wouldnt be the first time a totally contextually misunderstood term was more or less accidentally appropriated to have some new meaning, making its widespread adoption and widespread lack of its contextual origination even more infuriating.

This is kind of but not really similar:

What in the fuck is up with the PC GTA/RDR community using the term 'mod' incorrectly?

In every other context of video gaming ever, a mod is something that adds or changes a single player game, or a modded multiplayer game basically includes the server set of mods that all behave equally for all players.

But in Rockstar Online communities, modding means to be using a cheat engine. Something like what would be called hacks or aimbots or teleporting yourself or others or spawning anything on command, some other kind of client side exploitation software.

I have no idea how this happened or is the norm.

In any other game ever, a 'modded' server would mean oh we tweaked some global vars and we added these weapons and this vehicle and this new mechanic.

In Rockstar games a modded server is not a term that makes sense to these people because modding is cheating and only players can run mods... even though you can absolutely run an emulated private server through RedM/FiveM, and you can absolutely (and basically have to) run server side mods (as a barebones setup will be lacking MANY core and ancillary gameplay functions).

It fucking baffles me.

[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

WRT R*, I have seen hacks referred to as mods in some korean MMO communities, because client mods are lumped together with hacks in their ToS under "game modifications". No clue if that's what happened with R*'s stuff, but wouldn't be surprised.

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Every single GTA V or RDR2 centric discord I have ever been on is full of people who use the vernacular I described, to the point they will mock and then ban you for questioning it, as if theyve always been right.

Its possible I've just had extremely bad luck.

Its also possible that these people are primarily console players who just got computers to play only Rockstar games, I guess if you had 0 experience with PC gaming and 100% with consoles, it could explain only hearing the term modding as something illegal or cheating.

Or it could be along the lines that you've said: Younger generations just read official documentation and have near 0 knowledge of anything that came before?

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 1 points 5 months ago

I'm going to guess the "mod = hack" comes from people adding mods to the client, to do things like change textures to make them partially transparent, letting them see the enemy before they see them.

This stems from online games having to send an enemy player's position and expected movement, before they do it, so the user's client can render it in time. That means enemies get spawned into a client scene before the user sees them, then the client manages visibility,.and sends the user's actions so the server can determine the results.

Making walls partially transparent on the client, allows things like predictive aiming to shoot at an enemy just as they become partially visible but before they can see you on their client with opaque walls, giving an unfair advantage.

Other mods would allow a client to automatically parse the enemy's position, auto aim and auto fire. They aren't hacks as long as they use the game's official API for mods... and some games did expose that data to mods, making unfair mods possible.