TGG placed a spotlight on Twitter, fans have been making some controversial missions using the Mission Creator. We won’t enumerate the content of these missions, but they are already breaking Rockstar’s guidelines.
As we reported last week, they are explicitly going after content that:
…can cause any degree of real-world harm to other players, or that facilitates real-world illegal activity…
Are Rockstar’s Moderation Measures Not Working?
If you are a casual observer, you may already assume that this is a failure of Rockstar moderation. But that may not actually be the case. As XPRT Crew explained on Twitter:
@RockstarGames has already banned multiple users after the launch of the new Mission Creator.
Some Community Series jobs are recreating real-world violent events, which is not OK and can put your account at risk.
I strongly recommend not playing or bookmarking those jobs. Better to stay safe.
So, to put it succinctly, just because you are seeing these missions that are clearly breaking Rockstar’s rules does not mean that Rockstar is not enforcing them.
Unfortunately, what it does say does not reflect well on the Grand Theft Auto Online player base. We won’t spell it out here, but of course we understand not every player condones or wants to make or play that content.
This Issue Is Bigger Than Rockstar
What’s happening with Grand Theft Auto Online’s Mission Creator is a microcosm of the situation at Roblox, a platform that is entirely about user generated content. We don’t really need to elaborate here, but at least Rockstar has even more guidelines so that they aren’t facing a situation that is at the same level as Roblox has.
We made this comparison because there is no easy solution to this problem. But given the limitations of what the Mission Creator can do, Rockstar is in a better situation to control the problem.
So What Does Rockstar Need To Do?
TGG made this suggestion:
Rockstar is gonna need to hire someone full-time specifically to moderate this lmao
But as we pointed out earlier, seeing these rule breakers proliferate doesn’t actually mean they don’t already have a moderation team working on it.
Maybe TGG has a point in that they need to hire more people and put more resources into moderation. But videotechuk has what could be a more immediately effective proposal:
Rockstar is going to need to work on some sort of keyword blacklist for the Mission Creator. About 70% of people are following a stupid trend of making terrorism-related missions or recreating the Charlie Kirk assassination.
We’re seeing Rockstar issue bans and takedowns but more needs to be done here on stopping these missions from being published.
They have a blacklist usage list for in-game chat and names, it’s definitely possible to apply this to the creator mode.
Obviously, bad actors will be bad actors. Some players will try to skirt the rules and maybe use code words for the ill intended content they want to make. But a keyword blacklist is transparently a quick way to immediately block seeing all this content proliferate this much.
We’re sure Rockstar is seeing the online sentiment, and also they have the tools to see what their players are doing under the surface. Hopefully they have even better ideas than this and are working on implementing them now.
For those who think Rockstar has been naïve about this, we would point out, that they seem to have trusted their players more than they should have.
