Grand Theft Auto Online’s big Casino update dropped on Tuesday, and while most people are excited to bet money and gamble, others are rejoicing over a peaceful change to the overarching world.
Los Santos has never been a safe place — the heart of GTA is chaos — but one thing that made everyone’s experience worse was the widespread usage of “passive popping.” In a nutshell, this describes a common behavior where jerks would enter passive mode, meaning that they could not kill or be killed. Passive mode is crucial for allowing people to do their own thing, but the problem was that some people would abuse the ability. Sometimes, fans would harass other players by staying in passive mode until it was convenient, popping out of it, killing their distracted opponent, and then immediately heading back into passive mode. Targets wouldn’t be able to fight back.
Passive popping was a particular scourge with vehicles such as jets, which allow players to quickly cover wide swaths of land, and Oppressors, which gave trolls the usage of homing rockets. Players who abused this method were sometimes known to hold entire servers hostage, making for an extremely disruptive experience. The problem has existed since as far back as 2015.
Well, as of yesterday — literally after years of player complaints — passive popping is no more. Rockstar’s patch notes state that there is now a cooldown after using passive mode, so you can’t just keep terrorizing your lobby:
Passive Mode can now no longer be active when using a weaponized vehicle
A Passive Mode cooldown of 2 minutes is now in place for players who have just killed another player
Players now must wait 5 minutes before they can activate Passive Mode again after disabling it
Players now must wait 30 seconds before they can disable Passive Mode after activating it
Additionally, GTA Online has also tweaked its “Go Ghosted” option, which allows players to make themselves unavailable to others who have repeatedly killed them without provocation. Now, players can ghost each other after two deaths instead of three, and they can stay in that state for five minutes instead of only two. Here’s Rockstar:
The window of time for consecutive kills to count has been increased from 5 minutes to 10 minutes
The ‘Go Ghosted’ option is now available if the killing player is part of an Organization or Motorcycle Club so players can:
‘Go Ghosted to GAMERTAG’ (if not in a Gang)
‘Go Ghosted to ORG NAME’ (if in an Organization)
‘Go Ghosted to MC NAME’ (if in a Motorcycle Club)
Players will remain Ghosted to the members of the Gang even if they disband
All of these tweaks have players celebrating, as GTA Online may finally become a slightly more enjoyable experience after curbing some of the worst behavior present in the game. “This is like a dream,” one fan said on Reddit. “Pinch me,” another added.
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