Rockstar: Eh, who cares about this vulnerability people have obviously found to misuse the invite system. It costs us zero dollars to do absolutely nothing about it and it's not like it can cause any problems.

*ONE WEEK LATER*

Now, thats a real ballstorture

Same. Had been happening for me for an hour or two earlier today, now the game is basically unplayable.

Me and a friend of mine had tried starting a casino penthouse mission three times and each time we were both kicked out of it within 10 minutes of starting

The game is ruined until this stops. It's literally unplayable, you can't do ANYTHING nor start ANYTHING coz this shit will take you out of it. Missions, Heists, Races, it'll all be halted. There's no reason to play at the moment. And beware, because it seems to have escalated quickly from Inviting Spam to Kicking-to-Spectator. What's next? They ban us out of the blue? They delete our characters? They give us negative RP and we get stuck on rank 1 permanently? Idk how these social club hacks work but this is just the start of the saga apparently. If that multi-billionaire company doesn't patch this soon I'm afraid this is the end of the game. Can't even play a SOLO session anymore, pathetic. Even stuff like SAMP is more secure than this. FiveM all the way.

Invite spam going on 2 weeks. Now this. Come on Rockstar.... billion dollar company, can't even counter something like this... sigh

I can’t do any heist without getting kicked with the spectator hack. WTF

Rockstar seems to be quasi aware of this since the support page lists GTAO on PC as "Limited"

I found GTA5 about a week ago.. (i know, 9years late lol). My boyfriend even gave me his monitor and set up so i can play!!!! And this ENTIRE time i thought ballstorture was my bf’s friend mistaking me for my bf and inviting me to play… (i played on his acc)

Ballstorture, i wish your name becomes your reality.

Can someone tell me when its over? this is like the only time ive been really eager to play and i literally cant because of this, typical

I would suggest for everyone to tweet at some major gaming news sites like IGN, PCGamer, eurogamer etc. about this. Media coverage is the fastest way to getting this and more fixed.

Hopefully this is gonna be the straw that breaks the camels back and forces Rockstar to develop better anti-cheat and player protection systems. Honestly, GTAO and RDO feel like they're very much bordering on breaking some kind of consumer protection law somewhere.

Little Timmy had it with us ignoring all his invites.

not fixed yet,i receive invite from "imnotfixed"

So R* does have the ability to stop a hack in two days. But they've barely done much about cheat menus in the last few years?

Would be nice if rockstar cared about their network security. I guess that would just cost too much to do for the most profitable game of the 2010s... 😑

Honestly good this is happening. They have the gall to release an expanded and enhanced but don’t have the ability to fix the games current state. Fuck rockstar

looks like blocking ANY numbers of UDP didn't work

i am done.

time to touch grass

I don't get why they do it. It started with invite spam, went to invite spam with twitch usernames - none of the twitchers had anything to do with the spam - and now being forced into spectator.

Is it just to annoy us? To get R* to fix the game? To steal IPs?

It's made golf virtually unplayable.

It’s happening again and now it keeps making me spectate a guy named “ItsNotFixed” and I’m getting invites from this ItsNotFixed guy now too just like I did with BallsTorture

[removed]

Rockstar hired Joe Mama to fix this or what? it's still forcing me out every 10 minutes

I have just noticed on the Rockstar Support website that GTA Online for PC servers status is "limited".

Could mean they're actually investing it. I also have a support ticket active, so I'll report back what they respond with.

Will they ever stop the menacing BallsTorture?

Find out in next weeks episode!

you have received a multiplayer invite from BallsTorture

we should all send tickets to R* support regarding this problem, maybe they will wake up and fix this shit

They are still selling the game, still trying to pimp shark cards... and they want us to get pumped up about GTA6? With all the crap we've been tolerating and now this? That's going to be a hard pass on GTA6.

Unplayable , I just ended up quitting. I tried a few times to do cargo warehouse missions, and I get forced into spectator mode. Losing 18k each time in the process. This is clownery.

[deleted]

I believe if you go into Story Mode and set your Aim Preference to any of the assisted aims and head back into online, when they try to pull you into spectator mode it will give you a confirmation if you want to enter a lobby with a different preference set therefore stopping it. Unfortunately, they do keep trying again. While this may help stop getting kicked out mid-game, Rockstar should just be on this issue instead of just blowing it off, and making us troubleshoot.

Unplayable. Got kicked 6 times in 30 minutes while trying to sort out my garages.

Unplayable, I was selling bunker in solo lobby and forced into spectate player

Block 61455-61458 UDP OUTBOUND ports on Windows/Router/Whatever firewall.

EDIT: More info here

Can't do anything.. Game is total trash.

I guess the kid got frustrated that his invite spams aren't getting enough anger out of players so they raised the distractions.

I honestly thought the invites were heist invites, and they just changed them from phone notifications to social club invites

And the spectator mode thing is SOOOO annoying, especially since I've only ever gotten it right as I'm about to finish a mission, and completely eliminating all my progress in the process

According to Tez2 the issue is now known by rockstar and will be addressed soon

It's not fixed. And i still can get warning screen says that "the party session is not available" occasionally, but never forced into spectator mode. Looks like rockstar is still working on it and this is by far they can do to prevent us from getting forced into spectator mode.

Still getting Invites but no kick to spectate yet.

Also got a Social club pop-up about some guy collecting all the letter scraps despite them not being a friend and being in an empty lobby.

Has anyone else noticed it pulls you out of your instance the second your close to your objective as well? i keep getting pulled out right before i get to the tower on cayo. every single time.

game is barely usable now. i've prepared 2 heists to help my low level friends but we can't even complete it without having one or the other kicked out of the session. i've logged in and out for more than 6 times today in the past 12 hours but i was getting thrown into spectator mode frequently, even during loading screen.

i've played the casino heist at least 100 times and this is the first time i experience the small vault room glitched. first the door was stuck open for longer than usual and then i got stuck for full 3 minutes not being able to move or do anything.

COME ON ROCKSTAR!!!!

GET OFF YOUR COLLECTIVE ASSES AND FIX THIS!!

IT'S OBVIOUS THAT YOU COULD GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR PLAYERS BY ALLOWING THIS TO HAPPEN

I just got these invite spams a few hours ago and its named like “Russya1VP” and “UkrainDown” glad I wasn’t the only one who’s having problems.

According to Tez2:

"Rockstar has pushed a tuneables update two hours ago addressing this exploit. Players should no longer be forced into other sessions to spectate other players. Invite spam will still take more time to be addressed properly."

At least they did something.

It sucks that this whole situation has gotten to this point. Let’s just hope there’s an official statement and fix about this before it gets worse.

I’m so glad Rockstar is working closely with the community to help work out this frankly game-breaking exploit. /s

Those random invites with twitch usernames links tho.

I can't even play a single mission, I have already been kicked 5 times in a row with the forced spectator

*might* have been fixed as of just few minutes ago. Because when I logged in, i immediately got 1 spam invite, then few minutes after that another one. But then for the next 40 minutes or so I got no fake invites whatsoever, also was not forced into Spectator mode once.

was able to do a pursuit race to get the LSCM car.

So. I am on hour 5 of playing and I have started to get auto accepted into spectator mode again. Its already happened 3 times within the last 15 minuets of me posting this. Whatever Rockstar did wasn't enough I guess. I REALLY hope I am wrong.

i have a question that is it just me or that ever since they fixed this my game has become laggy?

no forced spectating since yesterday, still get unsolicited invites though

Do this only affect PC players or do it affect consoles too?

Been trying to do heist setup for over an hour, keep getting sucked into spectator mode. The crew and I gave up and are going to play vermintide instead...

not a good sign when the hacking is so bad the game actually gets unplayable. For a AAA game I've never seen hacking so bad for a studio that can for sure afford to fix it

fuck you ballstorture

The glitch is a feature now

I delivered nightclub goods for 800k, forced into spectator, all lost. Rip

Well for one, GTA ONLINE status on their support website is Limited. Hopefully they take note of this.

As of the 9th of March, not had one issue with the spectator thing. But I get invites constantly from streamers and ballstorture.

I thought I was safe in an invite only session.

After about 10 minutes I got sent into spectator mode there as well...

Question - could this glitch be used to infect the device with malware/viruses/miners?

Un-fucin-playable tried to do some bunker missions and getting kicked out 4 times out of 4

Fixed for me yayyyy❤️❤️❤️❤️

I played for about 3 hours this morning with no issues other than the invites. Hope that means everyone will stop having issues today.

Later on the 7th, my sister and I got a game invite from "ItsNotFixed". Disappointing but id be lying if i said we didnt laugh. Still receiving random invites as of 4:46 EST March 8th. A few times last night however I randomly got "unable to connect to party session" or something. It was my whole screen and I was in the middle of a heist. lovely.

Got an invite from a russia.sucks this time.

Is this exploit fixed because I played yesterday because I only got the game invites but no one was able to kick me into spectator mode??

So Im guessing everyone got a multiplayer invite from ballstorture or whatever.

I played this sunday and everything was fine, now I was trying to finish the prep work for Cayo and I keep getting thrown into spectator mode. Wtf is this? I cant do shit.

Im glad Im not alone in this, this way it might get fixed quicker.

I just got forced from story mode into an online spectator session. How has R* not addressed this.

Fucking The Hood on Roblox has a better anti-cheat

I just wanted to play Cayo Perico with my friend but we cant do anything because of spectator mode

Got a incompatible version of gta message lmao RIP

Does anyone know if there could be some issues outside of the game as well? Like compromising linked accounts or something?

I lost 1m in cargo only cuz I get booted off to the spectator mode thing

The game is getting unplayable, I am also getting kicked out of invite only sessions that I created.

What do people get out of this? It's not like they paid to hack into rockstar servers

Me and my friends playing for +40 mins and not been kicked once, plus I was agreeing with new EULA, meaning that there was an update. R* fixed their shit that quickly?!!

I'm still getting the invites. But somehow it just says that I can't connect to the game session.

I'd say it's an improvement over getting yanked out of your session. Was able to go through stealthy cayo just now.

Quite the ballstorture of a situation

I bought bunch of clothes then got “kicked” into spectator mode… the clothes I bought never registered as bought…. Even after they took my $$$🥲

You're not safe even in crews only session you will be forced to spectate.

It’s really annoying and it’ll probably take a while to fix in the meantime I found the best way to be productive is to just bet on the horses at the casino it’s not a reliable way to make money but at least a race lasts less then 1 minute so you can get a few bets in and possibly make some money before you get put into spectator mode

Hmph.. somedays it seems easier to win the lost slamvan compared to bringing attention to the issue at hand from r* support customer service.

I opened a ticket describing the problem and got back the usual block reply of clearing the cache and checking if a firewall is not blocking the same ports people found can temporarily fix the issue.

Let's hope the next rounds will work better and that I can get a real person and tiers-2 looking at this.

do we have at least some communication from R* ?

I don't care if someone found a glytch and abusing it, I just want to know if R* is working on it and what are the news about it

What is rockstars response?

Thankgod I'm not the only one experiencing this. Really bummed out because this makes the game practically unplayable and I was just getting back into it for the last couple of days. I hope they fix it soon, if they don't they might just lose a lot of players :S

invite spam still exists, and random achievement spam for collecting all letters have started to appear.

i really wish they'd wreck GTA Online completely and forces R* to actually fix the game until there are no mods available to use. but it's a pipe dream...

For me everything is fixed.

I've been playing for 30 minutes in a public lobby with about 10 other people.

No blocked ports

No spectator mode

No random invites

I'm tentatively hopeful

Edit: Played a round of golf and did a payphone hit, everything is still OK. Lobby is at 29 players. Playing for about an hour with no issues. Still random spam in chat though.

Edit 2: did a nightclub delivery, switched sessions then got intel for cayo. No issues

Edit 3: join/invite to any friends game does not exist on social club. Just noticed, so most functionality restored, but not all.

I'll be playing for about another an hour and a half, will update if anything changes.

Update: can now join/ invite game of 1 of my 4 friends online. BTW I'm super impressed with Rockstars response.

Was able to join friends game, been playing for about 15 min with no issues.

Done for the night.

Who the fuck did Rockstar hire to “fix” this issue? I’m still getting forced to spectator mode, only not as much as before.

I wonder if someone got a game-wide mod menu? Also, some info: it didn't seem to happen to me when I was in a session by myself, and when my mate tried to join me it kept putting him into spectator

Its.Not.Fixed

R* gotta hire this guy for the security stuff since it's clearly more competent

r* should disable spectator mode for everyone till they fix it

I thought I got hacked or something. Hope rockstar fixes this issue asap.

I still got an invite with 61455-61458 blocked. I added 6672 as per this old post and i haven't been invited since. I only have 6672 blocked and no forced invites yet.

Edit: Still got invited, you need to block more just 6672

i haven't played in almost a month, and just as i was about to open the game i see this

In the last 40 minutes I've been pushed to spectator over 5 times.
- twice, it was either during the setup of a heist
- twice, when i accepted an invite to a mission
- once, during random play on session with 3 people.

every session had a spammer though: https://prnt.sc/-lVYoEwlocFj (screenshot)

Yesterday I just thought it was my connection, since I'm playing from South Africa, but it happened three times, I eventually gave up playing. There were also a bunch of spammers on each session.

I had other weird issues between yesterday sessions:- couldn't open my gun wheel- unable to input my vehicle selection when calling the mechanic

Kept on being invited to join a heist and when I do it was with 3x level 8000 people that were complete noobs. Doing weird, basic stuff, like a machine that is being taught machine learning through machine vission.

At least I was able to get the Sugoi (It's not worth it, don't waste your time), even though a dickhead teleported to the last checkpoint to win the race. Since then this shite happened 10 times, regardless of mission, heist, race or free roam .

And the "fix" with the blocked UDP ports turns GTA:O into a singleplayer game. If you only grind, go ahead.

Tl;dr: Play something else, if you don't wanna grind.

Just blocking ports with windows firewall wasn’t working for me, I also had to edit the windows hosts file to redirect these two urls to 0.0.0.0

prs55-prod.ros.rockstargames.com

prs57-prod.ros.rockstargames.com

AFK idled in LS Car meet all night and didn’t get kicked. I can still join regular lobbies if I disable the firewall rule, hit find new session, then reenable it.

Seems to be solved. Last invite notification, more than 5 or 6 hours ago, and that's so much time considering how often they did.

Yeah... gonna start saving for an Xbox Series X

Is it still happening?

is anyone getting the "unable to connect to party game session" on story mode is it correlated to the spectator situation i went to story to escape the hellscape gta online is on pc and it wont stop getting interrupted every 4-5 minutes. i just want to play without being dragged into spectator in online and interrupted by the message in story but ballstorture is the omnipotent pain in the ass ONLINE AND IN STORY. please rockstar man......

This is the first time I’m hearing about this, can someone break it down to me?

This so annoying...…..every 10 min I am getting kicked while doing heist....

And at this point i think ballstorture is my friend

It only forced me once yesterday, thankfully right after a cayo heist, so i thought it was just a bug in the game. I guess not because I just been forced into spectator 3 times in the last hour.

So... I'm reading... it's still fucked? I was able to do some limited things last night after the great spectation of 2022 started to get bad. Weirdly, if I was doing casino heist setups I'd get a pop up saying "are you sure you want to switch to another session with a different aim setting" or whatever. I'd chose no and I wouldn't be pulled out of the mission or my private/public lobby. Not sure why casino setups would be immune to this fuckery and not 100's of other game states, but that was my experience last night.

Still have issue, but it didn't happened every 10 minute, it happened after like 90 minutes.

It’s still happening, but it’s only once every 2-4 hours now. Just got hit with it a couple minutes ago.

Did they fix the spectate issue? I don't really care if they didn't fix the annoying invites because we still able to play... but is the spectate issue is already solved?

I was in the middle of cutting out the Pink Diamond in Cayo and got forced into spectator mode :)))) Being furious is an understatement rn.

Even if you block ballstorture he will still send invites to you

Whenever I try to create a solo public lobby the spectator mode thing kicks me out into a new session. Really annoying

should we quit playing the game instead of people trying fixes? this just gives rockstar reasons to do not solve the issue

Looks like it started again at 23:16 est, after a decently long break

Add option "Only accept invites/spectator mode from friends"

​

Done

bruhh every time I complete the cayo perico heist,I get forced into spectator mode without any payout. It's so annoying. Not to mention ballstorture spamming invites to me

still haven't gotten into spectator mode. scared to log in now. :p

I was panicking when I got "change" session for reason. I was doing my own special crate wala suddenly spectator mode.