Watch GTA Online's Troll Clone Nightmare
Mo' money, mo' clone problems.
Hacking is a terrible thing which can ruin multiplayer games for everyone. Hacking can also, on occasion, turn multiplayer games into a creepy fever dream and deliver the kind of anecdotes that you want to tell all your friends about. That's the case with what happened to Idle Thumbs' Nick Breckon in GTA Online [official site] when he found himself i) spontaneously wealthy ii) the owner of every gun in the game and then iii) with a green-haired clone of himself attached to his back. There's a YouTube video below with Breckon telling the story, cut together with some footage of it happening.
I'm posting this simply because it entertained me.
A good story well told.
Developers Rockstar have been struggling to curtail modding and hacking of GTA Online since the game launched on PC, while trying not to anger or limit users who only use mods in the game's singleplayer mode. The struggle to maintain the sanctity of the online mode flared up again this past week when Rockstar banned three of the creators of a mod called FiveM, which enabled players to host their own GTA servers for unrestricted multiplayer mayhem. Although the mod apparently only changed the game's singleplayer, it may have assisted piracy and so was considered against Rockstar's terms of use.
I'm not sure what collection of hacks befell Breckon in the video above, although the ability to explode players, give players money, and attach yourself to the backs of players are all features I've seen before. While it was funny and strange in this instance: don't go doing it to others. You'll ruin the game for other players and quickly end up banned.
If the name Nick Breckon sounds familiar but you don't listen to Idle Thumbs, then it might be because he also writes for Telltale's Walking Dead: Season Two.