This is what you would have seen if you had visited the FiveM website in early 2015. It’s hard to believe that the project is almost 10 years old now, wow. So, what’s behind this motto? Is there a “bad” way to make multiplayer? Why did FiveM become so successful while none of its competitors ever came close, both technically and in terms of popularity? The answer is… philosophy. The philosophy of FiveM’s creator influenced many other members of the GTA community, and we have tried to follow it for all these years. We’ll explain everything.

It’s pretty obvious that back then GTA modding wasn’t as huge as it is now. It wasn’t an easy road as you might guess.

FiveM was planned long before the release of GTA V on PC in 2015. Initially, everything started with the CitizenMP framework, which was released in 2014. It was created by a developer known online as NTAuthority (a.k.a. NTA)

The project followed a simple "what if" idea: What if players could unlock the full potential of GTA IV and create their own game modes and custom content in a user-friendly way? FiveM was driven by the same dream, except for GTA V. Here’s an almost 11-year-old video of CitizenIV testing.

At the time, GTA Online had clear limitations. It offered very basic possibilities for user-generated content but was somewhat insecure and restricted everything to official servers with no custom assets. Despite these limitations, it still featured a variety of highly entertaining community-made game modes, such as the well-known “RPG vs Insurgency”. The potential of GTA V for UGC was clear.

Of course, this wasn’t a brand-new concept, other mods like MTA and SA-MP had already explored similar ideas. However, NTA had a different approach. Instead of working behind closed doors, they chose to follow a "by the community, for the community, with the community" philosophy.

From the beginning, FiveM was different. It was open-source, meaning anyone could contribute to its development and build upon the knowledge already obtained by NTA and other contributors. Unlike other platforms, NTA focused on improving GTA V's game engine (RAGE) itself rather than creating in-house systems for features that were already implemented and worked well in the base engine, such as synchronization. NTA actively discussed ideas with the community, seeking their opinions and input. This open, transparent development style set FiveM apart from other similar projects for GTA V, which were kept private and never shared with the community.

For NTA, it wasn’t about competition or profit, it was about bringing an idea to life. This wasn’t their first experience with game-enhancing projects. Before FiveM and CitizenMP, NTA had worked on alterIWnet and fourDeltaOne, similar community-driven projects for Call of Duty games that offered custom, moddable servers.

Thanks to this experience, FiveM's development progressed quickly. Just a few months after GTA V launched on PC, as planned, an early version of FiveM was already available.

Along with the core framework, NTA also put effort into enabling players to create custom assets such as models, textures, and maps. This was done through a command-line tool that initially allowed modders to convert assets from GTA IV to GTA V. It was released alongside a small tutorial on GTAForums.

Feel free to check out this forum topic, it provides a great insight into why sharing knowledge is so important. Things that take just five minutes to implement today and are widely known used to take weeks of research or reverse engineering. In the end, this tool sparked the wave of GTA V modding craziness that we’ve seen since the game’s release. It took years before it was replaced by full-fledged community tools like OpenIV and, later, CodeWalker.

The open-source nature of FiveM and this tool meant that anyone could benefit from and learn from the hard work of FiveM contributors. This "share the knowledge" philosophy allowed the community to build on each other's discoveries instead of repeatedly researching the same things from scratch. This was exactly what NTA sought to fight against in GTA modding. The lack of shared knowledge severely slowed down the learning process for the entire community.

People who wanted to improve minor details in closed-source tools (such as OpenIV and many others) were forced to develop their own tools entirely from scratch, starting with research and reverse engineering. NTA strongly opposed this, as it hindered progress, and instead, they aimed to make everything open and accessible to everyone. This same approach was later applied to RedM and its format-converting tool for Red Dead Redemption 2, which allowed creators to make custom assets for that game as well.



For those who have been here since the beginning in 2015, it is very difficult to underestimate this person's contribution to the entire GTA modding community, not only GTA V. We believe that this approach played a key role in FiveM’s success, both technically and in terms of popularity. FiveM relied on the community, and the community relied on FiveM, and it all aligned perfectly...

This quote was on the FiveM.net website for years. Back then, it meant something – it was the doctrine of FiveM, not just empty “PR wording” like it is today.

FiveM development continued.

NTA and contributors were rapidly improving the project, adding scripting support, a unique streaming system, and other crucial functionality. People started to notice the project and play FiveM even in its early development stage. NTA also introduced a ‘game-cache’ system that allowed users to avoid issues caused by game-breaking GTA V updates. Things were going well, the community began creating amazing content on FiveM, just as NTA had envisioned.

But some parties weren’t happy with these developments. These “parties” were Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games. They saw the community’s creative efforts as competition to GTA Online, especially since these efforts weren’t monetized.

The first attacks started in late Summer of 2015, when Rockstar Games/Take-Two banned the accounts of 3 FiveM community members: NTAuthority (lead developer), qaisjp (general support), and TheDeadlyDutchi (general support). Many other users were banned as well. Most of them had never engaged in reverse engineering work or modded the game outside FiveM.

This event was well-covered by various mass media back then. You can read more about it in this Reddit post. The official justification was that FiveM "facilitates piracy", which was completely false. FiveM was never intended for piracy, it always required a legitimate copy of the game from the very beginning. (Not to mention, GTA V had already been cracked months before this point)

These were permanent bans, restricting access to all Rockstar Games titles, including single-player.

Take-Two and Rockstar didn’t stop there. They continued banning NTAuthority’s accounts, including newly created ones that had no playtime at all. They tracked NTA’s newly acquired game licenses and banned them before they could even launch the game for the first time. This was documented by NTA in a GTAForums topic.

They even banned the word “FiveM” from GTA Online/Social Club and removed all related crews

Another major source of stress was the rise of a competing project that had a much larger development team and significantly better PR. At some point, NTA discovered that this team was directly copying and pasting FiveM’s code into their own project, while keeping their work private and accepting donations, despite not even having a public release, among many other unethical practices.
This project was called GTA:Multiplayer (a.k.a. GTA:MP), and we will discuss it in more detail later, as some of its developers would go on to join Rockstar long before FiveM did.

NTA had already experienced legal trouble with Activision over the fourDeltaOne project, which had left deep emotional scars. Now, it was about to happen all over again.

However, NTA wasn’t ready to abandon their dream so easily. Instead of shutting down completely, they ceased public distribution of FiveM (the client itself) but continued working on CitizenFX, the open-source framework that FiveM was built on. This meant the client became less accessible to end users but remained open-source, just as before. NTA hoped that, with time, the situation would improve.

In November of 2015, Take-Two Interactive sent private investigators to NTA’s house. These investigators lied to gain access to the property, then confronted NTA and demanded the cessation of all FiveM-related activities. There was no room for discussion.

NTA spoke about it publicly and quickly tried to dispute their main claim against FiveM – “piracy” – by adding additional ownership checks on top of what already was implemented.

Shortly after, NTA received a 2nd C&D letter in-hand. However, NTA wasn’t allowed to even read the letter until they would “convincingly say they're going to sign it”. NTA refused to do it and never saw what was in that letter.

Two days later, Take-Two instantiated a legal case.

Take-Two’s lawyers pushed every single possible and impossible accusation against NTA: piracy, taking 50 euros for donation on FiveM, bypassing DRM checks, even claiming “modifying code at runtime” was illegal.

NTA, being a young person with no financial resources, could not afford proper legal representation. With no means to fight the case, it was closed, and NTA was legally prohibited from working on anything related to Take-Two.

It is well known that Take-Two sent “spies” to infiltrate FiveM’s chat rooms, including internal discussions. These logs were later used against NTA in court.

This was a huge blow for NTA, it completely destroyed them. There were mental breakdowns, family issues, and more. It was a dark time emotionally.

Imagine being a 23-year-old with no malicious intent, just trying to build something great, only to be sued by a massive corporation that not only seeks to shut you down but also slanders you in court.

This is how Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games crushed NTA’s dream, forcing them into legal obligations and an emotional nightmare.

This is all history now, but there is one thing you should understand, situations like this leave scars. Scars that stay with you for life.

It wasn’t easy to get through, but NTA did. However, the emotional scars never faded.

Despite all the legal threats and risks, there were community members who didn’t want FiveM to die.

Revival projects emerged, the most notable being FiveReborn and MultiFive. However, these projects did not follow NTA’s original vision and lacked experienced developers. Their future seemed uncertain, and they primarily served as a refuge for those who wanted to continue playing the original FiveM.

Although these projects saw little major development, they proved one thing to NTA, people still cared about FiveM.

Thoughts of returning to the project began to creep into NTA’s mind. Despite the court injunction, by the end of 2016, the decision to return to the project had been made. NTA would continue working on FiveM incognito.

NTA decided to cooperate with FiveReborn, as it was the closest to the original project and involved some old community members. It was decided to restructure the project under the original “FiveM” name. To protect nta’s identity, the “CitizenFX Collective” (CFX) was created. (The FX means “framework” here, copycatting the Microsoft naming scheme.)

The FiveM.net website was updated with a statement claiming that this new group had taken control of the original domain and other resources.



NTA created multiple fake accounts, known as "elements", to make it appear as though FiveM was developed by a large team rather than a single individual. The system randomly shuffled these accounts within the "elements group" to hide who was responding on the forums. On Discord, element accounts also had their names randomized.

Later, NTA invited some community members to join as "elements" in an informal team, further reinforcing the illusion of a larger group behind the project. This approach of using element accounts was later extended to contractors and even continued after the acquisition.

At the time, the primary purpose of this system was to protect contributors' identities from potential legal threats. However, in later years (2020 and beyond), the Cfx.re team stopped shuffling element names and instead assigned permanent element aliases to team members.

After merging with FiveReborn, nta began to develop FiveM again, this time with a new fire in their eyes. They were focusing on improving the general state of the platform and implementing many quality of life changes. The platform was quickly getting more usable. Also during this time there was the illusive ‘64 slots’ experiment.

If you’re a newbie in FiveM, you would be shocked by the fact that FiveM only supported up to 24 slots, which a bit later expanded to 32 slots. Yeah, not just 32 players in scope, 32 players on a whole server. We’ll speak about how it was developed and extensively tested later, it’s a whole story!

For the whole year nta was doing all the work alone: developing FiveM, web services, PR work, doing support, getting in touch with the community. We swear if you take a look at these old 2017 posts on FiveM’s twitter or official forum posts from that era you can almost feel the enthusiasm yourself. Just take a look:


Or take a look at this update post State of the Snail: May 11th, 2017 where nta announced FXServer progress, which was a very important step for making OneSync possible, and introduces so many improvements. Or this post State of the Snail: October 12th, 2017 which features sneak peeks into the first experiments for OneSync, you can see how rapid the development was going back then. Funnily enough, you can see the mention of ‘Reverse game’ technology that was many years later used by NTA for the FxDK prototype. So many experiments have been done back then that later were implemented in a truly cutting edge form.

Back then, FiveM had only a few thousand players at its peak, but if you think maintaining that community alone was easy, you’d be mistaken. While players were generally more patient and appreciative at the time, not everyone was. Radical changes necessary for progress often sparked drama. For instance, deprecating CitizenMP.Server was not a flawless transition – some server owners struggled with updates despite the detailed documentation provided.

Due to rapid growth, the infrastructure costs swelled up. NTA was paying for everything from their own pocket, and for a long time there wasn’t even a way to support FiveM development. The decision to introduce Patreon and partner with Zap-Hosting was made only after the project started consuming more money than NTA could reasonably afford.

Another major factor in this decision was the widespread abuse of the platform. Many users were monetizing their servers and content despite this being strictly forbidden by FiveM’s Terms of Service. Attempts to enforce these rules often resulted in raids on FiveM’s Discord server and social media accounts.

It was a decision NTA never wanted to make but had to – otherwise, infrastructure costs could have killed the project entirely.

FiveM’s backend wasn’t just the forum, website, and client downloads. It also handled player license validation, the first thing NTA implemented upon returning to the project to prevent bypassing server-side license checks. This was critical for ensuring project stability and keeping Take-Two at bay regarding piracy concerns. Additionally, FiveM’s infrastructure included development tools such as Sentry, GitLab, CI/CD build machines, and more.

Later, a centralized server authentication system, Keymaster, was introduced. It wasn’t free, and as the project grew, so did the infrastructure load, exponentially increasing costs. At the same time, malicious actors occasionally launched DDoS attacks against FiveM for various reasons, requiring even more time and resources to mitigate these threats.
This huge amount of “side work” affected FiveM’s client development speed.

At the time, OneSync was the most important project. Competitors had begun advertising their platforms as superior to FiveM because they could support more players per server – a major selling point for users. (Despite the poor synchronization, closed development, and various other flaws in those projects.)

NTA knew this was a high priority and worked hard on making OneSync a reality.

After a few internal tests, OneSync’s code was merged into the main branch on April 1, 2018. Of course, it was still highly experimental – buggy, prone to crashes, plagued by sync issues, and lacking AI population support.

Everyone loved the dummy AI guys walking on the streets and occasionally causing mayhem out of nowhere. Because of this, there was a strong intention to implement AI population support before publicly releasing OneSync.

NTA decided to not make it ‘publicly’ available for production servers for some time until at least the most important issues were fixed. However, everyone could sign up for tests and mess around with OneSync. At this early stage, it was referred to as ‘ZeroSync’.

You can see the amount of work that has been done on GitHub - we believe any engineer would respect the amount of changes here, luckily there weren't code reviews back then!

In the middle of 2018, OneSync development stalled.

There were simply too many issues that couldn’t be reproduced without a large number of players.

A special logging system was implemented, which helped resolve some bugs with the support of the community. However, many other issues remained nearly impossible to debug. You couldn’t expect regular players to record gameplay for hours, especially since these logs could reach up to 100MB per minute. On top of that, nobody wanted to use a semi-broken OneSync on their production servers.

It was a catch-22. Players didn’t want to use OneSync because of its issues, but those issues could only be properly debugged on high-population servers.

Not to mention, working on a single task for so long was mentally exhausting. As a result, 2018 became a year of QoL (Quality of Life) updates for FiveM, along with the introduction of various miscellaneous features that server owners still rely on today.



Fortunately, someone found a solution – Disquse. Anyone who followed FiveM’s development knows that he was NTA’s right-hand man in the development department for years and remains one of the most respected figures in the Cfx.re community. Back then, he was an active community contributor, having implemented dozens of features for FiveM users since 2017, all as an unpaid volunteer.

Back in 2018, Disquse was one of the first people who asked for early OneSync testing access, and contributed a lot of reports that helped fix many early OneSync issues. Due to this hands-on experience, he came up with an idea to solve this catch-22 issue.

Disquse reached out to his local FiveM communities and proposed a collaboration to conduct full-scale OneSync tests, where everything would be properly set up – logging, video recording, and structured issue reporting. Players would also be trained on how to correctly categorize and report issues.

This initiative involved hundreds of volunteers and was not easy to organize. However, after a few experiments, Disquse and his team successfully developed an effective testing methodology.

In October 2018, after seeing that these large-scale tests were yielding results and after fixing many of the issues reported during the summer of 2018, NTA decided to launch the ‘OneSync Early Access Program’.

OneSync was “disabled” for most users on the platform and made accessible only through a whitelist system to prevent widespread disappointment with its unfinished state. However, it remained fully available in the source code, allowing anyone to compile it from source and try it out if they wished.

Due to his major contributions, Disquse was given the exclusive privilege of distributing OneSync EAP roles to development and testing servers upon request, provided they had a valid use case.

By the end of 2018, a major wave of testing was underway.
Testers from Disquse’s group would join voice chats with large groups of people, performing requested in-game actions and testing various high-risk scenarios where crashes were likely to occur.

It wasn’t easy – testers had to stay focused and avoid boredom, while admins had to remain alert for constant crashes, report updates to NTA and quickly update or restart the server when necessary.

This wasn’t a paid QA department, just random players from different communities who were willing to help improve FiveM.

When tests required hundreds of players on a single server, the "testing committee", a coalition of various communities, shut down their production servers to "force" players to join the test servers instead. To incentivize participation, they also implemented a bonus system that tracked the amount of time players spent testing. Later, this system was converted into "bonus points", which players could exchange for various perks on their home servers.

It paid off, NTA was fixing one issue after another while actively participating in these tests. They were even implementing server and client updates in real-time, allowing testers to immediately verify fixes as they were deployed.

Disquse has a video from one of the very first tests during this period, showcasing just how many issues OneSync had back then – especially with AI population. There’s even a Twitch clip from the first and only time NTA decided to stream a test themselves!

Everyone who made major contributions, whether through feedback, coding, bug reporting, or other efforts, was rewarded with a permanent FiveM Premium as a token of appreciation for their service.

By the end of this phase, OneSync had become significantly more stable. The "64 slots" were also working quite well. The first production servers using OneSync began appearing in FiveM’s server list. (Hard to believe this was over six years ago – crazy!)

Nowadays, FiveM supports up to 2,048 slots with AI population enabled — a number unattainable for competitors.

Of course, it wasn’t just about changing "64" to "128", then to "1024", and finally to "2048" in the code. Each increase required extensive work, primarily focused on server optimizations and performance improvements.

In April–May 2019, NTA began working on expanding support to 128 players. A major test took place in May, utilizing feature branches to prevent any potential regressions from affecting production servers.

In June 2019, OneSync+ (128 slots) was officially announced and released. While we’re mentioning this briefly, it’s important to understand that this milestone took months of full-time (and often more) work, backed by years of experience and knowledge.

In September 2019, NTA developed an experimental virtualization system as a proof of concept, implementing it in a single day. This system had the potential to remove FiveM’s player count limitations entirely. Work continued in this direction, and by January 2020, OneSync "Infinity" was publicly announced and polished within the year.

Testing OneSync Infinity was significantly harder because it required at least 300 players (or even more). To run large-scale testing, NTA created a testing group on Discord and invited server owners and their communities to participate. Developers expressed their desire to gather as many players as possible for the final OneSync Infinity test, but organizing such a massive event was extremely difficult.

Even after pinning the test server in FiveM’s main menu and asking players to join, there still weren’t enough participants. So, a controversial workaround was introduced: 5% of players who were launching FiveM were automatically placed into the test server upon launching the game.

Yes, it was a bit of a nasty trick, and many players were understandably confused. Of course, they were free to leave and switch to their usual servers. But in the end, this approach helped NTA finalize OneSync Infinity.



As you might know, COVID-19 brought a lot of new players to gaming, and FiveM was no exception.

From 50,000 concurrent players at the beginning of 2020, FiveM grew to over 170,000 concurrent players by early 2021 – an insane level of growth. What makes this even more remarkable is that, at the time, the project was still maintained solely by NTA and community contributors, unpaid volunteers. OneSync played a crucial role in this expansion. While its development was somewhat chaotic, it was completed at exactly the right time.

In total, over 30 large-scale tests were conducted by the testing group between mid-2018 and the end of 2020.

Shortly after the announcement of the PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2, NTA announced RedM. RedM was intended to work alongside FiveM and was expected to be released approximately one month after the game's launch.

The community welcomed this announcement with excitement, eagerly anticipating the Cowboy RP experience and more.

For NTA, this was yet another exciting challenge – keeping up with Rockstar’s latest advancements after years of working with their technology. It also provided an opportunity to expand CitizenFX’s capabilities to yet another RAGE (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine) game.


The first successful multiplayer tests were made in November of 13, just one week after the game's release.

The first integration of RedM into the shared codebase was completed on November 11, with a massive commit on GitHub!

"Bob" was one of Red Dead Redemption 2’s internal codenames, which was leaked after the game's release.

RedM’s development was not as smooth as initially planned. The game introduced numerous internal changes to the RAGE engine, making feature porting significantly more difficult. Additionally, frequent updates at the time and the high cost of storing game cache presented further challenges.



The integration of Cfx.re into the GTA modding scene was in direct form. Not only did NTA sponsor various community projects - such as CodeWalker, OpenIV, and others, but some team members also actively contributed to these projects in different ways.

Both NTA and (later) Disquse played a crucial role in expanding the modding ecosystem, from resolving asset-related crashes to developing a RedM converter, much like what had happened with FiveM in 2015.

As with GTAV, NTA created the first-ever tool that allowed users to convert custom assets from GTAV for use in RDR2. This tool later facilitated the development of a Red Dead Redemption 2 port of CodeWalker, leading to extensive research and documentation of new file formats. These efforts ultimately laid the foundation for CodeX RDR2 modding to exist.


It wasn’t just about financial support – it was also about deep technical collaboration with various community members to create amazing projects. Money isn’t everything. The team provided tools and knowledge, and the community, in turn, built incredible projects.

Just as a reminder, for many years, a single person (NTA) was behind the project. NTA had been doing the vast majority of work: client and server development, anticheat development, web development, devops, planning, business ops, PR, support, enforcements, handling feedback, R&D, managing GitHub repository and many… MANY more.

Yes, there were a lot of great community contributions, some people volunteered with support, some helped with testing, and many shared feedback. This was greatly appreciated.

NTA was always open and transparent with the community. If you listen, respect, and collaborate with them, the community will repay you with understanding, passion, and support in various ways. Of course, no large community is ever perfect, but the key is to focus on the good people.

However, there were some pitfalls that were not easy to avoid.

As the player base grew, so did the responsibility and pressure, which dramatically increased NTA’s stress levels. This sometimes led to random emotional outbursts – usually on Twitter. Long-time FiveM regulars from that era will remember the harmless or silly tweets posted on the official FiveM Twitter account.

While this wasn’t exactly professional, and some people pointed it out, FiveM was never meant to be a “professional” project. It was driven by a single person going above and beyond, managing far more than any one person reasonably should.




NTA had the same thought. By early 2020, the project’s earnings finally made it possible to hire a few employees with competitive salaries.

However, this wasn’t as simple as it seemed. FiveM operated in a legal "gray area" at best, making it far more difficult to hire professional developers compared to other businesses. Anyone researching FiveM would quickly discover that Take-Two had previously attempted to shut down the project and had even taken legal action against its creators.

The only viable option was to hire developers from within the community, people who were already familiar with FiveM and its ecosystem. A few months later, NTA made their first hires.

Unfortunately some of these early hires would turn out to be a terrible mistake, and they would go on to severely damage the project and everyone around them for years...

The final decision to hire a team came after a massive wave of cheating, when NTA, as a solo developer, simply couldn’t keep up with the overwhelming number of different cheats.

In response, NTA made a public plea, asking anyone from the cheating community to stop being abusive and instead work with them to improve FiveM. Surprisingly, one person answered, a talented engineer known as ‘duk’, aka DefCon42.

He is a talented engineer that dedicated a lot of time improving FiveM’s anticheat, even voluntarily for a large amount of it.

Duk dedicated a significant amount of time to improving FiveM’s anti-cheat, much of it voluntarily. After having a positive experience working with duk, NTA decided to expand the team further.



Both of them eagerly tried to convince NTA, even claiming they had already quit their jobs to work on FiveM. NTA didn’t recognize them as notable figures within the FiveM community but, after persistent persuasion, ultimately thought, “...why not?”

Thers had made a few minor contributions to FiveM, mostly related to UI improvements. He promised to assist with future UI and web development.

Deltanic had very little prior involvement with FiveM. Initially, he suggested working on documentation and brainstorming early map editor ideas. However, after some dramas involving NTA, he shifted his focus to management-related tasks, as stated here.

Alongside these two, NTA extended an offer to Disquse – the most active community contributor at the time, who had already made significant contributions to the project.

Given their strong working relationship during OneSync testing, NTA saw great potential in him. Despite a language barrier (Disquse’s English was quite poor back then), NTA wanted to help him grow and contribute even more to making FiveM better.

This was the formation of the first FiveM team:

• NTA as Founder and Lead Engineer
• duk as Anticheat Engineer
• Thers as UI Developer
• Deltanic as some form of an Assistant
• Disquse as Software Engineer

At the time, all communication took place via Telegram text chats.

Deltanic assisted NTA with minor administrative tasks, such as blocking and warning servers that violated the Terms of Service (ToS).

Thers focused on UI development, as promised.

Disquse took on major development work for RedM, including porting the streaming feature and beginning OneSync development for RedM.

Duk continued working on anti-cheat improvements and other engineering tasks.

Overall, things were going relatively well. Despite some minor internal conflicts, everyone appeared motivated and actively contributed to the project.

However, the seeds of malice were beginning to take root.

Both Thers and Deltanic became very proactive in building a personal relationship with NTA, excessively praising them, avoiding disagreements on critical matters, and constantly seeking favor.

According to Disquse, he initially viewed the three as a tight-knit group of friends and didn’t see any reason to intervene in these interactions. Instead, he simply chose not to participate.

In early 2021, the decision was made to expand the team even further.

The initial "experiment" of hiring three community members was considered a success. Despite some expected slowdowns, everyone genuinely tried to contribute and remained engaged in the project.

The team considered using self-hosted Mattermost for communication and Jira for coordination. Additional team members were brought in – some from within the FiveM community, while others discovered the project via job postings.

More people generally means more management is required to keep things running effectively.

From the beginning, NTA didn’t want to take on additional management responsibilities, aside from their usual development work, which remained largely unchanged.



There was a single attempt to establish an agile workflow for the team, which was supposed to include meetings, proper task assignments, and team-building efforts. However, it never even got off the ground and was abandoned almost immediately.

Deltanic's behavior soon followed a consistent pattern of extreme irresponsibility. He would forget to complete tasks, ignore team members, and often be completely absent from the project. Even on the rare occasions when he did show up and attempt to work, he would take an excessive amount of time to complete even the simplest tasks.

We’re not talking about a few days of delay for something that should take a week – we’re talking about weeks or months of delay for tasks that should have been completed in a day or two.

Receiving status updates from Deltanic was nearly impossible. As you can imagine, this became a major issue, as certain problems required a timely and predictable response.

For example, imagine being a server owner, getting banned, and having to wait weeks just for a response – completely unacceptable.



For instance, the Anti-Cheat team never received the necessary funds to purchase cheats for analysis. NTA wasn’t even aware of this issue, as they had delegated the task to Deltanic, who was instructed multiple times to handle it – but never did.

The Anti-Cheat team, sick of Technetium’s behavior, would just start buying cheats with their own money. They were never compensated for these expenses.



FxDK was an innovative project designed to revolutionize GTA V modding. The majority of the work was done by NTA, including the reverse game technology, reversing and patching the game’s code, making side-by-side framework support, and many others.

Thers was responsible for UI development and side-by-side client integration, essentially everything frontend-related.

This would be the last major task he completed within a reasonable timeframe or with proper collaboration with his coworkers.

Since summer 2021, Thers has followed the same behavior as Deltanic – irresponsible, lazy, and highly unpredictable. He would promise to complete tasks but then abandon them after a long time with nothing to show for it.

However, his absence wasn’t as damaging to the project as Deltanic’s.

Thers was highly possessive of his work, actively pushing away anyone who tried to help or contribute to his area.

This behavior was in stark contrast to FiveM’s internal structure, which was open-source, flat-hierarchy, and encouraged collaboration. In FiveM, anyone could jump into any department and contribute freely, except when it came to Thers' work, where stepping on toes was a real concern.

As a result, FxDK was abandoned, and the great potential it once had was left unrealized.



Disquse recalls an “interesting” collaboration effort with Thers while working on AnimKit, the first-ever tool that allowed FiveM and the broader modding community to edit and create custom animations for GTA V.

Thers offered to integrate AnimKit with FxDK, which would have enabled users to preview animations "on the fly" without needing to go through manual processes. It was a great idea, and Disquse agreed to it.

However, as you might have guessed, this integration from Thers was never released – and most likely, was never even started.

The exact same scenario later played out with Disquse’s timecycle editor, another collaboration that never happened.

Thers even attempted to take on a leadership role for a frontend engineer who had been hired to assist with development. However, after a month of inactivity, during which this new hire received no proper management, code reviews, or task assignments, they decided to quit the team.



Additionally, many other tasks were simply forgotten and left abandoned in FiveM’s internal GitLab.

We’re sharing a conversation that happened between Disquse and NTA in 2023, discussing Thers’ behaviour.


By 2022, Thers and Deltanic’s behavior worsened dramatically.

During 2021, however, several regular hires joined the team. Most of them were productive, professional, and contributed positively to the project.

We’re going to name notable hires that will play roles in this story:

• LWSS, an experienced engineer and reverse engineer, known for many interesting security researches, they weren’t a part of FiveM community, and found the job listing on HackerNews. Started from making gameplay features and became a lead of the anticheat development after duk’s departure.
• Gottfriedleibniz, an experienced engineer who's been around the FiveM community for some time, was volunteering various good contributions. After joining the team, he helped with game development, also known for dramatically improving Lua runtime experience for FiveM users by making CfxLua 5.4 that most Lua resources use nowadays. Later decided to leave the project for their personal reasons not related to any team member, but after the acquisition were invited to join Rockstar Games.
• Fortahr a.k.a. Thorium, one of the later hires, a community member who joined our team to work as a software engineer, he was working on some gameplay chores and known for maintaining our C# scripting runtime, working on a complete overhaul named MonoV2, that were supposed to dramatically improve experience of developing on C#.
• Tabarra, a community member who has been working on the txAdmin extension. Hired to keep their work up and were also a witness of all the events that will happen in the future.
• Nimoa a.k.a. Titanium, joined the team by Deltanic’s initiative, supposed to work as a support agent. Later switched on performing some PR tasks like writing posts and has been extremely lazy, we’re going to outline his work and “achievements” during this later.
• Xinerki a.k.a. Fengorian, joined the team by Deltanic’s initiative, same as Nimoa, were supposed to work on support tickets but later switched on PR, also playing a key role in this story, so we will cover this later.

Deltanic repeatedly pushed to hire his friends to work on FiveM.

At the time, this didn’t seem suspicious, as many community members already knew each other. However, this would later lead to significant problems.

The vast majority of people hired at Deltanic’s recommendation turned out to be extremely lazy. Some of them had fewer than 50 messages in Mattermost – over a span of 2–3 years.

Mattermost, the team’s primary communication hub, was a text-only platform, making such low engagement highly concerning.


Tabarra wasn’t the only one unaware of just how many of Deltanic’s friends in the team were completely AFK.

One of Groot’s friends was hired to “work” on asset-related tools for “FxDK 2.0”. However, he only had around 60 messages on Mattermost in total.

Despite this, he secured a free ride into R*, and as far as the team knows, he is still there, collecting a paycheck.



In 2021, NTA were working tirelessly on the platform, nearly every single day of the year.

These weren’t just small updates to maintain a streak, they were major projects that required days or even weeks of development, including NTA’s part of FxDK, CEF updates, project restructuring, bug fixes, server reviews, and much more.


Unlike some others who create fake commits, these are real contributions, you can click on any green square and see the actual work behind them.
No rest, no weekends, an almost year-long streak.

You can also view the graphs for 2020, 2019, and previous years.

This is already fascinating, but don’t forget that NTA was also handling numerous other tasks and responsibilities, many of which should have been delegated but never were.

In reality, all team management responsibilities were pushed onto NTA’s shoulders, even though this was something they were barely able to handle.

The management was poor from the start, but when Deltanic completely abandoned his role, the entire burden fell onto NTA, who was already overworked and overwhelmed.



NTA never tried to hide the fact that they were not suited for management and made multiple attempts to bring Deltanic back to work.

While Deltanic occasionally returned for short periods, these comebacks usually resulted in even more unfinished work, leaving affected employees without clear communication or an understanding of their tasks.

NTA tried to fill these management gaps, but the stress was overwhelming.

First of all, NTA wasn’t great at planning, as most tasks that could be assigned to contractors were ones NTA could complete much faster themselves, which is exactly what usually happened.

Secondly, NTA wasn’t the easiest person to communicate with, this was no secret. At the time, they were extremely stressed about everything. Additionally, they had some communication and socialization issues due to medical reasons, which NTA would have to disclose themselves if they chose to.

If you didn’t know how to discuss work with NTA, chances were that your conversations would be unproductive.

This wasn’t a secret to anyone, and NTA never denied it, which is exactly why they wanted someone else to take on the management and communication responsibilities.

The Pulse posts were NTA’s effort to keep the community informed about the latest developments. These updates covered project progress, new features, programs, policy changes, and general insights about the future.

In short, they were meant to be monthly updates, summarizing the most important project-related information. In various forms and under different names, this type of update had existed since 2015.



The reason? These monthly updates were consistently delayed, had unpredictable release schedules, and at some point, fell months behind.

This pattern of laziness and missed deadlines continues even today, with some Cfx members failing to do their work – even after joining Rockstar Games.

However, we’ll cover that later. For now, let’s focus on the events of 2022–2023.

By the end of 2021, Nimoa (Titanium) and Xinerki (Fengorian), tired of handling support work, approached NTA and asked if they could also take on PR-related tasks, such as writing announcement posts, tweets, and other community updates.

NTA initially had no objections, as it meant some of the responsibilities would be taken off their shoulders.

However, much like Thers and Deltanic, both quickly abandoned their responsibilities. They not only failed to handle PR properly but also became extremely lazy with support tickets, eventually dropping them entirely.

Their lack of effort led to consistent delays in the monthly update posts (a.k.a. the "Pulses").


Read the excuse given in this post.

Of course, there were no "unforeseen developments", this was pure and utter laziness on their part.





Here’s the internal Mattermost conversation from that time:

Imagine having to beg your full-time paid contractors to do their job like this.

This isn’t a difficult task, it’s just writing a monthly forum post!


NTA always tried to be as transparent as possible with the community about the project but didn’t want to throw contractors under the bus for their laziness. So yeah, “unforeseen circumstances”.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t an isolated incident, it happened again and again, forcing NTA to step in and do the work themselves. As you might have noticed, they continue to do this even today at Rockstar Games.



And so it continued, again, and again, and again.

Keep in mind that these people were billing NTA for full business hours, which was blatantly fraudulent.

Is writing a single post once a month, within a 28-day deadline, really such a complex task? How do you delay a one-month task by two months?

At some point, these PR people just gave up and did nothing at all. They made sure to continue invoicing NTA though.

Frustrated with the constant delays and excuses, Tabarra stepped in and asked if he could take over the responsibility of writing Pulse posts while continuing his work on txAdmin.

Somehow, Tabarra managed to balance his regular txAdmin responsibilities with PR work, and since then, Pulse posts were released on time, without delays. Not only that, but they also featured well-written content and good wording.

Tabarra was quite thoughtful, even DMing team members with questions to ensure the posts were accurate and informative. He took over Pulse posts from January 2023 until the acquisition announcement, and if you check, every single one was released on time.



(If you haven’t heard of Ethan Hirsch yet, don’t worry, you’ll learn a lot about them later.)

While they weren’t directly involved during this timeframe, some longtime FiveM community members may have noticed a pattern in what we’ve been describing.

That’s why we decided to draw a connection between how these issues unfolded back then and how they continue to persist, even under different management after joining Rockstar Games.

Nimoa (a.k.a. Titanium) and Xinerki (a.k.a. Fengorian) were extremely lazy in their PR roles. While their lack of effort was obvious to everyone, both inside and outside the team, at this point, it wasn’t significantly damaging the project.

Meanwhile, Deltanic (a.k.a. Technetium) and Thers (a.k.a. Nihonium) had been doing nothing for months, to the point where they barely even had a presence in the project. Whenever they were questioned, they claimed they were working on something in the background and had "nothing to report".


In fact, due to the absence of these people, some team members had honestly assumed that NTA had fired them. They had been completely absent in a small company for over a year. It wasn’t until the Rockstar acquisition deal that they suddenly rushed back and acted like they had never left.

You may ask: if these people were so lazy and weren’t doing their jobs properly, why didn’t NTA simply replace them? After all, this was a paid job, and they were expected to follow their contractual obligations.

That’s a good question, and the answer leads us to the nastiest part of the pre-acquisition era of FiveM.

If you recall, it was mentioned earlier that Thers and Deltanic were actively trying to build a relationship with NTA. Unfortunately, this wasn’t genuine friendship.

Earlier, we also noted that NTA had socialization difficulties due to medical reasons and often struggled to find friends to connect with. NTA mentioned this multiple times in Discord, and older community members may remember these messages.

NTA had been trying to form friendships for years but was unsuccessful, mainly due to incompatibilities with others. They weren’t always the easiest person to deal with, and everyone was aware of that.


We can’t say for certain whether this was their plan from the start, or if they simply realized the “easy way” halfway through, but as NTA’s emotional attachment to them grew, so did their laziness and irresponsibility.

Looking ahead, 6 people:

• Deltanic (a.k.a. Technetium)
• Thers (a.k.a. Nihonium)
• Nimoa (a.k.a. Titanium)
• Xinerki (a.k.a. Fengorian)
• Kane (a.k.a. Silicon)
• AK (a.k.a. Roentgenium)

Grouped together and formed their own little clique within the FiveM team.

It’s also important to note that these individuals already had relationships with each other before they started “working” on FiveM, and they were all originally referred by Deltanic.

These 6 had a Telegram chat where they privately coordinated and started to actively manipulate NTA for various favors.

Their preferred work ethic? Do nothing. Once they realized that NTA was too afraid to fire them, being too scared of damaging their so-called "friendship", they completely stopped working.

Another power they exploited was the ability to block servers they personally disliked or help their friends evade TOS enforcement.

This behavior only worsened over time and continued even after the acquisition, with these individuals now working at Rockstar Games, something that will be discussed later.

This is how NTA’s personal vulnerabilities were exploited and turned against them. The project suffered. Other contractors suffered.

At some point, these individuals became so confident in their invulnerability that they started to play these “emotional rollercoaster” manipulative games publicly.


Sometimes, this would be triggered by something as small as breaking "canary" (FiveM’s update channel for unstable/untested changes) due to hard-to-test updates. Other times, it was simply the result of random personal drama in their private chats.


When NTA would try to force them to do their work, they would resort to the same emotional manipulation playbook, forcing to feel that NTA is bad and don’t deserve such “good friends”.


Can you imagine speaking like that to your boss?

While the team had no strict rules regarding communication, starting a conversation with toxicity and blame was a common tactic used by this group, not just Xinerki, but several others from the same group as well.

The tweet in question was about a new crosshair system added to FiveM, something that should have been a simple update.

It might sound like pure evilness to intentionally behave this way, and we agree.

While there's no reasonable doubt that this type of behaviour was used deliberately, we can only hope it wasn't their intention from the very beginning.

The rest of the team, who were merely spectators to these events, couldn’t believe what was happening. They considered it as just interpersonal drama between friends.

However, it became more and more clear that these weren’t just random incidents – at least, not all of them.

We’re attaching a clear example of how their "emotional baiting" tactics worked. NTA often took their exclusion from real-life events involving this group of “friends” too seriously.





Afterward, Titanium ignored NTA for two full weeks, while Deltanic’s group held private meetings in Amsterdam. This wasn’t just personal avoidance, they also ignored work-related chats and tasks.

As typically happened after such incidents, they disappeared for an extended period.

One might ask, why did NTA care so much about these real-life meetings?

First, these meetings were project-related and included other team members, specifically, members of Deltanic’s group.

Second, NTA genuinely believed these people were their friends and felt hurt by being excluded from such events.

Third, as mentioned earlier, NTA deeply wanted to socialize more. Due to medical reasons, this was not easy for them, but they were making a real effort to break out of their isolation.

Fourth, as mentioned, this group knew exactly how NTA would react. The "accidental" leak was clearly not a mistake, as similar incidents had happened before and would continue to occur in the future.

It's important to note that, despite NTA being a difficult person to communicate with, only this specific group had ongoing conflicts with NTA over the years.

By the time the team stopped hiring, there were more than 20 contractors, yet only these six individuals had major issues with NTA.

The rest of the team, including the most active contributors, who interacted with NTA daily,


Disquse recalls that there were several conflicts between them and NTA early on. However, these usually stemmed from misunderstandings, either because Disquse took NTA’s responses too personally or because NTA used poor wording that was misinterpreted due to Disquse’s language barrier.

In the end, they managed to build a solid working relationship, and most of their later disagreements were caused by so-called "mood takedowns", which we will cover soon.

The team was made up of different types of people:

• Some were passionate about modding and worked hard to improve the project.
• Some worked hard but never actually cared about modding itself.
• Some joined and immediately vanished.

Overall, the vast majority of the team had no major issues at the time.

The only consistent conflicts involved the six individuals who were manipulating NTA, which, in hindsight, is quite self-explanatory.


For some reason, these individuals, despite having little to no contributions to the project, began to see themselves as “leaders and visionaries”, placing everyone in the team else beneath them.

Their sense of superiority was solely based on the fact that they “had” to communicate with NTA in real life.

No, this is not a joke or an exaggeration – one of the group members publicly mentioned this in 2024. However, they had already been acting this way for a long time, and their superiority complex was obvious to everyone.



Can we even compare the PR or UI/UX work to the amount of work Disquse contributed to the project, even if we ignore their extreme laziness and pretend they’re worked hard all these years?

What about the effort required to keep FiveM updated for the latest game versions, or the work that went into building RedM from scratch?

What about LWSS, who was highly proactive in maintaining the anti-cheat system for years?

What about GottfriedLeibniz, who fixed hundreds of crashes and, for example, introduced CfxLua, which is now widely used in FiveM?

How about Tabarra, who was building and updating txAdmin, a tool that made the lives of countless server owners significantly easier?

And many other truly hard-working contributors.

None of the Deltanic’s friend group was even contributing to any project-critical work, let alone fulfilling the jobs they had promised to do.

We will revisit this topic in the "post-acquisition" era of the story, as it requires more details and context. We will also discuss how these individuals justified their laziness.

You might ask: How could a mature person be so easily manipulated?

The answer lies in NTA’s vulnerable mental state, which was affected by medical reasons. Unfortunately, different people exploited this vulnerability in different ways.

Disquse recalls realizing that, at some point, long before he was hired, he too had unintentionally manipulated NTA. It wasn’t for money, laziness, or personal gain, but rather a “strategic push”. He remembers noticing that NTA would get extremely stressed about competitor features.

Disquse took advantage of this by showing NTA a video of a 3D CEF rendering implementation in one of FiveM’s competing WIP multiplayer mods. As expected, NTA took it personally, and within a single day, they implemented the feature themselves in FiveM. While this might sound innocent, and in the end, it benefited FiveM, Disquse was fully aware of how NTA would react, so it was still a form of manipulation.

At the time, it was just an internal joke, and Disquse didn’t realize how much stress it actually caused NTA. Some of you might remember the infamous "FiveM being hacked by Disquse" message, this was one of the outcomes of these so-called “innocent” manipulations.

NTA took down the entire FiveM platform in an attempt to provoke Disquse. While this reaction was completely inappropriate, and NTA shouldn’t have done it, only after this incident did Disquse realize how harmful these mind games were, and he never did anything like that again.


If you were an active FiveM user back in the day, you might have noticed that FiveM’s infamous "mood takedowns" (as the team called them) became more frequent in 2022-2023.

The reason? Manipulation continued, but this time, it came not from Disquse, but from different people and for entirely different purposes.

Everyone on the team was suffering from these events. Disquse remembers trying to discuss these issues with NTA in direct messages, asking why they couldn’t find a manager to properly take over the project’s management.

NTA’s responses were extremely disheartening, as they blamed themselves for being unable to manage even a small team. They rejected the idea of hiring anyone else to help with management, fearing it would upset the group.

Whenever these people wanted something, they would relentlessly pressure NTA. If their demands weren’t met, they would punish NTA by collectively ignoring them for weeks.

While the original team had their heads down, putting in 4 or 8 hours of work everyday; This group would neglect their duties, slack off, and then plot ways to use NTA in their secret Telegram.

So how exactly did the project start to suffer from this?

The most obvious impact was on NTA’s mood and productivity, which suffered significantly. Their 2022 GitHub commit graph shows major gaps, periods when NTA was completely demotivated and unable to work on anything FiveM-related.

Of course, these gaps weren’t the only time when these people played on NTA’s nerves, they’re just the most visible ones.

Secondly, as explained earlier, NTA was under constant pressure – either directly managing the team or trying to push those who were supposed to handle management.

Not every hire was lazy or irresponsible.

• Disquse helped relieve NTA of some development burdens by handling updates for FiveM and RedM on newer game builds, fulfilling community needs with new features and bug fixes, and taking ownership of RedM.
• LWSS, as of 2021, took the lead of the anticheat department, managing a small team and doing an excellent job.
• GottfriedLeibniz provided significant contributions to game development tasks and played a key role in pushing CfxLua (a.k.a. Lua 5.4), which made Asset Escrowing possible, a remarkable achievement.
• Thorium managed the C# scripting runtime and handled additional game development tasks.
• One team member took responsibility for web services and also contributed to the Asset Escrowing system.
• Several support agents worked despite the lack of manpower.

While mismanagement and internal conflicts created major obstacles, individuals remained dedicated and made valuable contributions to the project.

Overall, the majority of the team consisted of good people who genuinely tried to do their work. Some may have been lazy at times or lacked motivation, but in the end, they made an effort. Most had no issues working with NTA and did not cause problems for the project. They certainly never tried to enrich themselves at NTA’s expense. Some openly admitted that they weren’t passionate about the project and were simply doing their job, and that was completely fair.

The whole picture looks pretty different compared to Deltanic’s group who were lazy, irresponsible, and never cared about the project. Worse yet, they manipulated and abused NTA to get what they wanted.

The dedicated members of the team helped alleviate some of NTA’s workload in game development, anticheat, and web services. However, the pressure dramatically increased in management, PR, enforcement, UI design, and other areas where Deltanic’s group was supposed to contribute but failed to do so.

One major consequence of this pressure and manipulation was the phenomenon known as “mood takedowns”.

This is when NTA was partially or fully shutting down FiveM, preventing players from playing it. There is no rational justification for such actions, as NTA is a mature person who was making such actions on their own.

To understand why this happened, it’s important to consider the context. Before 2021, NTA rarely did something like that, and when they did, it was usually due to the immense pressure of maintaining such a large project, as a single person responsible for EVERYTHING.

At the time, NTA was already carrying deep mental scars from past encounters with Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games in 2015, as well as earlier issues with Activision. There was intense competition that NTA was determined not to lose to, alongside a growing number of PR and support challenges, as well as individuals trying to exploit the platform for profit in every imaginable way.

Even then, these takedowns were extremely rare and typically triggered by conflicts or sudden drama, such as in Disquse’s case. NTA never took down FiveM “just for fun” – there was always a breaking point, a specific event that pushed their sanity to the limit.

However, between late 2021 and 2023, these incidents began occurring far more frequently.

As you might guess, the increase in "mood takedowns" was directly correlated with the increasingly egregious behavior of Deltanic and his friends. While not every incident was caused by this group, since late 2021, almost all were directly or indirectly tied to their actions.

These manipulations of course did affect NTA a lot. They honestly thought these people were their friends. Friends that NTA was trying to find for so long. Naturally, when you finally find something you've always wanted, you don’t want to lose it. This group played a "good cop, bad cop" game, putting NTA on an emotional rollercoaster.

These situations usually occurred when NTA asked them to do actual work, but many of these interactions were difficult to trace because they primarily took place in direct messages.

The rest of the team witnessed numerous instances of this manipulation, but at the time, no one wanted to get involved in what was thought to be "drama between friends", especially when emotions were running high. Almost every single "mood takedown" during this period was directly linked to drama caused by this group.

As mentioned earlier, the usual form of their “punishment” for NTA’s “bad actions” was ignoring NTA for a few weeks or so. Instead of communicating their grievances or attempting to resolve conflicts, like in a genuine friendship, they simply refused to engage.

During these “ignoring periods” they were not only ignoring personal messages or DMs, but also were not showing up for work, leading to an even worse work environment. Despite their absence, they still counted every single day as "worked" in their monthly invoices.

The team remembered a few cases where NTA took down FiveM to bring their attention to some critically important work tasks that required immediate reaction from these people (business inquiries, infrastructure failures, etc), but they were in “ignoring mode”.

While these takedowns were undoubtedly a terrible decision on NTA’s part, we’re not here to justify or sugarcoat anything. Our goal is to tell the full story, one where the vast majority of claims have been confirmed, either directly or indirectly. We are not hiding any facts but rather providing a complete picture of the situation.

We are also not trying to excuse NTA’s actions. These takedowns were unfortunate and damaging to the platform's reputation, but it's important to understand that they did not happen without reason. Additionally, NTA never attempted to lie about these incidents, shift blame onto others, or deny responsibility, they took full ownership of their actions.



Rumors may have originated from within the team, possibly from members of Deltanic’s group. They frequently lied about various things when addressing the audience, including the "mood takedown" incidents.

This is something NTA never wanted. Remember the “open and transparent” ideology that was NTA’s credo? It’s unknown if these people just wanted to look more professional, or if they actually were trying to keep NTA in a good light, as they were afraid of the consequences. Their love to lie continues even today. There will be more details around that later in this document.

From an outside observer’s perspective, someone unaware of the internal drama, it was impossible to understand the true nature of these events. Even from an insider’s point of view, the mood takedowns made NTA look terrible. Deltanic’s group appeared calm and mature, while NTA came across as impulsive, shutting down servers like a frustrated child.

Once again, most of the team tried to stay out of the drama, choosing not to dig too deeply into what was really happening. Deltanic’s group followed the same manipulative routine every time: start doing the regular manipulations, refuse to do any work, ask NTA for favors or money, if declined, “punish” NTA for this, and make them freak out.

If a "mood takedown" followed, even better—they could run and tell everyone how terrible NTA was and insist that "mood takedowns should never happen again", as if they had nothing to do with causing it in the first place.

Due to a lack of context and understanding, even people like Disquse, who deeply respected NTA, initially supported this false narrative. From an outsider’s perspective, the situation seemed obvious: “Why would a single person take down a platform used by millions of people?”. After all, FiveM was the primary source of income for 20+ team members, as well as some server owners and content creators.

You can’t say they didn’t have a valid point, if only they weren’t the ones pushing NTA toward these actions in the first place. Again, we’re not trying to justify NTA’s decisions, but we need to highlight the full context to help everyone understand what was actually happening at the time. Even internally, it was difficult to grasp, but with hindsight, the bigger picture becomes clearer.

As you continue reading, you’ll hopefully see how the dots connect, but there’s another crucial point about the "mood takedowns" that will help reveal the true intentions of these people. We will discuss this later in the document.

However, "mood takedowns" weren’t the only consequence of these manipulations—they also negatively impacted development.

Behind the scenes, FiveM had ambitious plans to make modding more user-friendly, accessible, and appealing to new audiences.

For example, the project mentioned earlier, FxDK, was designed to revolutionize the way developers create maps, write scripts, and test assets. There were also plans for official Blender tooling that would have been integrated into FxDK, making content creation even smoother. However, due to poor management, none of it ever materialized.

The Cfx.re "Dev Portal" was intended to function as a combination of Keymaster, Unity Dashboard, and a marketplace. The idea was planned as far back as 2020, and with the Tebex partnership, it became even more evident that FiveM needed such a system. However, it was never meant to be a lazy, for-profit project like the recently announced "Cfx.re Portal", which is essentially just a Keymaster redesign that took over a year to develop.
Not only did FiveM fail to deliver this much-needed tool to its audience, but the current management of the "Creator Platform" also failed to address it properly.

The Dev Portal never materialized because Thers had not been actively working since 2021. Instead, they kept "planning" one "cfx-ui refactor" after another. In the end, it took nearly two years to get this "refactor" working, while also breaking several UI features that were never fixed. Of course, all other development work was blocked during these endless "refactors".

What about a UGC-based game powered by Cfx.re? Imagine breaking free from Rockstar’s influence and hiring a team of professionals to develop an original game, finally moving the project out of the "gray area". NTA had the resources to hire an entire studio to make this happen. But what became of this idea? Driven to complete self-doubt and overwhelming stress, NTA refused to even consider such a massive task. It would have required significant management and business operations, responsibilities they knew the team wasn’t capable of handling properly, and Deltanic was obviously not a viable option.

If you remember, there was a "joke announcement" on April 1st, 2021, where the "Portable Edition" of FiveM was revealed. While the post was filled with irony and humor, the underlying concept wasn’t a joke. At the time, GTA V was already runnable on Android and worked surprisingly well, years before modern open-source solutions allowed for better emulation of native Windows applications on Android. However, NTA was afraid to release anything like this, knowing it would bring too much unwanted attention to the project, attention that rarely led to anything good. Despite the “joking nature”, the prototype was real.

The FiveM Marketplace was planned long before Asset Escrow was introduced—back when the first attempt at creation monetization was being explored. The vision was to build a marketplace similar to those of Unreal Engine and Unity. Unlike the fragmented Tebex stores, the marketplace was supposed to be a unified platform with: a single search hub for all assets, promotions and giveaways, quality checks and automated tests, better support and moderation and much more.

One can only imagine what FiveM’s future could have looked like if not for this small group of people. How do they sleep at night, knowing they exploited a person struggling with mental health issues for their own profit? It’s… pure evil.

Of course, no one ever sees themselves as the "bad guys." There always has to be some excuse for their behavior.

In the beginning (2021-2022), it was “burnouts”, “unpredicted life events”, etc. and similar justifications that constantly prevented them from doing their work. For some unknown reason, these issues kept happening again and again – only to this group.

Sometimes, they would lie about being overloaded with work, even when their tasks were neither complex nor demanding – such as writing Pulse posts. Other times, they claimed they needed extra time to figure out how to implement a simple task.

Keep in mind, this was a contractor job with hourly-based payment. If they had simply not invoiced NTA during their weeks or months of absence, it would have been fair.

As time went on (2022-2023), their excuses evolved. As they ramped up their manipulation of NTA, their new excuse became: “it’s because of NTA”.

There were always different stories about how NTA supposedly prevented them from working, claiming they were "demotivated", "blocked", suffering from "PTSD due to NTAs actions", or facing other emotional struggles, all conveniently tied to NTA.

Most notably, they got so used to this type of behaviour, that it even continued after the acquisition and after these people convinced R* to fire NTA from the team.

Months after NTA was gone, they were still blaming them for every single failure in their own work. Just giving a few examples.

Claiming that not using a specific Docker image was the cause of infrastructure delays, even though that image didn't exist when the container was created.

Complaining about "bad code" from NTA, as if it were a massive blocker, despite the fact that their task was a simple fix that should have taken only a few lines of code, yet dragged on for weeks.

Blaming their inability to fix issues in time on NTA not writing documentation, despite having had years to document things themselves.

They even invented meaningless tasks such as "ensuring NTA can't regain access to this server" and "reverse engineering the backend." They would constantly complain in meetings about how terrible everything was, ironically revealing just how little work they had actually been doing before the R* acquisition.

The core team found it disgusting to hear these excuses from the same group of people who had historically been lazy, and remained lazy. Even after joining Rockstar Games under Ethan Hirsch's management, they continued using NTA as a scapegoat, just as they had for years.

Other members of the "Creator Platform" noticed this behavior and attempted to get them to stop or move on. A few authoritative figures were also observing them, and it quickly became obvious what they were doing.

To understand the true nature of these people, you need to start from the beginning. As you may have noticed in the article “Changes to the Cfx.re core team & a word on recent events”, there was a statement explaining the reasoning behind hiring the first team members:


It does align perfectly with what was written earlier, and this was NTA’s real intention behind starting to hire people into the team.

While it may have been just a coincidence, we believe Deltanic, whether intentionally or not, chose the perfect moment to step in and offer help with real issues that NTA was genuinely struggling with. As mentioned before, we don’t want to assume that their initial goal was to exploit NTA, simply because it’s difficult to believe that people could have such a low level of morality.

However, these individuals had been around the project for a long time and were well aware of NTA’s weaknesses.

Another major red flag was when Technetium attempted to take full control of the project while his group was actively manipulating NTA. The earliest mention of this "idea" dates back to early 2021.

Disquse recalls that after a personal conflict with NTA, caused by a misunderstanding, he considered stepping away from the project for a while. At the time, Deltanic, who had not yet gone into ghost mode, was actually trying to mediate the situation, speaking with both parties. He told Disquse the following about NTA:

It’s uncertain, but this seems to be the point when this group began considering a takeover of the project, justifying it by blaming NTA’s behavior and decisions.

This also coincides with the period when they started acting lazy and irresponsible (early to mid-2021).

It took some time before any noticeable actions were taken in this direction. By late 2021 to early 2022, the punitive narratives surrounding "mood takedowns" were being pushed so aggressively that Deltanic and his group attempted to seize complete control of the project.

They pressured NTA to hand over all accounts, passwords, and tokens, while also demanding that NTA completely remove their own access.

Surprisingly or not, NTA, who was well aware of their emotional instability and the damages that such incidents do, actually wasn’t entirely against this idea.

While NTA refused to provide “full access to everything”, he offered Deltanic the ability to take over the project's infrastructure, and hosting access, as to prevent such incidents in the future.

NTA wanted to set up a contract with Deltanic that would’ve protected the rights of both parties, to ensure that NTA is still the owner of these assets, and allow NTA regain full access back within a reasonable amount of time (as these takedowns were impulsive, and last only a few hours at most).

NTA already had an unfortunate experience of losing access to their own project (AlterIWnet in 2011). Back then, someone promised to help with the infrastructure, took over control and then just disappeared. Because of this experience, NTA knew a legal contract was mandatory.

Obviously, NTA didn’t want to give them excessive access to the project.
They don’t need full access to, e.g. patreon related things, domain registration rights, etc. If we forget that these events were happening because of the drama created by these people, this sounds like a win-win solution to everyone.

Deltanic received a draft contract from NTA somewhere in the middle of 2022. However, Deltanic never signed it, and just vanished regarding this topic.

For whatever reason, the solution that was supposed to resolve all the problems related to the “mood takedowns” was ignored, quite opposite of what they’ve claimed was their real intention – protect players from NTA’s emotions.

We can only assume that they didn’t quite like that NTA refused to give them full access without any contracts. One could even speculate that their real goal was just to get access into the financial systems.

Despite this, after some rough talks with Disquse, who was pissed about these takedowns, NTA decided to give away their access to the infra servers, even without a contract.

Which apparently wasn’t the first time they tried to resolve such an issue like that.

Deltanic, Kane, Nimoa and Thers received full access to the project's infra, and NTA’s access was removed.

But… They were quite bad at maintaining the infrastructure.

As was mentioned by NTA in screenshots, they were extremely lazy doing infra tasks even back then. Nothing has changed since. The outages that were happening on their own from time to time, were either due to a random software outage, or targeted attacks from malicious actors (e.g. ddos).


Without NTA’s help, these were taking way longer to resolve. Their reaction time was awfully slow. Even without the “mood takedowns”, the platform's stability was actually going down, the amount of outage-time was higher, and NTA had to ask them for access back to resolve the issues properly.

Nowadays, there are still major infra issues happening from time to time, some are not highlighted on the status page due to the way it works. For instance, the forums had some large issues uploading images and other attachments for a long time, and this issue randomly appears again. Another case was a broken login functionality in various scenarios for like a week. Nobody cared to fix these issues in time.

Just a set of random recent screenshots from FiveM’s official Discord guide shared to us by community members about the “stability” of the platform after the acquisition.

Looking retroactively on this situation. Given the fact that there wasn’t a single, but multiple attempts to transfer the project’s infra ownership responsibilities, this specific group never was interested in this, despite their earlier claims.


When the group started to ignore infra related tasks again and again, NTA abused some “leftover” tokens to gain access back to some part of infra to do a “mood takedown” again. Disquse was now paying way closer attention to the whole situation, after hearing from NTA that these people keep ignoring their work related tasks. Disquse noticed the same picture. So their further talks were less stressed out, but Disquse still insisted that NTA must stop doing that. As we’ve said earlier, the rest of the team tried to stay away from the dramas and never tried to understand the nature of these events.

At some point, the actual infra failures, caused by laziness and unwillingness to put any effort into this, started to become a large problem. Following their usual routine, they started to claim that it was NTA causing these outages on their own intentionally. The lack of access they’ve been explaining as “NTA has many backdoors and secret access tokens that we can’t find!”. While it seems there actually were one or two events like that, the vast majority of outages weren’t caused by NTA in any way. NTA’s takedowns always were followed with some silly messages when trying to connect to a server or some other stupid things like launching MS Paint instead of FiveM, these were regular issues within infra.

We are not trying to justify NTA’s actions, they’re terrible, wrong and in the end never should’ve been done. However, these situations help to understand a little more about the nature of this problem. This is when Disquse also started to be a bit more careful about everything related to NTA and this group.

The actions of these people were quite opposite of what they claimed they wanted. Instead of taking care of infra, they’ve just continued to be lazy and irresponsible. They always had a chance to quit the project any moment if NTA was such a “bad boss”, but none of them did this, except AK, who was very short-lived. While it was obvious to everyone that these people had no passion left for the project, they started to reveal their real intentions more and more.

As a final bit, we’re sharing this conversation:

Now we feel it’s important to outline a bit more context about this group of “friends” who were abusing NTA’s mental vulnerabilities.
From now on we’re going to call Deltanic’s group the “Groot Gang”. (Shortly before and all the time after the acquisition, they actually acted like a gang.)

Speaking of the nature of this group, it’s important to mention that they weren't well “organized” and not everyone followed exactly the same ideas as others. Their communications were happening in their Telegram chat. And while some members, specifically Deltanic (a.k.a. Technetium), Thers (a.k.a. Nihonium) and Nimoa (a.k.a. Titanium) were following the Xinerki agenda, abusing NTA as much as they could and trying to take over control of the project. People like Xin (a.k.a. Fengorian), Kane (a.k.a. Silicon) and AK (a.k.a. Roentgenium) more likely followed the same idea of manipulation but more like a way to be lazy, meaning no further harm, at least back then in 2021-2023.

As a great example that these people are not the same, we could take the Roentgenium case. While he was a part of the Deltanic’s group, he decided to step away from the project. While we’re not directly claiming he wasn’t playing his part of these manipulation games, this person, at least, decided to leave the project. While he hid their real intentions, officially it was “health issues”. It was most likely due to being unable to get along to work with NTA. He was the first and the latest Deltanic’s group member to have done this. And it clearly means his intentions weren't the same as other group members, or maybe they’ve changed. This makes quite a difference to what the other group members have done in the future.

Diving deep in the future, all of them were claiming to Rockstar that NTA was a bad person, abused them and made them work in a terrible work environment. Somehow these claims were made by the same well-known as historically lazy and irresponsible Deltanic’s group

It’s also very important to mention how Xinerki refers to 6 people max as “the whole” team, while the rest of the team, even Disquse who had personal dramas with NTA earlier, managed to build proper work relationships.

Xinerki, compared to other group members, most likely actually tried to build friend relationships with NTA (and failed, as you remember NTA wasn’t the easiest person to deal with). It’s also important to mention that among the whole group Xinerki was actually passionate about the project as a modding platform, not as a way to solely make money. While not exactly being very productive on their work tasks, they did use the platform as a regular user on a regular basis. Something the rest of the Groot Group barely ever did. A person who did various FiveM resources for the community looks quite different compared to a group of people who were working on this project for many years, yet not even aware how to control a helicopter or where Paleto Bay is located. However, Xin also loved to take advantage of opportunities that NTA were providing. For instance, NTA “fictionally” hired a friend of Xin, was paying him quite a large salary to justify their work visa in the Netherlands, so Xin could be close to their friend. Other than the fact that this friend wasn’t doing any work, everything was legally and NTA was paying real money with no “chargebacks”.

Kane (a.k.a. Silicon), being a part of the Groot Gang, while always blaming NTA for his own failures, wasn’t caught being as lazy as the other gang members. He always quite tried to do his work, although sometimes not taking it seriously enough or not being competent enough to do it properly. Notable that this has continued even after the acquisition, although the amount of blame put on NTA for being unable to perform some tasks in time dramatically increased. At least the team remembers that he did some effort in trying to accomplish their responsibilities, and not just once a month, unlike other Groot Gang members.

Even those who were historically lazy, tried to appear once in a while (after weeks or usually months of absence) to do some minor tasks/chores, and then disappear back for an undefined amount of time. Thers were doing minor fixes for cfx-ui and FxDK from time to time. Deltanic was randomly asking the team management questions like “hey what everyone’s doing?” and then disappearing. Nimoa were occasionally writing the pulse posts, although with major delays. But this was no more than a few hours of work a week. Not the 40 hours they were supposed to do according to their contracts.

The rest of the team were pretty much noticing that there’s some people who are for whatever reason allowed to be slackers. But due to the always ongoing dramas that were surrounding these people, and the fact that the majority of the team saw them as “friends” that had interpersonal dramas, nobody actually bothered to ever try to ask NTA why they keep these people or why they’re allowed to be lazy.

NTA was trying to make sure that the laziness of these people is not a problem to anyone by filling the gaps. If you needed some PR work, you could ask NTA to take care of it, this would either lead to NTA doing this work on their own or them trying to push the related people to do their work (which in case of small tasks sometimes worked without dramas).

This is a good contrast compared to what the team has had to experience in Rockstar Games, where waiting for an ability to discuss a creation of a small article from the very same people was taking almost 2 weeks. And it’s just an ability to discuss it, not the creation itself. We will discuss the terrible work environment that the hard workers of the team were put into after the acquisition in the next part.

Deltanic’s irresponsibility once put Disquse’s well being in real risk. While it’s a bit of a personal story, Disquse shared this screenshot with one of the team members behind the document, we’re sharing it with you. This talk has happened between Disquse and NTA by the end of 2022. “Tech” is a Technetium a.k.a. Deltanic.


But, as we’ve mentioned and proved earlier, this is not an exception but regular behaviour of Technetium.

Returning back to the past, we don’t know exactly if these random rare attempts of this group to do their work were just to look a bit better or if they just occasionally were getting the desire to do their work responsibilities once in a while.

Since we’re not trying to intentionally make anyone look good or bad, we are mentioning this point. As well as reminding, they weren’t like that from the beginning, something happened in their minds, and we don’t exactly know what. We can only go off what the team had to witness and the evidence that we’ve got.

So, even if we forget about the rest of the claims, how could they make an excuse for being lazy while charging NTA for full workload? NTA once mentioned that they don’t want contractors to feel too much pressure, especially on the monetary front. If someone for whatever reason felt sick or just burnt out or any other viable reason to not perform any work, they could reasonably take PTOs (paid time off) and not worry about anything.

The majority of the team used this opportunity to build a perfect work-life balance - something you couldn’t ever do in most companies nowadays. But the rest seem to abuse this ability to hell, although they never tried to excuse such behaviour using this point. This pretty much explains their inability to do any real work after the acquisition – they didn't used to do actual work everyday 8 hours a day, which continues even today.

We’re getting close to another important arc, but first, we find it’s also important to outline some events that happened during the acquisition negotiations. These events were hidden from the vast majority of the team, but we’ve managed to confirm it from chat logs that we’ve seen between various team members, usually in the form of “casual discussions”.

The first contact between Rockstar and Cfx.re was made around October 2022.

However, it was not NTA.

It was Deltanic who initiated acquisition deal negotiations without saying anything to his boss (NTA). Deltanic had absolutely no right to do this as an “Assistant”.

NTA, being well aware of Deltanic’s laziness, was periodically checking his work emails to ensure there were no ignored important messages. This unfortunately had happened before. They noticed a message from a @rockstargames.com email, and subsequently shared some bits of information with Disquse.


There were two months (Oct-Nov 2022) where Deltanic was privately going back and forth with Rockstar regarding the purchase of FiveM. NTA was completely unaware, and even afterwards, Deltanic would secretly contact Rockstar and change parameters of the deal without NTA’s permission.

NTA would also not be allowed to meet with Rockstar representatives on Zoom without Deltanic present.

Disquse remembers that the information about setting up a contact with Rockstar was both scary and exciting. Although there were many thoughts about what could happen in the future, what they would do to us, what their real intentions were - the odds of Rockstar being interested in an acquisition/partnership deal were thought to be very low.

NTA was not given a choice to opt-out from this discussion. From the beginning, Deltanic leaked NTA’s real identity to Rockstar.

Remember that NTA had a court restriction NOT to work on anything related to Take-Two. Deltanic had now put NTA in real legal risk.


As you can see from the screenshot above, it wasn’t only NTA whose data was sent to Rockstar behind their back without permission. Deltanic had secretly leaked the personal information of every single contractor to another company.

This put every team member at great risk, especially after legal cases like Take-Two vs FiveM and `Take-Two vs. reGTA team`.

Deltanic knew exactly what he was doing here. In fact, in 2020-2021 Deltanic himself preached about contractor privacy, saying it was very serious, for there were great potential legal risks attached to the work on FiveM.

In addition, Deltanic also leaked the company’s entire financial data, again, without permission. He was trying to secure a “sweetheart deal” at R* by being a “good boy”.

Sadly, this worked, and he would go on to become a “Director”.

Negotiations started. Aside from Deltanic's actions, everything went at a normal pace.. They asked about various tech stuff in FiveM. There were lots of meetings and negotiations. Surprisingly, Deltanic wasn’t lazy at this specific point, he was even described as: “too excited”. Which is fairly understandable, even if we forget about the fact that he tried to take over the project, he and his gang were always sharing their frustrations about NTA internally.

This was a great opportunity to give someone else management powers. NTA also saw the same opportunity – they didn’t want to do management work, and they couldn’t push the Groot Gang to do it either, at least while still being “friends”. NTA saw this as an opportunity to resolve all these personal issues, and remove so many responsibilities from their shoulders. NTA finally be able to focus on doing what they loved.

After all, this was a potentially huge step forward for the whole modding community. Who could imagine what was achievable with Rockstar’s help, right? Well, as now we know, it utterly failed. Read on for more.

In general, while understanding the whole situation and the new risks, NTA wasn’t too optimistic, but kept hoping everything would go alright.

At some point in the negotiations, Deltanic started to behave inappropriately.

There would start to be some weird decisions made behind NTA’s back.


Apparently there was an opportunity for this deal to not end up like an acquisition, but to instead be more like a partnership. This would leave Cfx.re more freedom, however, this idea was privately declined by Deltanic. NTA wasn’t even aware that Deltanic was intervening in the negotiations like this. Hirsch had confirmed that this opportunity was possible but “refused”. At this point it’s pretty much obvious why Groot Gang and Deltanic himself didn’t want to stay under NTA - they were following their old intention to take over the project in any way.

Rockstar asked NTA and Deltanic not to share any information with the team just yet, at least while the details of the potential deal were still being discussed. Despite this, Deltanic leaked the Rockstar negotiations to his officers in the Groot Gang. However, before signing an NDA, NTA also privately discussed the matter with Disquse a bit.

As long as people can keep their mouth shut and not leak confidential information, no problem here, right?

The pre-emptive actions that were taken by the Groot Gang members here are quite demonstrative.

These are only what we’re aware of, but this is already enough to understand their actual nature and intentions since the beginning.

First, Groot Gang pretended to start working again, after being absent for long periods of time. Although not accomplishing any tangible results, they at least would send a message on the mattermost once a week or so. However, it wasn’t for long, most of them gave up a month later when they most likely became aware of the deal.

Second, they petitioned NTA for a temporary salary increase, which NTA approved. The reason behind this move was obvious – they wanted to receive higher salaries for a few months so they could deceive Rockstar into believing they were earning significantly more than they actually were. This would help them secure a higher position within the corporation and lend credibility to their future claims of being the real bosses. From Rockstar’s perspective, individuals with higher salaries likely appeared more important.

Third, they made “fancy” C.V.s with fake experiences and projects. They also took credit for the bulk of development of the project. For instance, Thers took full responsibility for making a “next-generation SDK” that pushed the boundaries of modding. He was referring to FxDK, the failed project that was abandoned immediately. He also forgot to mention that he mostly just did the UI for this project. NTA’s impact was completely left out (if you remember from part 1, some experiments regarding FxDK implementations were actually done in 2015-2017).

The rest of the gang members significantly exaggerated their achievements and performance, as well as the state of their areas of responsibility for which they were supposed to be responsible. It seems, these stories were never scrutinised by Rockstar. The team became aware of these claims from Ethan Hirsch, after the continued management issues became a problem for the whole dev team.

Fourth, Deltanic tried to get most other contractors excluded from the deal, so they wouldn’t move onto Rockstar. NTA was the one who countered this completely, put a foot down, and demanded as part of the deal that every single person be moved into Rockstar. Hirsch later confirmed this part. If you remember, NTA was quite unable to fire anyone. There were people who had less than 100 messages in Mattermost during their years in the team, and they later got a free ride into Rockstar Games. There were even “coders” with less than 10 commits total at Cfx, who became “R* Engineers”.

For clarity, it’s important to mention that Deltanic didn’t tell this information to everyone in his group. We know for sure that Thers (a.k.a. Nihonium) and Nimoa (a.k.a. Titanium) were aware of this immediately. The rest of the group aren’t confirmed, and it’s doubtful they did any suspicious action. Meanwhile, the rest of the whole Cfx.re Team was unaware that any of this was going on. This was by design. Groot repeatedly reminded NTA not to tell anyone, and because of this, his group got an unfair advantage and used it for their own selfish purposes.

These people, after getting an informational advantage over the rest of the team, couldn’t just stand still, and felt obligated to use this insider information for selfish purposes. Disquse, who also was aware of this deal earlier than everyone else, never used this information for any “benefits”.

At some later point of the acquisition process, Deltanic became more and more irresponsible. He was attending “secret” meetings with Rockstar without inviting NTA. He wasn’t sharing any details about anything with his boss, using his usual “ignore mode”. Being fed up with this, and after trying to discuss these points with Deltanic, and continuing to be ignored, NTA decided to cancel the deal while it was still possible, and try to get things back to normal.

As you might guess, the Groot Gang was very unhappy about this. They all started to dance around NTA, trying to keep the deal going

First it was tears and prayers. In a voice chat with NTA, Thers was literally freaking out. He said that if NTA doesn’t accept the Rockstar deal, they will sue us, he will lose his job in the Netherlands, and will be departed back to Russia where he would immediately be drafted and die in the war.
Of course, this was him just over-exaggerating, and trying to prey on NTA’s strong sense of empathy. While Russia is still not a safe place, nobody is drafting anyone on the streets since 2022.
Their usual way of punishing NTA by ignoring them wouldn’t work as this time they needed to stop NTA quickly from taking actions. Groot Gang sent out an emergency call-to-arms via their Telegram, and took turns trying to convince NTA not to cancel the deal.

It wasn’t working. Groot Gang started to threaten and intimidate NTA.
Groot himself threatened to personally sue NTA for 6m euros if the deal did not go through. This was about 1/3rd of the proposed deal amount. He said that he was entitled to this for the great amount of “personal risk”.

“Personal Risk”...

These people were worried about themselves and asked for a “risk fee”. This is despite the fact they’re the reason this risk even exists. They had already taken actions that jeopardized the rest of the team. It was Deltanic who had tried to secretly sell the company to Rockstar, and leaked everyone’s personal information. That was months before this, and for whatever reason he just now started to care about his own “risk fee”, but not about anyone else who also was put into risk by his actions? Just imagine the level of selfishness here.

In any case, NTA eventually gave in to their tactics and decided not to cancel the deal. There were anti-stalling mechanisms built into the contract, and it was assumed lawsuits would follow if they didn’t accept after some point, so NTA had to make a pressured decision.


After getting through the point of no-return, Deltanic completely vanished, making NTA deal with the whole acquisition on their own.
NTA, being left out of Deltanic’s previous Zoom meetings, had to resolve the remaining points and sign the deal themselves, within a tight deadline.

As you might notice in the chat above, Deltanic also played behind-the-scenes games with Cfx’s partners - Tebex and Zap-Hosting.

While there is no direct proof of some of the suspicious actions that the team has heard about, there’s one case that was confirmed and is on the absolute borderline with lawlessness. There are confirmed cases where Deltanic was faking NTA’s signature to sign company related contracts without NTA’s permission. He later explained himself in this instance, “you would’ve signed this anyway!”. We don’t even know how to comment on this, it's absolute fraud. Nobody in the team was aware of this at the time, except NTA.

These partner contracts were predatory on NTA. One known example was a contract for a new UI that was to make buying a server easier (Similar to Minecraft Realms). The contract was for 2M EUR, but had a sneaky clause in it where if Rockstar bought out FiveM, it had to be paid out in full no matter what.

How did this partner company know that Cfx were going to join Rockstar, and put this clause into the contract? That was Insider Info that the vast majority of the team did not even know…

At the end of the day, that partner accomplished zero progress towards the feature, and NTA had to pay them 2M.

There are multiple rumors that Groot gets kickbacks from these partner companies. One anonymous team member told the writers a story where Groot bragged about getting a free Tesla car from one of the partners, after coercing NTA to sign a contract. We cannot confirm or deny this information in any way.

It’s unknown how much money Groot made off of this. While most of the team were honestly working away in their respective areas, Groot and friends slacked off, and instead were scheming on how they could enrich themselves using NTA. The team tells of Dutch court documents they’ve seen, and how he appears to have gotten quite wealthy from his time at FiveM.



NTA ended up signing and selling for ~20 months of the project’s income. A major factor was just the fatigue from running it, and the hope that R* would bring more structure, resources, and proper management.

The team has heard a lot of promises from Ethan Hirsch. “Cooperation”. “Development Assistance”. “Interest in the project”. You may have heard them too. The engineering team hoped that with Rockstar’s help they would be able to make some truly next-gen features and long-awaited fixes.

Turns out, it was never gonna happen.

Ethan Hirsch’s management would become way worse than during NTA’s time as leader. Those who were working hard started to suffer from the mismanagement and a terrible work environment. Those who were historically lazy and irresponsible became even moreso, but now were also affecting other’s work.

Few on the team knew how bad the situation was around the acquisition, and how much NTA was manipulated during it. Disquse only knew some bits because sometimes NTA was sharing their frustration about everything, probably seeing a glance of understanding.

Shortly before the team began their introduction interviews with Ethan Hirsch and Rockstar, Disquse was a bit nervous of the upcoming events. NTA’s frustration, in addition to his language barrier, and being a Russian national, made him a bit skeptical of everything.
Thers, also Russian, contacted Disquse and scheduled a call to discuss Rockstar. This was an informal talk where Thers said everything is going to be ok, but the team has to prepare to work without NTA. He continued with some weird statements that we have other people on the team who know how various aspects of the mods work

He mentioned that we won’t have to worry about OneSync improvements without NTA because we have Ammonia who knows a lot about how it works. While Ammonia knew a bit of reversing (more than Thers), he was working as a documentation writer, not as an engineer.

Disquse found these statements weird, back then he thought that Thers meant that NTA will get excluded from Rockstar eventually on their own.

In reality, The Groot Gang wanted to “milk this cow dry” and then get rid of them.

To better understand everything, let's illustrate the state of the Cfx.re team right before the acquisition.

The Cfx team had more than 20 contractors, all of them joined Rockstar. Some contributed more, some contributed less. Some were passionate about the project, others just thought of it as a job. Some were lazybones, others were trying to work their job fairly.

The community generally knows who is a real contributor or not, it’s an open source project.

There never was any team building, meetings or calls between team members. The team members, aside from the Groot Gang and, later on Disquse and NTA, barely spoke to each other outside of work.

Barely anyone knew the conditions in which NTA had been put. How NTA was manipulated, and how bad it was in reality for the project. Everyone knew that most of the Groot Gang members are extremely lazy, but usually it wasn’t causing any trouble to the rest of the team and nobody really cared.

At the beginning, nobody had any issues with Groot Gang directly.

Ethan Hirsch was a “Director of Strategy” at the time the acquisition process started. Later in 2023, his title changed to “Senior Director: Creator Platform”. This person is directly responsible for the acquisition and team integration into Rockstar, according to his own words. He worked for Rockstar for a few years before this. Initially, he managed to have quite a very good impression. His professionalism was respectable, and his words were nice to hear from a Rockstar official. He showed interest in modding and UGC specifically, and had done his homework regarding FiveM.

Ethan promised a lot of future developments, further cooperation with modding, and help from Rockstar Games to make FiveM and RedM better. Basically a ‘bright future’ to the entire project.

Unlike with the Groot Gang, with Ethan Hirsch we can not provide many chat logs as the vast majority were from Rockstar’s internal Slack. Leaking these conversations would’ve been extremely iffy..

Instead, we will share discussions between team members during these events to provide context and additional evidence. We will also quote some important messages from Ethan Hirsch to further clarify the situation.

While we’ve already mentioned that Hirsch has basically built a corruption circle inside Rockstar Games, and are going to detail this, as of now, let’s proceed neutrally - same as a team member would have back then.. Consider Hirsch as a good guy for now, and see if your opinion changes as we continue to reveal information.

Ethan is now the new big boss of FiveM.

The majority of the FiveM team didn’t become aware of the R* deal until about May of 2023. Around then, Ethan started interviewing each member of the team via Discord. These were basically just friendly conversations where Ethan would ask about your job, and say that great things were coming. A basic attempt at getting to know everyone.

Ethan already was familiar with Groot and friends, unfortunately, and they were his primary source of information surrounding the team. Groot Gang told Ethan that they were the “visionaries” of FiveM, and the real minds behind the project. Ethan was skeptical of some of these claims, and asked others if they really did X or really did Y. Who knows who said what, but Ethan let them roll with it in the end.

Team members joined the R* location nearest to them, in technicality. Everyone was still remote, and was shipped secure hardware to work from. The hardware was nice, probably worth several thousand dollars at least.

The announcement was made very soon after finalizing the deal, this was necessary for public disclosure purposes (investors). Members of the team joined a group call on the Mattermost (a team first), and discussed all the public sentiment surrounding the deal live as it went down.

This was a historical moment and we believe everyone still remembers some bits of that day (there’s even a recording).

While some were thinking about the future, and the work that lay ahead… Others were thinking about how else they could milk a cow.

Some members of the Groot Gang became fixated on the new cash that NTA had secured (it was supposed to be 20M EUR at the time).

Nihonium bizarrely asked for compliments on his prior UI work, insisting NTA grant him a bonus as a result of his work, and not because he asked. However, when denied, he would just ask again… and again.

Groot asked for 30% of the sale. That was also the amount that he demanded from NTA for if the deal did not go through. He would constantly try to persuade NTA and said it was his “dream” to get that kind of money.

They were unsuccessful at getting their bonuses, at this point. Later, they managed to play around NTA again and get their “bonuses” using their good old strategy. This almost ended up with a court case. This will be covered in more detail later.

Within the first week of Rockstar, the entire Groot Gang started their job by slandering NTA. There was a casual meeting where all Groot Gang members started to trash talk on NTA without any good reason to R* employees, including HR.

One Groot Gang member claimed that working with NTA caused him PTSD. Another person said that talking to NTA “lowered his health data on his FitBit”. Other gang members were blaming NTA for an unhealthy work environment: stress, overwork, annoyance. NTA was a bad boss. NTA was a bad person. NTA attacked them in real life. And other stories without a single proof.

This trash talk lasted for a while, the rest of the team, who weren’t in Groot Gang, were just shocked and remained silent. In the end, it sounded like one of the Rockstar HR employees wasn’t liking this talk and tried to use some generic phrase to ensure they’re satisfied. He said that if NTA would do anything like that at R*, they won’t tolerate it, and there would be punishments up to kicking NTA from the team.

One of the Groot Gang members answered: “That’s what I wanted to hear”.



These poor traumatized hard-working professionals were stressed so much by the fact that they had to do a single monthly post as a part of their paid work (and still failed to do it).

If you think they were genuinely asking if they’re protected, so they wouldn’t have to worry about NTA’s “attacks” – you’re wrong.


They followed the same usual routine, ignoring NTA in DMs, ignoring them in work chats, not answering any questions, even work-related.
At some point they managed to piss off NTA enough for them to do stupid things, for which NTA was suspended for about 3 weeks. The gang members were later pushing some nonsense claims like “NTA got mad because we got our equipment faster than them”, trying to make them look even worse. Ethan actually believed this and parroted it as justification to the team as to why NTA was suspended.

This is how NTA really reacted to the fact that the rest of the team got their hardware sooner.

Here’s a discussion between NTA and Disquse about the “toxic” relationships. NTA truly believed these people were their friends, and it was just a complex relationship that they could improve. Disquse also thought it’s just some interpersonal issues. However, in reality they never were friends.

The Groot Gang was abusing a vulnerable person to benefit themselves.


Their silver bullet was NTA’s former relationship with Xinerki. Unfortunately NTA and Xin had been a thing, and NTA wasn’t completely over it. Groot weaponized this, and got Xin to follow along in his scheme. They told suggestive stories that are completely unknown to most of the team - the details were not told to anyone, not even NTA.

Xin would later express his regret at being “used” by Groot to kick out NTA.

This would impact the entire team. Higher-ups at Rockstar watched this go down, and it made them regret the FiveM purchase. Ethan had been pitching them some package of god-tier modders. What they got was a bunch of drama queens.


The Original Devs barely had any idea what was going on, these claims and actions were all going on behind closed-doors. Being uninvolved, it was very hard to stick up for NTA.

The team shared a bit of frustration about such a decision, but given that this was supposed to be temporary, it wasn’t considered as something irreparable. Disquse spoke to Hirsch about this. The way Hirsch discussed these things back then was quite reasonable. Disquse suggested some points that the team was planning to implement before the acquisition, that could minimize the risks caused by these “mood takedowns”. Hirsch ensured that he will try to find a way to keep NTA as a part of the team and make a work environment where NTA could be useful but not be able to damage the project.

Ethan said this:



Please take a note at the “for the team” part. No one in the team had any problems with NTA except the “The Groot Gang”. That’s 5 out of 20+ people in the team. We aren’t saying that the feelings of 5 people should be ignored, No. It’s a clear sign that something is wrong between the relationships of these people. Hirsch, as a manager, had dozens of ways to make these issues not affect the work environment. Instead, Hirsch took the path of blaming the weakest link, ignoring any context.

After kicking out NTA for the first time, The Groot Gang all took a couple weeks off, almost immediately after the acquisition.


Aside from this, the first weeks at Rockstar were a huge mess. Nobody was managing anything, nobody knew what to do, some people were scared of the future, some were scared of the new work environment.

Everyone was left in silence.

NTA, while being suspended, tried to figure out why their “friends” are so mad at them. All their messages and work related requests were ignored. At some point, NTA remembered that they wanted “bonuses” from the acquisition, but refused back then.

NTA, thinking they could buy back their “friends”, sent Technetium/Xinerki/Nihonium ~2M, 1M, 150K Euros respectively.

As stupid as this idea may sound, it quite explains how attached NTA was to these people.

Obviously, after the Groot Gang milked NTA completely, they weren't interested in playing around with them anymore. They got lots of money, easy high-paying careers, and prestige. NTA couldn't give them much more from their point of view.

So, in the end, this “idea” didn’t work, and the Groot Gang continued to campaign for NTA’s firing after receiving the bonuses mentioned above.

Groot was particularly egregious about this, and thought he could get even more money from NTA. He asked for more. Groot wanted 6M, not 2M or 1M, and took credit for setting up the entire R* deal.

NTA replied to Groot by asking for the money back, saying “it was sent by accident”. Groot involved his lawyer and initiated legal proceedings to keep the money. They went back and forth for a while. Groot deleted his entire Telegram+Discord history, so NTA couldn’t use it in court, but eventually folded anyway and gave back the money.

(Members of the Original Team later speculate that Groot folded also because he had other embezzled funds from FiveM that may have been discovered if they actually went to court. Groot’s bank account containing the bonus was a new account with 0 Transaction history. Hope he pays his taxes properly.)

Once the Groot Gang came back from their vacation, things really started to get bad.

Ethan’s first priority was to get rid of the flat structure at FiveM and stratify everyone into a corporate hierarchy. He was quite reasonable explaining this and promised that this is just for accountability, the team would operate the same way as before.

Surprise-surprise, it turns out that all the Groot Gang members were Seniors, Managers and even Directors. The rest of the team were their underlings.

Ethan would lie and say NTA came up with this hierarchy. In reality, it was Groot.

Groot (a.k.a. Technetium) himself was placed as Ethan’s right hand man, Assistant Director. But, even with this new position, he would remain uninvested and unaccomplished. His Bi-Weekly reports would often be blank, and Ethan had to just remove his time slot because of how bad he was looking. He continued to be lazy, even when doing the simplest of tasks (such as “handover a list of people to Ethan”). In the hierarchy, he was at the same level as NTA, top management of the team. This is quite a big career growth, from an assistant at Cfx.re to a director at Rockstar.

Thers (a.k.a. Nihonium) was appointed as the lead of the engineering department despite having little to no expertise. He isn’t proficient in C++, has never used IDA, lacks management skills, and has barely done any modding. (Of course he is the second-in-command of the Groot Gang.) Initially, he held the title of “Senior Software Engineer”, but after clearly demonstrating his incompetence as an engineer, Ethan changed his title to “Software Engineering Manager” – the only R* employee with such a title that we’ve found.

Nimoa (a.k.a. Titanium) was made a Senior Manager of Support and PR, despite all the laziness, irresponsibility and the very deplorable state of these departments at Cfx.re, which continues today. Nimoa continued being opaque with the community, doing fake PR and ignoring real problems. No management skills, no professional history, no demonstrable achievements – Senior Manager at Rockstar Games.

Xinerki (a.k.a. Fengorian) was in public relations. As you can tell, they didn’t do much. Later he would blame Nimoa for adding some unnecessary pressure and refusing every single idea. While the team struggled to say if it was true or false, Nimoa’s mismanagement in general was obvious to everyone.

Kane (a.k.a. Silicon) became a lead of a 1-person team of the infrastructure department. Despite all the help from Rockstar Games and their new powerful hardware, he still failed to do simple tasks in time. He would spend weeks paranoid, checking for “NTA Backdoors” into the servers, and months attempting to “reverse engineer the backend” due to his inexperience and refusal to deal with NTA.

Now, if you think this was a “cool role giveaway” from Rockstar’s side, let’s say as a “tribute”, this was not the case.

The people who actually contributed a lot to the development of the project became “juniors” and “associates”.

Disquse, one of the most active developers, who solely maintained RedM, was one of the core developers for many years and made major contributions in GTA and RDR modding, became a contractor with no title, and positioned under everyone.

The anticheat lead, who also was quite the only person at Cfx.re who had his own internal team and an abstract hierarchy, despite years of contributions and real management experience, became an “associate”. Yeah, he was an “associate” engineer while leading a team of 2, and doing complex work to secure FiveM. He only was offered 55k USD.

Thorium, one of the recent hires, was still far more experienced in management and engineering than Thers. However, he was placed under him, which later caused significant management issues for the entire team.

NTA, the founder of the project and the person with by-far the most contribution into it, was also hired as a “contractor”.

Tabarra, a demonstratively proactive worker and community member, who was actively developing TxAdmin in addition to making the Pulse Posts for the lazy Groot Gang, became a "contractor" as well.

Same with the others, everyone was put under their Groot Gang “Senior”.

This is quite an important point in the Ethan Hirsch corruption circle. The team members weren’t treated equally since the beginning, and not because of merit.

Not only did the “titles” and “roles” not line up with actual contributions or their position before the acquisition, but this came out of nowhere. This hierarchy was built even before the acquisition, nobody ever managed to introduce themselves to Rockstar and share their opinions/thoughts/desires of any future positions.

Later in the middle of 2024, FiveM staff were automatically placed into the GTA5 Credits. Longtime core contributors like Gottfried, NTA, Tabarra, and Disquse were completely left out. These were people Ethan hired as "Contractors". Groot is now credited as a “Director” for GTA5. Thers is credited as a “Software Engineering Manager”.

This is how people who barely participated in the project's life, never made any modding contributions whatsoever, and didn't have any achievements became “bosses” over the people who actually spent years of effort into making FiveM and RedM as successful as we know it.

Speaking of “not being treated equally”, it’s also important to note that NTA was oppressed from the beginning.
First of all, they weren't hired as an employee, but as a contractor without any reasonable explanation other than “company policy”, they were the only EU-living member of the team who ended up being a “contractor” against their will.
Secondly, since the beginning, NTA was cut from internal VPNs, the only person from the team who ended up with such a limitation. NTA was never warned about this, and it hindered their ability to access the internal tools.


At this point in time, the team never really cared about the hierarchy. They didn’t know a whole lot about the “Groot Gang”, even though some of them had been around from 2020.

The Original Developers, while being skeptical about the hierarchy and not understanding the whole situation, were willing to give them a chance. The main focus in their minds was on improving the platforms using Rockstar resources, and the work that lay ahead. Workplace politics was just fluff.

This friendliness would end up being a mistake, Groot Gang didn’t think the same way.

As you’ll see later, Groot Gang would continue to have a chip on their shoulder from when the Core Developers tried to side with NTA at the start.

During all of this, there were 2 observer-type figures that Rockstar had assigned to watch over FiveM meetings and activities.

One of them was someone who had sold their business to Take-Two. We’ll call them “Onion” as the person isn't known in the modding community, and is not responsible in any way for any of these events. Onion actually tried to help the team with issues.

The other was “Barzakh”, a person from the GTA:MP project (mentioned briefly in Part 1). There was one more person from the GTA:MP project at Rockstar, but he didn’t interact with the FiveM team.

The GTA:MP members were not introduced to the team and no one understood what they were doing at Rockstar. As the team would figure out themselves, they were working on some kind of a project. Most likely it’s ROME or some part of ROME. These people were placed in leading positions at the Creator Platform team out of nowhere. Obviously, the team was quite curious who they were, because modding is a pretty small niche and there’s not much talent around the same level as NTA.

When you’re supposedly on the same level as NTA, you must have some interesting background, right? Some part of the FiveM team became very interested in learning about their achievements, but… they barely found any. These people were pretty ordinary community members, not very active, but they made a few small mods that nobody actively used.
They were ex-developers of GTA:MP but since it never was released, it was hard to judge it anyhow.

Barzakh was in a weird position where he would relay technical requests to R*, however they were usually denied, or limited, with weeks of delay. He had access to the GTA5 repo, but was told not to give up any sensitive information to the FiveM team. Sometimes the team tried to report some GTA5 exploits that they’ve fixed in FiveM, where GTA Online was still vulnerable. None of those exploits were handled so far, despite the potential damage that they could introduce, from crashing selective players to “desyncing” the entire session for every single player in a session in GTA Online. The team doesn’t know whether these reports were missed or simply ignored, nor blames anyone for this – this is just to understand their interactions with this person.

One team member recalls the one time Barzakh tried to do some technical work for the team, it wasn’t a success. After the “roadpathgenerator.pdb” leak, Barzakh used some tool to generate an “SDK” for the team from the leaked data. It wasn’t asked for, or used; it honestly was not useful. Especially given that FiveM supported many game builds seamlessly. Any time Barzakh spent on this was wasted. In fact, in the meeting he scheduled to show this off, team members told Barzakh himself that the GTA5 source code was going to leak in a couple weeks anyway. At that point in time, low-level GTA Online hackers with Marijuana in their profile pictures were already subtly flexing the leak in public Discord guilds.

Onion actually was a fairly reasonable and pragmatic person. They would grill certain members of FiveM staff for not accomplishing much in their Bi-Weekly meetings, and they would compliment Original Team members for their work. In addition, they even helped Disquse draft some Team Feedback documents to Ethan, regarding the horrible state of the team, and where his management could improve. These would be the only documents that Ethan would respond to, anything done without a 3rd party, would be blackholed.

After Christmas of 2023, Onion would no longer be seen, presumably busy with something else.

A couple months after the acquisition, Barzakh would start up a secret project again, dubbed “Soundstage”. He was hiring new staff into this secret department that FiveM was not supposed to know about. These new hires however, stuck out, and when questioned leaked basic information about the project to others. Not only internally, but also outside of Rockstar.

We will discuss Barzakh’s modding achievements later in the text.

After the 3 week suspension, NTA returned to the team. With NTA back, there was hope things could get better.

The Groot Gang members continued their efforts to kick NTA, except now with their quite blatant manifestation of hate, they couldn’t do it the same way as before; although they tried.

Immediately after NTA returned to the team, these people started to completely ignore them at work. NTA was ignored In every single work-related discussion, question, request. NTA’s pull requests were ignored (even urgent security vulnerabilities that would later put the entire project and players at risk, which we will cover later). NTA’s suggestions were completely ignored in the most toxic way, they were pretending as if there’s no such person in the team whatsoever – reading these messages and then intentionally doing exactly the opposite thing as was requested.

NTA found themselves in a situation where they couldn’t do anything without the approval or review from the brand new “management”, a.k.a. The Groot Gang, who hated and avoided them. While it did cause some emotional outbursts, no major damage was done, and it wasn't enough to make NTA do something stupid again.

NTA tried to discuss this situation with Ethan Hirsch, complaining about getting avoided in every single attempt to do work. NTA would be ignored as a consultant (i.e. suggesting and reviewing things), as a developer (the suggested code was ignored for months for no reason too), or as a part of the PR team (nobody shared any documents and not allowed them to participate in calls).

Groot Gang escalated things. They decided to remove all of NTA’s roles in the official Discord and lock it down so NTA couldn’t communicate with the community. When the Groot Gang lost the ability to manipulate them through their inaction, they decided to bully NTA with actions like this.

NTA tried to discuss it with Ethan Hirsch, pointing out that it was the only place to speak with the community. Groot Gang ignored requests to let NTA talk on Discord again.

Ethan Hirsch promised to look into this situation, he also said quite an important statement that is important to remember.

Ethan said: R* can not have an environment where ANYONE feels uncomfortable at work.

Hirsch also agreed that this group of people were indeed preventing NTA from doing their work, but justified it with interpersonal relationship issues that he couldn’t improve (e.g. “some people are upset”).

Ethan proposed that these relationships should improve naturally over time.

Basically, Ethan Hirsch allowed these people to continue sabotaging NTA’s ability to work on the project. He put responsibility for improving work relationships on NTA. Ethan wasn’t interested in figuring out interpersonal relationships.

While we can agree that these are definitely interpersonal issues, what’s not interpersonal is the fact that a group of people were sabotaging the work environment of another person just because they had some “bad thoughts”. We’re pretty sure that Ethan Hirsch, being supposedly well-educated, has heard of “work relationships” and that these are not directly tied to “personal relationships”.

There are millions of people who don’t like their colleagues, bosses and teammates for whatever reason, but don’t allow their personal feelings to affect the work environment. Disquse, who had a lot of issues with NTA before, never allowed himself to slack off for weeks and justify it with NTA’s behaviour.

A decent manager would’ve drawn a clear boundary, become a mediator and without diving deep into the personal relationships, make these people either work together, or separate their work environment to avoid conflict of interest (i.e. make their coordination less dependent on each other, so NTA could do work without blocking).

Building a proper team and healthy work environment was Ethan’s responsibility after the acquisition, he mentioned that himself. While the state of relationships of these people was a huge mess that took months to understand retrospectively, there were clear and obvious ways to make everyone act professionally and accomplish work.

Work started to become painful for NTA.

The only person from the Gang who started to speak with NTA again was Xinerki, very rarely.

As mentioned earlier, NTA hired a foreign boyfriend of Xin’s at the company to provide them with a Netherlands Visa. The boyfriend was getting paid as a no-show employee, and didn’t accomplish anything. This all was just as a favor to Xin, because NTA was still fond of him.

After the acquisition, NTA’s company no longer generated any income and NTA decided that they’re not able to continue sponsoring this person. NTA tried to recommend them as a support employee at Rockstar after the acquisition, but they didn’t want him. Eventually, NTA decided to not extend their contract as it would’ve meant a one more year of being obliged to pay to a person not doing any work.

NTA warned this person and Xin about this decision in advance, yet it turned into a huge drama. Xin was furious his boyfriend was being deported, blaming NTA for almost everything you could imagine. NTA also wasn’t a saint here and it was a huge drama in Discord DMs.

Shortly after this, about a week later, Xin sent a complaint to HR about NTA harassing them in Discord DMs and affecting their work environment. Rockstar policy treats these personal dramas, even in personal spaces, as a violation.

NTA was suspended again shortly after this report. This was the end of October of 2023.


The formal reason was “harassment”. NTA wasn’t given a chance to explain themselves or discuss it.

Thanks to some screenshots shared by Disqsue in the community, we’ve managed to confirm that it was Xinerki’s report.

Xin later mentioned that there was no intention to get NTA suspended, although it’s hard to tell if he’s being genuine here.


We’re attaching this specific conversation between Disquse and Xinerki, including Xin’s opinion about this situation for broader context. This was quite a long conversation where Xin also pointed out the major management issues. We will share more bits of this later.

Overall, NTA only managed to work for a month after the previous suspension. This time, NTA was supposed to be suspended for 3 months.

This was a breaking point for many people in the team. The way how these people abused NTA was very obvious to anyone. Ignoring your colleague during your work time can’t be justified by anything, especially when such actions would damage the project.

Some team members wrote their messages of frustration to Ethan Hirsch/HR about NTA’s suspension. Sharing their thoughts about this being unfair to suspend people for their personal drama in their direct messages caused by their long-term relationships. Some people thought that it’s some kind of abuse of the Rockstar HR policy (which definitely was written with an intention to protect employees, not to attack them).
The same people also shared their major frustration with the poor management by the Groot Gang members, outlining some obvious cases that we will discuss in the next part as well.

NTA’s suspension affected many people in the team in a bad way. Those who've been working hard for all these years were usually discussing or getting advice from NTA. NTA had a huge base of knowledge. Not only framework-wise, but also GTA-related. Instead of wasting a day on a task you could spend like an hour on it with NTA’s help.
Not to mention that major parts of FiveM’s codebase were not documented. Finding a bottleneck in a large codebase with thousands of memory hooks is very tedious and hard work. With NTA’s help you could’ve simply asked “hey do you remember if we’re doing something with the X subsystem of the engine?” or “hey, do you know X system works in the game?”.

With NTA suspended again, all hopes to improve management, work environment and efficiency fell apart. The biggest and riskiest part of the project was left in hands of the only 2 reverse engineers: Disquse and LWSS. Development was in a very bad condition, the management also was not able to outline priorities/tasks, unlike NTA before. Both Disquse and LWSS were pissed off about such a decision, and they weren’t alone, everyone was suffering a lot from the management and lack of NTA in the team.

Nihonium was the most obsessed with NTA, and getting rid of NTA. Multiple original developers recall an incident where he screenshared on Zoom, and his browser on his Work PC had NTA’s entire personal social media catalog bookmarked as “frequent visits”.

A bit later, Disquse discussed with Nihonium, his mismanagement and obsession with NTA. Disquse, knowing way more than Nihonium thought he knew, decided to pick a strategy of not adding any pressure to the discussion. Disquse was trying to figure out how deep Nihonium would dig himself into a hole, and also hoped for some honest answers.

During this conversation, Nihonium mentioned that he deeply hates NTA, describing him as a disgusting person. Nihonium stated that his hands would shake whenever they were in the same voice call with NTA. Although he might have hated NTA as a person, he definitely loved NTA’s money. Even after NTA asked him to return the “bonus” money he had sent earlier in an attempt to “fix their relationship”, Nihonium refused.

Nihonium also lied about the fact that Technetium wasn’t leaking anyone’s identity and it was done way later and approved by NTA. On the poor management side of the question, Nihonium started to complain that he’s 24/7 busy and has to work overtime, he has so many meetings that he has no time to do actual work outside of meetings.

After this call, Disquse figured out what type of people he’s dealing with. Before that, there were some hopes for misunderstanding or actually hard relationships, maybe exhaustion from communication with NTA - Anything reasonable that could’ve explained this type of behaviour.
However, Disquse knew that he was dealing with a very pitiful and manipulative person with a bunch of personal complexes, who even tried to manipulate him during this talk.

This myth of being busy 24/7 because of all-day meetings was busted by simply checking Microsoft Outlook’s meeting planning tool. In this tool, you’re able to see everyone’s scheduled meetings. You can’t see the details of these meetings but you can see the timeframe. In the worst case scenario, Nihonium had 3 hours of meetings a day.

Laziness and irresponsibility continued after getting rid of NTA. The stories about “NTA preventing us from doing our work” obviously turned out to be lies. Even with NTA gone, the Groot Gang still loved to blame NTA for random things while explaining how they failed to do their tasks.

Because of the Groot Gang’s unfair dominance, and NTA’s constant suspension, the Core Developers decided to form their own chat group around late December 2023. The “OGs” composed of the Original Developers. Before this, they had talked friendly amongst themselves, but their relationship didn’t extend beyond a work context. They realized they weren’t alone, and began “trauma bonding”.

In their group, they could still talk to NTA, who was still under NDA. The group was able to talk about technical opinions and bounce questions about old code, etc. It was mostly productive and technical, but they also did rant about being squeezed by the Groot Gang. The OG chat was a much more lively place than Slack, and although the OGs didn’t like having a secret work chat, they felt more comfortable talking there. Ethan was informed of this chat’s creation, was not happy, and accused them of “starting an army”.

In January of 2024 it became clear that NTA was not coming back. The suspension should’ve been lifted, but there were no updates. Hirsch eventually returned with a statement, where they claimed that NTA refused to participate in any discussions regarding the points that concerned Rockstar about their involvement in the project. They decided to terminate NTA’s contract.

In this part, we will cover events that happened between NTA getting kicked from their own project to when the rest of the original development team were kicked or decided to leave the project. Almost every single point here is about or because of the extreme management issues that the team had to go through under the poor management of Ethan Hirsch.



After Rockstar acquired Cfx.re, the TOS (terms of service) was turned into a PLA (platform license agreement). While both documents follow the same core points, Rockstar’s policy was way more strict regarding the use of real world brands or copyrighted stuff on your FiveM server.



While this new PLA is totally understandable, the way the “new rules” were applied was a total disgrace.

Previously, if a copyright owner reported their copyrighted assets being used without authorization, FiveM (and sometimes Tebex) were first warning the violating servers, then banning them if nothing was done about it.

In cases with Tebex related violations, Tebex were banning the violating stores upon request.

Real world brands contacted Cfx and asked them to remove assets from certain server/s in their report. In short, while Cfx never allowed any copyrighted assets without permission from the copyright owner, there was a “presumption of innocence”. The team was taking action upon request.

Now let’s walk through how it works today.

First of all, you’re not allowed to use any 3rd party copyrighted “brands” even if you have permission, or the copyright owner doesn't care. You are considered guilty for even having a real-world brand.

The enforcement team sent tons of warnings and takedown threats over random 3rd party brands.

For example, there’s a famous “2048” game, whose name apparently was someone’s property. However, if you open Apple Store or Play Market, you will see hundreds of games with “2048” in them. There’s way more examples. Your server could’ve been removed simply out of the fact that you mentioned some random phrase anywhere on your server, and some random person reported you to FiveM staff.

Instead of fairly enforcing the entire platform, Hirsch and Titanium decided to selectively attack specific servers and make them comply within a much smaller timespan.

Imagine yourself in a situation where you are working hard on your project, putting effort, money and soul into making it actually good, popular, and profitable. Then at some point, a group of people contact you and tell you that you must remove a bunch of content from your server because of the new rules.

When you try to ask them about the competitors who do the same thing, they’re assuring you that these servers will be requested to comply really soon. So, as a fair person, you decide to comply with the new rules. You try to explain this to your community, and you start getting a huge amount of backlash, players start leaving your server.

They’re not just leaving, they’re leaving your project and going to your competitors. While your attempts to be a fair person and follow the rules are causing you massive damage, your competitors are getting an unfair advantage and are benefiting from the fact that you’re following the rules and they’re not.

When you attempt to explain the situation to the Cfx staff, you get the same statement about their plans to enforce the rules on other servers soon too.

Weeks pass, Months pass, nothing changes. You got unlucky, or someone at Cfx didn’t like you. Sad.

If you think this is an abstract story that we’ve just fabricated - no. This is the real story of Nex, the owner of the RSM (RockStarMischief) project.
After waiting a long time for fair enforcement and losing his playerbase, RSM decided to boycott FiveM, to bring attention to this issue.



As soon as Disquse noticed this boycott, he contacted Ethan to bring it to his attention, as he already knew that Titanium would simply dismiss his concerns. Ethan was quite mad at Nex about this boycott and called him an “attention seeking pain in the ass”.

Ethan said this was already discussed with Nex multiple times and he should’ve understood.

Disquse tried to cut corners and speak with Nex about this situation.


A few months later, RSM would share this post:

While some FiveM projects received huge amounts of unfair damage from Hirsch’s poor management, other servers became invincible from enforcement while blatantly violating the PLA.

Due to Hirsch’s close cooperation with them, NoPixel are allowed to violate whatever rule they want and nobody can touch them, even if they’re being reported internally.
“De-badged” vehicles are not allowed in FiveM for many reasons. It was stated many… many times. Despite the rules, NoPixel is not only allowed to use “de-badged” vehicles on their servers, but also are allowed to sell them on Tebex.

Xinerki actually noticed this, and wrote a large document where he provided proof and references, pointing out that PLA rules are being obviously violated. Xin then sent this document to management, including Hirsch, and it just… disappeared.

When a small server violates the rules, it’s bad. When a huge server with large media coverage violates PLA it’s a disaster, it sets a bad example for other creators that violating the platform rules is something that’s okay.

Here’s a conversation between Disquse and Xinerki, Xinerki sharing their frustration about this report being completely ignored.


It’s known why NoPixel is allowed to violate the rules so blatantly. A big chunk of the NoPixel team is secretly working together with Hirsch to move their server onto the so-called ROME (Rockstar Online Modding Engine) project that was leaked earlier last year.

This so-called “FiveM-killer” is something that Hirsch has been cooking for years. Ethan doesn’t care about any server owner on FiveM. He only expects the community to follow NoPixel, and move their servers and resources to the new platform. The NoPixel team already received a lot of internal information and early access, leaving the rest of the community in the dark.

Such favouritism dramatically damages the platform’s reputation as “fair and competitive”.

Everyone is bringing in revenue for FiveM, not just NoPixel. Fair competition attracts people, improves the platform and creates good conditions in which a UGC platform can grow. Imagine investing big money into your project trying to be the best server in your niche, while random people are receiving unfair advantages straight from Rockstar..

ROME and the underlying events are quite interesting, but keep in mind that Hirsch hates you as a FiveM server owner. He only cares about a single popular project which he wants to weaponize against FiveM to move the audience into a proprietary slave cage, where everything is going to be controlled, monetized and the community will be milked as dry as possible. The NoPixel team was getting even more information about Rockstar’s plans than the original FiveM development team.

While we don’t have anything personally against the NoPixel team, we have to write about this anyway because Hirsch’s actions here disregard the rest of the Cfx community.

Before moving forward, there’s another demonstrative incident regarding UGC…

Let’s read the Celebrating one year with Rockstar Games forum post. Note the announcement about CPX Fest.


While there’s nothing suspicious about this announcement in the text – everyone loves bonuses, let’s see some Twitch streams from this “Complexo” project they mentioned.



The very first streamer that we found back when reading this announcement. Notice the “de-badged” Mercedes-Benz and Nissan vehicles. Hirsch has allowed his “favourite” servers to blatantly violate PLA, while others face enforcement for the most minor things.

Ironically, they mention that “de-badged” vehicles are not allowed, again, right in the same post.

The second server promoted in this same post was also violating the rules. The community noticed both of these cases, and nothing was done about it. Doesn’t this sound like the perfect spot for corruption? A barely-moderated UGC platform where everything is controlled by a single person with no limits? Just think about it, Hirsch is even using Rockstar Games’ name to promote this server that blatantly violates copyrights of 3rd party companies, while Rockstar technically makes money off it.



Why do these specific servers get chosen by Hirsch as special?

As mentioned earlier, the management after the acquisition was extremely bad. While the Core Developers could be productive on their own, mismanagement affected the project and the work environment.

No matter what angle you pick, Nihonium, a UI/UX guy with no management experience or native engineering skills, is a bad choice for a manager. Putting everything aside, there’s no way you can go from doing literally nothing for nearly 2 years, to magically becoming a productive “Senior R* Manager”, at the drop of a hat.

So what issues were there?

Let’s start from the smallest one. A basic lack of any involvement in the community.

NTA was always speaking with community members, reading feedback, reporting issues and taking community suggestions.

Thers never did this. He never made Jira tickets or assigned tasks to anyone. He barely suggested someone work on anything, and it wasn’t him trying to be nice, it’s because he didn’t care. While some of the team was reading through the usual FiveM-related chats and forum categories, it wasn’t enough to cover everything. The team had to continue without management, and now had to monitor the public chats more heavily as well.

Another issue was the lack of internal transparency.

The most critical issue was their disgusting level of laziness.

No matter what you would ask them to do, they wouldn’t care. They couldn’t even make a ticket, or post something in the Slack about a CRITICAL vulnerability reported by the community.

There was a critical RCE (remote code execution) exploit that would’ve allowed server owners to easily infect your entire PC with whatever they would like when you joined a server. As a platform that relies on the community server list, you might guess this is VERY serious. RCE security vulnerabilities always are priority #1.

This was a real incident that was (luckily) left unnoticed to the public, but was very demonstrative internally.


Only after Disquse publicly brought it back up in Slack, mentioning the severity, Thers decided to do anything about it.


Apparently, this report got lost somewhere in the private messages of the management. Even if you don’t care enough to make a ticket for this, and assign someone to it, why wouldn’t you at least drop it in the work chat and bring attention to it?! Keep in mind that this was reported by NoPixel. If NoPixel can’t get the Support/PR/Management to merely parrot information back to the Developers, then the average server owner has zero chance of accomplishing anything.

There were many other cases of this…

There was another critical vulnerability that allowed malicious actors to DOS (denial-of-service) any FiveM server. This exploit was reported by NTA internally in September of 2023, not only with a ticket that had a detailed description and mention of severity, but also with a fix that was ready to be pulled. All that was needed was to click the merge button.

Same as the previous exploit, it was simply forgotten or ignored. This ticket was made back when the entire Groot Gang were ignoring NTA, preventing them from doing any work.

The desire of these people to completely ignore NTA at work, in an attempt to isolate them, put the platform at unnecessary risk. Getting rid of NTA was their number one priority, and they cared about it more than fixing exploits.

People started to abuse this DOS exploit in the wild.

NTA, while being suspended and having no access to internal resources, decided to make a public GitHub pull request to address this issue as soon as possible.

Groot Gang then started to blame NTA for making a public exploit fix, ignoring the fact that it was abused in the wild. Gang members immediately started to speculate that NTA was the one abusing this exploit, attacking Xin’s server, and framed it as NTA attempting to stress everyone out.

It’d be understandable if this trash talk was just in some DMs or something, but they were accusing NTA of this in public internal chats that lots of various R* employees could read. Of course they didn’t have any evidence of this malicious intent, only a report that NTA made in September.

Disquse, who was sick of this trash talk, intervened in this conversation and asked them not to spread false information. In addition, he mentioned that NTA is actually doing their job and they should be grateful.


Another instance is when there was an exploit on the forum that allowed malicious actors to bruteforce passwords without any kind of cooldown. This was an issue for a long time and led to a big wave of people losing access to their accounts. The malicious actors were setting up their own 2fa on the hijacked accounts and the only way to remove 2fa was through manually contacting support.

Later these accounts would be used for faking boosts and stealing purchased assets, so this exploit had a huge impact. In addition, the people affected by it couldn’t get help from support because they were lazy and irresponsible under Nimoa’s (a.k.a. Titanium) management.

At some point, the number of people complaining about losing access to accounts was crazy, they wrote everywhere, from the forums to the Discord guild. The management of course ignored it, and the rest of the team who cared enough to notice, had to deal with tons of different issues.


Disquse screenshot these messages, trying to bring some attention internally, but it didn’t work.

There were people who tried to report the way this exploit works, hoping for some sort of a bug-bounty compensation. One of these people tried to contact support for a long time, but ended up reporting it in Disquse’s direct messages on Telegram.


This issue only got the attention it deserved after Disquse published this conversation in internal chat and pinged a bunch of people.

The same story as the DOS-exploit happened again with another client exploit. A pull request was made to fix this issue, but it was forgotten and ignored for months. It truly showed that they didn’t learn anything and continued to be irresponsible.

While joining Rockstar, there was a clear mention that Rockstar wanted the team to pay closer attention to any potential exploits, and fix them as soon as possible to make the platform as safe as possible.

Meanwhile, Thers was constantly trying to prove to Rockstar that they don’t need NTA onboard. It started pretty much from the beginning, when Thers assigned himself to work on refactoring FiveM’s CI/CD scripts, something nobody asked for. This task took him a crazy amount of time, at least a month to “refactor” these scripts. These changes didn’t even make much sense as a “refactor”, it was basically just splitting some chunks of a big script into small chunks for “maintainability”.

Thers then found an ancient feature branch system that was used back in 2021 for OneSync tests, and claimed he invented it as part of his “refactor”, when in reality it always was a thing. If Thers would’ve been a good manager, he would’ve delegated this work to NTA, who wrote these scripts initially. He could’ve at least asked to document them and share the knowledge. NTA would have spent less than a day on such a task. Instead, eager to somehow prove they don’t need NTA on the team, Thers picked this task and spent at least a month on it, later causing many issues to the team when build scripts were failing.

This strategy of picking random tasks and then disappearing for weeks or months would become usual for Thers, same as he did before the acquisition. Pretending to work was the way he would act, it was his way of getting out of his responsibilities, while getting to keep his position, pride, and pay.

There was another exploit in our integrity validation system that allowed malicious actors to edit FiveM cache files and bypass runtime validation. The validation is supposed to ensure the player is not using any kind of modified files when running FiveM. This exploit would let people install files that would give them increased weapon damage, have more ammo in clips, or replace some parts of the map.

Disquse figured out who was abusing this exploit and how they did it. He made a quick report and brought this topic internally on November 21th of 2023. Thers decided to pick this task. It took him exactly 3 months to create a fix for this issue. This was a task for a few hours or 1 day of work in the worst case scenario. It was not a task that required reverse-engineering work of any kind.

At some point, Thers decided to hatch a “plan” for “refactoring” ros-patches-five. It’s one of FiveM’s hackiest components that performs lots of interprocess operations related to social club emulation.

Thers mentioned that R* are planning to change a lot of things in RGL so pretty soon FiveM won’t be able to use the existing implementation, making the game unplayable.

He made it a critical #1 priority and decided to take this task on himself. It was quite weird for Thers to pick this task, as this component was mainly reverse engineering, and Thers had no experience in that at all.

For a whole month, in every single meeting, Thers claimed he was working on this task, and the team initially expected some sort of large change. After a month, and failing multiple deadlines, the team saw the fruits of his labor – a useless pre-planning flowchart that barely documented what needed to be done, more confusing than useful, and it didn’t even mention the most important points that could change everything in this situation (such as FiveM using its own instance of RGL).

Long story short, he was obviously useless and any person with RE (reverse engineering) skills could’ve done a way better job on this task within a more reasonable timespan.

After completing this flowchart, Thers simply forgot about the task for months – it was no longer a “critical #1 priority problem”. The real development behind the task was later assigned to GottfriedLeibniz, who conducted a major refactor of the entire component and noted that the flowchart was “completely useless”.

More than nine months after this was internally marked as “done” and even reviewed by other Rockstar departments, they recently released a modified version of the effort, causing major issues for the player base. GottfriedLeibniz’s version did not have these issues and was properly tested, so it’s likely that they attempted to change his work and ended up breaking it. This was reverted a few days ago after they realized they were incapable of fixing the issue in time. However, this is just one of many “broken” updates, and we will later cover how recklessly they have been releasing untested changes.

Another demonstrative incident with Thers was when the RGL update actually did break FiveM and RedM, but not for the aforementioned reasons. After a RGL update, FiveM started to fail to obtain required authentication data from the launcher, and was failing to launch. The update happened at peak player time and Disquse immediately reported it, confirming that both FiveM and RedM are broken.

It was December of 2023 and the very first idea Disquse suggested was to ask NTA for help, as they were the only person experienced with RGL/Social Club and ros-patches-five. Disquse also offered their help to research this issue with their reverse engineering skills. (the entire component is hooks and patches).

However, Thers, in his attempts to prove that he was the Lead Developer and the team didn’t need NTA, went completely nuts and forced the entire project to be out of service for 5+ hours at a player peak time just because he was unwilling to ask anyone from the team for help.

Instead, he asked Barzakh to help him. They both got in a call trying to desperately figure out anything, and ended up stuck. They then contacted the RGL team for help. Contacting them was useless because the RGL/SC team had no idea how FiveM was communicating with the Social Club SDK. RGL couldn’t help them.

Luckily for Nihonium, NTA, while still being suspended, noticed this issue and decided to help. They figured out the problem within a few minutes and suggested a fix. Nihonium begrudgingly merged this fix, and FiveM was back up and running.

This is how the failed manager, trying to desperately prove that he can run the project without NTA, left hundreds of thousands players out of their servers and damaged the project.

The community contributors also weren’t quite happy with how the management worked. The nitpicks existed even for community pull requests. At some point it became so obviously bad that Nihonium started to do “reviews” in direct messages. Quite the opposite of what “open source” should be.



Nihonium sent this message to a community contributor who tried to address a security critical exploit:



Apparently the engineering lead wasn’t aware that cheats for FiveM exist.

Seeing what Nihonium has requested to change out of nowhere, one of the core developers asked this community contributor who requested these changes.


While the team members allowed themselves to use strong language between each other in DMs, as they knew each other for many years, everything that happened in internal Rockstar chats, including talks with Ethan, were more formal. The expression here describes how bad these reviews were.


Despite previously bringing up NTA’s “mood takedowns” over and over again as some sort of argumentative point that he was better than NTA, when it actually came time to saddle up, Nihonium needed NTA to come fix the problems for him. Even though NTA saved the day, Nihonium would resent NTA even more.



This type of behavior continued and resulted in huge frustration within the community. The PR team on the other hand were completely ignoring any community concerns, which later would end up with the biggest public outcry from the community – The Open Letter. (Covered in detail later)



Another critical issue was the complete lack of understanding of the project. The Groot Gang members never cared about the project. They didn’t know what functionality FiveM had, let alone how it worked. The management was supposed to plan some short-term roadmaps for improving the project, but they just weren’t able to.

The December 2023 GTAV Title Update (b3095) work was yet another victim of the incompetent management.

In FiveM, since 2021, the team always tried to bring new Title Update support to canary as soon as possible. The idea was simple: provide people access to the latest TU content within a short period of time focusing on stability and reliability.

Disquse had been leading Title Updates-related work since 2020, first on RedM and later on FiveM. At times, he led other developers in these efforts, assigning areas and tasks to resolve, as well as things to test, all while managing the rest of the required work. Through years of experience, he developed his own strategy, tools, and workflow for this work.

He and LWSS (the lead anticheat dev) took responsibility for handling this update. The team tried to get some help from Rockstar, explaining how this process goes against the needs of a corporation, but they were unsuccessful. Even as Rockstar employees, they were still forced to reverse engineer GTA.

Title Updates since the acquisition were a pain for Disquse and the new managers of the team (Producers, Project Managers, etc). Project management wanted the team to work within tickets and time estimates. It was almost impossible to predict the scope, risks and time estimations.

Title Updates would drop out of nowhere, Rockstar wasn’t warning the team initially. Disquse would have to switch from his other tasks to the new update. It happened multiple times and there was an obvious need for improvements, especially from the business side..

Hirsch tried to resolve these issues and provide the team with estimated release dates for Title Updates. (This only happened once, the other updates were still a surprise for the team.)

While getting estimated release dates was a good thing, it was still unknown how much of the game would be changed with these updates. The project management wanted to be able to estimate how much time would be required to finish each task. These are management things nobody outside of the management usually cares about, but the team considered this as something reasonable.

The obvious best solution was to provide early access binaries of the upcoming update to the team. This way, the team would’ve been way more flexible in deciding when to work on these tasks, without having to worry about releasing it as soon as possible. This could also make possible same-day access in FiveM, showing real examples of the Rockstar acquisition benefitting FiveM.

Despite these ideas being shared multiple times, the work on b3095 continued the same way as it was before. Disquse and LWSS both crunched for 12+ hours to be able to provide access to this Title Update as soon as possible. This included fixing signatures, vtable offsets, class offsets, and more. The crunch was voluntary, but they were both eager to provide Title Update support in a short timespan.

The update was fully ready and tested by the night of the same day it was released for GTA Online.

Disquse made a huge mistake and asked Nihonium to set up some kind of a test server to schedule a quick team-shared stress-test session, same as it was before. Long story short, It took Nihonium 5 days to set up a FiveM server.

While Disquse and LWSS crunched to provide Update support in FiveM as soon as possible, Nihonium decided to slack over the simplest task, delaying the release for a week. The plans about releasing it as soon as possible were known to Nihonium, and it was discussed many times.

Aside from the test server, Nihonium also did not update delta patches for the update. Without updated deltas, new FiveM players would have to download multiple gigabytes of cache files in order to launch FiveM. This is bad for both user experience and the business side, as internet traffic isn’t free. Nihonium did not care, only after repeated attempts to bring his attention to this issue, and a crash-course on how it was done, did he manage to upload deltas. It was the only time he ever did it.


People in the community started to be eager about any news regarding the title update.

Meanwhile, the community was asking about the estimated release date for the new Title Update. Nihonium decided to answer with “no comments”. This misled people into thinking that R* was not allowing FiveM to update the game anymore.

The other “favourite” incident that pretty much explains everything about Titanium and his work as a senior PR/support manager was the FiveM Sub-Reddit takeover.

Sometime in mid-January 2023, Indra (a moderator who joined Cfx later) warned the team that, due to a lack of moderation, Reddit had marked our official r/FiveM subreddit as an "inactive community" (read more here). Additionally, someone had applied to take over ownership of the subreddit.

Reddit, of course, had notified the current owners (titanium, technetium, xinerki, and others) about this and required them to maintain moderation activities to avoid losing ownership of the subreddit.

Luckily, this issue was brought up early, and talked about in Slack. The PR team said they would handle it and even created a Jira ticket for it.

However, two weeks later, ownership of the subreddit was transferred to a random person.

Fortunately, it turned out to be a FiveM server owner, and active Reddit user, who just wanted to revive the subreddit.

You can imagine the potential damage if it had been someone shady, like sellers of cheats, accounts, boosts, virus spreading or other malicious entities, especially given that it's a R* brand now.

At this point, R*'s PR department had to get involved and reclaimed ownership through a "legal takeover", as FiveM was a registered trademark. It is supposedly now handled by R*'s PR team. Funny enough, the fact that Reddit was taken over by some random person was brought up by the original devs in work chats. The PR team was not monitoring anything.

See this Takework post.

This happened after the Open Letter, which should have lit a fire under the PR team, make them be more responsible for their work.


Any internal communications with the Titanium’s PR/support departments were a huge pain too.

Sometimes it would take up to 2 weeks to simply get a chance to discuss something with them. The team remembered that the project manager, who was well aware of everyone’s workload, was struggling to get any answers from them, pinging again and again hoping for an answer. This was blocking work for other teams, and any task that involved the PR/support departments were the most complex ones by default.

We hope these couple of pages of blatant problems would bring a better understanding of what was happening back then.

This all came from the members of the Groot Gang and at some point, the team started to wonder how much longer can this attitude towards work, the project and colleagues continue? But in reality, it was only the beginning.

Before diving in, let’s take a quick look at the state of the project at the beginning of 2024.

FiveM and RedM were in poor condition, primarily because the 2 main developers had been unable to work on them for months.

NTA had been suspended for weeks, which eventually turned into months.

Disquse faced a painfully slow onboarding process, preventing him from working on the project for over 2 months.

The number of unresolved issues was growing exponentially, leading to widespread instability.

Ethan Hirsch’s promises that Rockstar would support development, share resources, and provide assistance turned out to be lies.

The original team repeatedly explained why resource-sharing was crucial, not only to compensate for the loss of the project's creator but also to significantly improve the platform. They also pointed out how unfair it was that they had to suffer from cheaters who exploited illegally obtained GTA V source code to attack FiveM, while the team itself had no such access.

Despite this, they were still forced to reverse-engineer exploits that cheaters had easily discovered using the leaked source code.

The team also expressed how bizarre it was to be part of Rockstar Games yet have zero access to even limited internal resources. There was nothing at all.

Hirsch justified this by calling it a sensitive subject following the 2022 security breach. He assured them that Rockstar would eventually provide all necessary materials once the team built trust.

It sounded reasonable, but empty promises did nothing to improve their working conditions.

The original team compiled a list of improvements that would have significantly benefited the core game. These were changes that would have taken weeks or even months for the FiveM team to implement but only a few seconds for the Rockstar team that maintains GTA Online.

These included things like clothing YMT limits, weather slots, and other modifications that involved adjusting array sizes in the game’s code. Unfortunately, all these requests were ignored – even though they were also highly requested by server owners.

Months after the acquisition, the user base was growing increasingly impatient, rightfully wondering when they would see the promised 'Rockstar improvements'. The PR team had heavily marketed FiveM as now being an official part of Rockstar, claiming that the platform would improve significantly. In reality, things were only getting worse.

At this point, FiveM was facing serious PR problems. The long-standing trust the community had in the project, built over years, was deteriorating. Development velocity had slowed dramatically due to poor management and NTA’s suspension. Both FiveM and RedM had numerous critical vulnerabilities that management repeatedly failed to address on time, some of which were even reported by the community.

As frustration grew, the community began voicing their concerns. However, the original team felt restricted in what they could discuss publicly due to Rockstar’s vague and overly strict communication policies. These policies were completely unsuitable for a project like FiveM. While Rockstar could afford to remain silent for months, or even years, Cfx was running a community-driven project, where transparency and engagement were essential.

The community had many valid concerns, from stalled development to worsening PR issues. Many members of the original team shared these same frustrations but were too afraid to speak up.

The main problem was that the PR team simply wasn’t doing its job. FiveM is an open-source project that relies on community developers for revenue, yet they were being kept completely in the dark. Instead of addressing concerns or maintaining proper communication, the PR team was busy posting screenshots of their Minecraft world in #offtopic on the main Cfx Discord, trying to be funny.

At the time, the biggest complaint was slow development. Without the project’s star developer and founder, things were obviously much worse. The remaining original developers were also being actively hindered by the newly appointed 'Seniors', constantly nitpicked, and stalled on their work. This was the exact opposite of what the community had been led to expect.

Meanwhile, Nihonium took great pride in his 'Lead Developer' title, eagerly taking on tasks that allowed him to have one-on-one conversations with Rockstar employees. He loved talking to Rockstar. However, when it came time to actually complete the tasks assigned to him, he would stall for weeks – only to pass them off at the last minute to someone else with a poorly transcribed set of secondhand instructions.

There were also major internal transparency issues. Nihonium was supposedly working on various so-called 'roadmaps', but never included anyone else in the discussions. Given his level of competence, the team was understandably concerned.

None of these 'plans' turned out to be actual plans. They were just old backlog tasks reformatted into an enormous document filled with unnecessary fluff.

Nihonium was also proud of keeping information from the team, even boasting about it publicly.

Direct quote:



He had never used FiveM as a regular player, never hosted his own server, and never ran a community. Compare that to Disquse, who had been running non-commercial servers on FiveM and RedM for years. Even compared to Xinerki, who was actively creating community resources, he looked incompetent. In fact, most 'Junior' team members had a far better understanding of the project, greater vision, and more actual ability than he did.

If you ever had private meetings with Rockstar and Nihonium found out about them, he would do everything in his power to invite himself. Not to contribute, just to flaunt his presence and 'authority' as Lead Developer (and likely to waste work hours). Several actual Rockstar employees disliked him, and in some cases, they would just cancel the meetings after he forced his way in.

Disquse recalls that in the spring of 2024, as part of his 'promise', Ethan Hirsch set up a direct chat between Disquse and some Rockstar developers. The purpose was to allow Disquse to request information about Red Dead Redemption 2 to help improve RedM.

Shortly after briefly mentioning this chat in a meeting, as part of a 'Thanks, Ethan!', Nihonium insisted on joining.

As soon as he got in, he invited a flood of people who immediately derailed the conversation with completely irrelevant, casual questions. The chat, which was supposed to be focused on development, quickly went off-topic and became useless for its original purpose.

The Rockstar developer quickly realized what was happening and moved the conversation to direct messages with Disquse.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure team was busy 'Reverse Engineering the Backend'. Instead of simply asking NTA how things were set up, they wasted months trying to figure out a system they had never built or maintained.

This really speaks volumes about how much actual work the backend team at Cfx was doing. In the bi-weekly meetings, they would deliver the most paranoid status reports imaginable, claiming that NTA was possibly sabotaging the servers, might still have a backdoor, and that they needed to redeploy all applications and thoroughly check the code for tampering.

These were people who originally had zero reason to hate NTA. However, after realizing that the Groot Gang was the dominant faction, they quickly jumped on the bandwagon. At the end of the day, it was nothing more than a convenient excuse to mask their own incompetence while earning favor with the Groot Gang.

The UI team was practically non-existent, and since Nihonium was now the Lead Developer, he no longer wanted to handle it.

Next, we will highlight a few more glaring issues caused by management, problems that severely damaged the project and fueled community tension.

“Asset Escrow” is a form of copy-protection offered by FiveM where you can upload assets/resources for encryption, then sell them in an encrypted manner to paying customers, where it is decrypted on-the-fly on their server.

Servers can run a mix of Escrowed and plain resources/assets. Once a resource is escrowed, it takes a good amount of reverse-engineering to cobble it back into usable Lua source code from the bytecode. There was a black market for this, and popular products would get “cracked”.

Initially, the Asset Escrow system idea came to NTA in 2019-2020, with the platform’s rapid popularity growth, there also was a growth of various forms of abuse and scams. There was high demand for various community members to monetize their creativity. The demand to purchase high-quality assets was getting higher as well.

While monetization was against FiveM’s TOS back then, it was almost impossible to try to fight against.

Content creators started to “illegally” sell their creations against FiveM’s TOS. Similar to any UGC. Roughly at the same time “resellers” appeared. These were people who purchased access to an asset that they were later “reselling” for a cheaper price to other people, making a profit off it.

The content creators tried to fight against this by using some forms of obfuscation and their own “protections”. This created another problem when the assets were broken.

FiveM developers need to get ahold of these broken assets to fix the crashes, however getting a “paid” broken resource for free was almost impossible. Due to various forms of obfuscation and protections, it was almost impossible to do it without cracking the entire protection, which is a huge headache and a time waster.

NTA tried to contact creators of such assets, asking them to provide them a clean copy without any form of protection. Sometimes these creators were understanding, sometimes they weren’t. Any form of communication like that is slow and unreliable. While NTA was waiting for an answer, a crash could grow exponentially. Some players would blame FiveM for “breaking” something.

That’s how the idea of centralized copy-protection came about. It would also help to identify malicious resellers. The Asset Escrow was made by NTA, gottfriedleibniz and another Cfx contractor who remains anonymous (there are no “element” alias or community presence) with cooperation from Tebex. You may find this odd, but Asset Escowing wasn’t initially intended to be a money making strategy. The most important point was about stopping any sort of abuse and giving developers a clear way to download paid assets without any kind of protection (if it was required for their work).

Once this service was released, there were unfortunately some malicious loopholes ignored by the enforcement team.

Any user could take public open-source code, a free asset, or a stolen “cracked” asset, upload it to Escrow, and start charging money for it. The obfuscated nature of escrow made it harder to tell if someone was stealing. There are countless cases of code licensing and copyrights being infringed in the escrow system.


The enforcement team would rather delete complaints than work through their abuse tickets.

The Users began to think that FiveM was turning a blind eye to these abusive cases on purpose, because of the % cut FiveM takes on the sale of escrowed assets. This was not really the case, it was pure laziness on behalf of the enforcement/support team. The PR team also dropped the ball and did not address the matter.



“Thanks for letting us know. We agree that there is an issue and we are looking into it” is the usual response from the support department, which was led by Titanium (the person who was removing these messages). This answer basically just means that they’re closing the ticket on you, and you should go away. At some point there was an entire forum topic filled with this phrase, a flash mob, trying to bring attention to this issue.



Nothing has been done about these Escrow Scams. Nowadays, Asset Escow abuse and scams, IP rights violations, and favouritism seems to be the business strategy of Ethan Hirsch - damaging the reputation of Rockstar Games.

Another form of platform abuse was filling your server with fake players (bots).

In 2023, it was becoming increasingly more popular to inflate the player count on your server and make it more enticing to play on.

Various shady commercial operations opened up, offering to put bots on your server for a fee.

LWSS, who was the FiveM anticheat lead for many years, had tried to hinder this a few times, despite it being more of a backend problem. There were various patches put in place that stopped some botting services, but not all, as they used various different workarounds that were hard to catch.

It was a race and chase game, same as with cheats. LWSS was receiving a report about some servers with obvious fake players (it was usually coming from Tabarra) and tried to find and fix how it worked. The anticheat lead tried to get this under control and not allow such services to grow too much.

Now with the departure of the OG team, Fake Players are fairly common and cheap. This is a very huge market with a monthly profit in the hundreds of thousands Euros.

Management has zero incentive to chase after this. Bigger player numbers just means that they’re doing a good job.

Nowadays, nobody really knows the true playercount of FiveM. The backend has several timing bugs that were never fixed, and random permanent fake players can occur if you are “unlucky”. The methods that LWSS and Tabarra used before to find fake players don’t work anymore.

Imagine investing money into your server trying to make it more popular and getting shadowed by other servers who simply purchased hundreds of fake players. This is a huge issue but nobody cares about it.

Recently, some members of the community have been upset at this:

https://forum.cfx.re/t/cfx-community-must-stand-against-fake-players/5304029

Boosts are an upvote for your FiveM server that usually cost 5€/month per upvote. Servers appear in the server list based on their upvote order.

It’s probably the most profitable part of FiveM.

There are regular occurrences of people using credit card fraud, order cancellations, and stolen accounts to get or re-sell fraudulent boosts. These types of abuse are known and regular, some work was done in that area to improve things.

However, there also was something more nefarious going on internally. A community member would report this conversation to one of the FiveM staff:


In these screenshots, this person is trying to recruit a member of FiveM to sell Boosts/Upvotes on the side. Offering 80% of profits, and promising upwards of 70k in sales. He also hints that “For a while, no one has provided me with that”.

In early 2024, FiveM team members would find evidence of tampering with the Upvote Database.

Someone had been running manual queries on it, and accidentally set a numeric field in the database to a string. The string field was causing errors, and that’s how it was noticed.

Mysteriously, there were no logs in place for this.

A Newer Junior team member, who was also a student, was blamed for this and fired without any real proof.



Ethan later justified this firing to the team by saying that he “decided to return out of nowhere” after his internal access was cut off. Ethan was inferring that this person was upvote manipulating, and they cut access, and he showed up to complain. However, this person was just not online at all, and was instead focused on school, their internship, and moving out of their mom’s house. They later would ask to be brought on full-time, but was ignored by Technetium.



After getting fired, this person contacted one of the team members and mentioned this.

Apparently, Ethan Hirsch “discussed” this with the team. Who the “team” is remains unknown. Even the lead of this person wasn’t involved in any discussions.

The Upvote Database tampering suddenly stopped after this person was kicked from the team.

Many months after getting fired, there was a discussion where this person swore that he had done nothing of what he was accused of, realizing that the way back was closed to him anyway.

While it’s impossible to figure out what actually happened back then, there’s multiple reasons to doubt that this person is involved in this.

There was some known abuse happening in the team at least in 2021, way before this person was hired.
It’s confirmed that someone has tried to sell the source code of FiveM’s adhesive (anticheat). If you remember, there are also people who were doing similar fraudulent things before, such as faking the signature of their boss to sign company documents.

This Junior member had some real life events that prevented them from working, and he did warn his management about this beforehand. Although Technetium might’ve simply not delivered this message to Ethan, as usual. Vanishing doesn’t look like a good way to perform this type of abuse, especially given that work PC login logs should’ve been clearly indicating when a person uses their work hardware.

However, no proof has been shown to anyone. No one from the original team participated in any kind of investigation. Even those who had experience working with this type of database could have potentially found some evidence.

The Groot Gang management completely ignored boost problems after the acquisition, only noticing it after some major damage was made. Such as the database started to malfunction or hijacking user accounts with element club subscription to apply their “free” boosts (that is a part of a subscription) to target servers.

There are many different workarounds, most of them are ignored, making the fraudulent boosts market large and very profitable to malicious actors.

Seeing these and many other problems, the original team tried to share their opinion and frustration about the management issues and the rest of the ongoing issues, hoping for improvement. Keep in mind that these issues not only affected the project, but also the work environment. It later turned out that the entire original core dev team, almost everyone who had to work under the Groot Gang management, was being frustrated by their incompetence, laziness and irresponsibility.

At some point, after months of suffering while working on the entire reverse engineering part of the platform almost alone, Disquse decided that he can’t work in this work environment anymore. Being stressed out about everything from personal well-being to the project’s condition, Disquse just wanted to keep doing what he loved to do the same way as it was before: making FiveM and RedM better, help the community research both games and make useful things to expand modding boundaries.

After a hard 2-month long trip across 3 countries as part of the onboarding plan, where he had to spend almost every single penny of his personal savings, Disquse found himself in an extremely toxic work environment where political games and management issues weren’t allowing peaceful work on project related tasks.

Disquse contacted Ethan Hirsch and wrote a wall of text where he outlines some core points of the situation and told Ethan that he wants to retire from the project. He asked Ethan to consider hiring more reverse engineers so Disquse would have some time to share knowledge with them before the contract expired, so as to not leave the project without people who could maintain it.

Keep in mind that Disquse has worked on this project for more than 6 years at this point, it was a very tough decision. But Disquse noticed that this environment has severely affected his personal mental state and well-being, after his friends started to worry about his depressive state. This was a very tough decision.

Back on the topic of hiring: Disquse mentioned to Ethan that a month earlier he compiled a list of good community members that could be potentially hired, and sent this to Technetium. Ethan claimed that he never received this list. It turns out that Deltanic either ignored it out of his usual irresponsibility and laziness, or chose to purposefully ignore Disquse’s hiring suggestions.

Ethan asked Disquse to send it to him directly. He also told Disquse that he wants him to stay in the team and he promised to address the listed issues, explaining that he was just busy with other tasks. Hirsch asked Disquse to reformat the wall of text that he sent into a structured document that would be easier to handle. Hirsch asked “Onion” (the mentioned earlier R* employee) to cooperate with Disquse on this and Onion basically did everything on their own, only clarifying if they understood a certain point correctly and asked for ways to resolve issues from Disquse’s POV

This is how the Feedback #1 document was created.

This document contained a list of points, here's some of them:

• Development speed has gotten slower due to management issues and suspension of NTA.
• Product vision was better before the acquisition. It was unclear what the priority for FiveM/RedM is for Rockstar
• The priorities that the team had (codebase clearing, fixing vulnerabilities, ensuring safety, etc) were failing due to the management.
• Before the acquisition, there was transparency inside the team and with the community. The team was afraid to communicate with the community due to very strict R* policies that weren’t anyhow adjusted under FiveM’s realities.
• Trust issues from Rockstar
• Rockstar not sharing technology as was promised earlier. Creating a situation where the project actually startedto degrade after the acquisition, instead of what was promised.
• Running low on reverse engineering manpower. Leaving a large-scale project with lots of hard-to-maintain code entirely in the hands of a few people who never took responsibility for the entire project (only for their areas of expertise) was a very bad decision.
• Many Community Concerns.
• Stopping the sponsoring of CodeWalker (an ecosystem-critical tool developed by a community member, NTA was funding this previously).

Each point had a suggestion of how a certain problem could’ve been solved. Disquse also mentioned that the project objectively is in the worst ever condition and this is not how it should’ve ended up with Rockstar.

Ethan Hirsch acted very understandingly. He explained many things from his point of view, most of these were about the difficulties due to a major difference of how the team worked before compared to how it would’ve been acceptable for the company to work. He agreed with many mistakes that had been mentioned in the document and apologized for it.

In this response he answered why they made Nihonium an “engineering lead”, basically because of “broad and general understanding of the project at the high-level and good people management skills.”

We don’t exactly know whether it was a lie or he indeed trusted these claims, but it's a fact that Nihonium NEVER had any management experience, it was obvious. Later it was confirmed by his own words and the words of other team members who were complaining about his work. His communication skills were also poor. He lacked a “high-level understanding of the project”, and didn’t have a basic understanding either.

Hirsch also mentioned the concern about the past Rockstar vs. modding cases, including re3, OpenIV and other cases. He claimed that in the past it was Take-Two’s Legal department that was seeing modding through the lens of IP infringement and security related concerns. He went on to say that Rockstar is now given way more freedom related to modding, and they’re eager to improve their relationships with the broader modding community. Keep this in mind.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, Hirsch has agreed with Disquse about most points and promised to resolve these issues. He explained ignoring these issues and not being aware of the situation as having to be busy on other fronts after the acquisition. Nobody doubted his words, he seemed to be a very busy person.

On poor management he promised to improve the situation and asked us to give them a chance while they’re learning. The team was suffering from the management since the very beginning, but overall, under Hirsch’s promises, they tended to believe that things would be better in the future. Unfortunately, this never happened.

On transparency issues Ethan answered that internally there are no secrets, it’s just about asking around if you’re interested in some subject. This later became obvious to be a blatant lie.

Hirsch addressed the concerns about being scared to speak with the community, agreed that R* policies are slightly out of context for FiveM’s scenario and told the team to keep communicating but use common sense.

On running low in reverse engineering manpower, Hirsch promised to start working on hiring people, he also noted receiving the list that Deltanic failed to redirect to Hirsch earlier. He took the initiative and suggested making the recruitment process transparent, which could've resolved transparency issues in this area. This suggestion was very welcomed and Hirsch actually worked on it later.

Hirsch explained the lack of any help from Rockstar as something temporary, the result of recent security breaches and the need of building a trust between the FiveM team and Rockstar. He promised to make some direct line of communication where anyone would be able to request specific information from other R* teams. Jumping ahead, he did do something like that but the first and the last request ended up being ignored for months.

He also promised to take care of some of the community related concerns, and find out how Rockstar would be able to continue supporting CodeWalker the same as Cfx were doing before for many years. He mentioned that Titanium is actively monitoring community sentiment and hasn’t seen any major changes from baseline (of course).

After receiving such an honest answer with the promises to resolve many of the described issues, Disquse decided to stay. He also shared some positivity with other team members who were suffering the same way.

This was the first feedback document sent around November of 2023. It only outlined some part of the issues that we’ve described earlier, not everything that we’ve described earlier has happened to the project and to the team at this time point.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, we have no intention of being biased against anyone in this text. We’ve seen some of these documents and we can confirm that some of the issues were addressed, and some issues Ethan did try to address, or at least put some effort into this. Unfortunately, the main issue, despite some minor attempts to improve it, became permanent.

The management issues, like cancer, metastasized into the project and had no intention of letting go.

Despite Hirsch’s promises and attempts to improve certain aspects of the work environment, he ignored one of the most critical issues – management problems. Many of the issues we previously mentioned occurred after Disquse sent the first Feedback document, including exploits, the lack of any PR efforts, poor support, and more.

By early 2024, the team still hadn't received any support from Rockstar. Their attempts to gain official access to the source code were met with repeated promises that the issue would be resolved soon. Meanwhile, the entire community had already obtained the leaked sources. The GTA V source code leak, which occurred on Christmas 2023, is a significant part of this story – we will uncover facts that have remained hidden since then.

Starting in early 2024, the forums became flooded with large, highly active threads discussing major issues with the project and demanding action from Cfx. Community members voiced concerns about the very issues we’ve outlined. The outcry was impossible to ignore, making it clear that something was seriously wrong. However, there had never been such major unrest on the forums before, yet the Groot Gang and Ethan Hirsch continued to dismiss it.

In January 2024, after releasing what was arguably the laziest Community Pulse update ever, the post was immediately swarmed by a flash mob of comments. Dozens of responses such as 'Thanks for letting us know', 'We agree that there is an issue and are looking into it', and even constructive critiques flooded in from frustrated community members demanding action. Titanium put significant effort into deleting these comments, but some remain intact.



And there were many, many other comments like these. Constructive criticism of this kind is not something every gaming community has; usually, it’s far more toxic, especially considering how long these people had been accumulating their frustration. However, the community members fairly explained their points, suggested improvements, and asked for changes. Most gaming communities aren’t this constructive or understanding. This type of mature community is a gift that FiveM has given to Rockstar, an opportunity to work together with these people to build an even better platform.

Unfortunately, some people at Cfx and Rockstar deeply resented any form of criticism of their work.

For instance, after the acquisition and the removal of NTA’s authority, Titanium went on a rampage, targeting his 'enemies' and banning them for any form of criticism. He even deleted comments from the Pulse Post that the community was actively monitoring. During his rare appearances in the official Discord guild, he also banned people for voicing criticisms.

Titanium (a.k.a. Nimoa) had a particular hatred for one community member. This small but telling story will help you better understand the broader context.



Smallo was a long-standing community member with a true passion for the project. He created several free tools and public resources for the community. Despite some past controversies and drama, he had been involved with the project for many years and always tried to be helpful in one way or another.

As someone deeply embedded in the community for years, Smallo noticed something was off with the project a few months after the acquisition. The slowdown in development, lack of communication, and other issues were already apparent. He began voicing his concerns in the official Discord guild – sometimes in a 'spicy' manner, but without violating any rules. Smallo also expressed frustration over knowing that certain team members personally disliked him.


Many team members agreed with what Smallo had shared about the team. Many of these concerns were later echoed in community outbursts. However, Titanium seized the opportunity to finally get rid of him and banned him from the official Discord Guild.

A long-standing grudge – years later, Titanium would use his authority and lack of any control at R* to exact his revenge.

When Disquse brought up this issue internally, Titanium’s explanations were beyond reasonable justification. He claimed that despite being repeatedly proven wrong about some of NTA’s actions, Smallo continued to defend them, acted 'toxic' about it, and spread this toxicity in the Discord Guild. He also cited Smallo’s seven-year-old Nazi jokes as justification for the ban. However, 'spicy' jokes were something Smallo had made long ago, for which he had already received fair punishments. Furthermore, the last incident had occurred years prior, and Smallo had publicly apologized multiple times, actively trying to become a better person.

The so-called 'toxicity' referred to sharing criticisms about the lack of improvements and absence of communication from Cfx since the acquisition – concerns shared by many community members. Even internally, nearly the entire original development team was worried about the same issues.


The fact that Nimoa (Titanium) mentioned that Smallo supported NTA and recalled some old jokes does, in fact, reveal the true nature of this decision. The Groot Gang held a grudge against anyone known to be on NTA’s side.

Speaking of past actions, how about we bring up some old things that Titanium’s friends have said?


Returning to Smallo’s case, Disquse tried to discuss it with Ethan Hirsch, providing examples of reasonable critiques, some of which had already been shared as part of the Feedback #1 document. Many other team members agreed with these points. Smallo was neither the first nor the last to be muted or banned for expressing the 'wrong opinion.'

Disquse pointed out that more and more people were voicing their frustration, tensions were rising, and that instead of muting them, we should listen—'We can’t mute them all, right?' He expressed his belief that the community played a crucial role in making FiveM what it is today, and that FiveM's popularity and success were largely due to NTA’s 'open community' policy. He argued that Rockstar should encourage people to share their opinions and work towards improving relationships with the community, rather than worsening them by selectively banning those who express dissatisfaction – especially when real issues exist. Even those who share misleading opinions could be addressed with decency.



Titanium would continue to “handle” community concerns by muting, banning, deleting community member’s comments and unlist their topics. And internally reporting that the community sentiment is a good state.


Internally, Ethan Hirsch only began to acknowledge the growing negative sentiment within the community after Disquse sent the January Pulse Post to 'Onion', asking for their thoughts on the backlash. Onion agreed that it didn’t look good and forwarded it to Hirsch, who also admitted that this was not the kind of response they wanted to see.

In hindsight, it seems that Hirsch simply didn’t want to see such feedback—he had no intention of addressing these concerns and preferred for the community to remain silent. Instead of taking meaningful action, he ordered Titanium, whose incompetence as a PR manager was largely responsible for these outbursts, to 'handle' the situation. How Titanium, as a senior PR manager, dealt with this will be covered in the next section.

Going back a few weeks to early January 2024, internal frustrations and disagreements over HR actions and the Groot Gang's management escalated in private chats. Initially, the complaints echoed points previously mentioned in this document: the project was in poor shape across nearly every aspect, and removing NTA had been a mistake. Later, it became clear that NTA was not coming back.
The Groot Gang then began attempting to isolate team members from Rockstar. They sent direct messages instructing them, 'Don’t go to Ethan or HR with complaints, come to me instead.'

Soon after, they started using passive-aggressive and toxic remarks, completely unprovoked. This behavior likely stemmed from their own insecurity or perceived embarrassment.

The breaking point that ended the original team's efforts to cooperate with the Groot Gang came in mid-January. During one of the anticheat lead developer’s attempts to address community concerns, he posted this message in the Engineering Guild:

The lead anticheat developer acknowledged that there was some slowdown, which was obvious to everyone at the time, both externally and internally. However, he reassured the community that new management was coming and that it might improve the situation. Information about this management change was already public, new team members had announced their roles on LinkedIn, outlining their responsibilities.

The Groot Gang saw an opportunity and decided to report his message to HR. While the team understood why they might want to do this, it was still unclear what specific justification they used when contacting HR.

A few days later, Ethan Hirsch reached out to the lead anticheat developer, informing him that a complaint had been filed with HR regarding his recent messages in the Engineering Guild. This was how the original developers became aware of the situation. Hirsch admitted that he personally didn’t see anything wrong with the messages but advised him to 'be careful'.

‘Be careful’. No matter how you look at it, this is completely wrong. The very people failing spectacularly in their PR roles had reported an employee for simply using public knowledge to provide the community with some clarity. The lead anticheat developer had given people a small glimmer of hope for improvements, and for that, he received an HR complaint.

Even if the Groot Gang had an issue with his statement, couldn’t they have just sent him a message to discuss it directly or brought it up with Ethan? They could have, but they didn’t. Because they didn’t actually care about the project or the company. Their goal was simply to remove anyone loyal to NTA, using the same tactics they had used to oust NTA itself.

And what did Ethan Hirsch do? Despite seeing the situation unfold and fully understanding the context, he simply advised 'be careful.' How is this a safe work environment when you have to 'be careful' because a group of people is manipulating the HR complaint system to get rid of you, even when you’ve done nothing wrong?

The majority of the team was unhappy with how the Groot Gang was managing both the team and the project.


After the failed HR complaint, the Groot Gang began behaving even worse. They attempted to use the same tactics they had previously used against NTA, now leveraging their authority to abuse their power.

This pushed the original development team into an even deeper hell. They resorted to personal baiting, attempting to belittle the team’s achievements. They flaunted their so-called 'secret' access and greatly exaggerated even the slightest mistakes.

In short, they were trying to find a way to provoke the team's emotions

We’re leaving comments one of the original developers left in chats about this:


This was when the original team started to call Deltanic & his friends “The Groot Gang”, mainly to each other.

After witnessing the mess and realizing the true nature of the Groot Gang, Disquse decided to create an updated feedback document to address these issues and provide an update for others. This document contained far more specific details and covered significantly more points than just those raised by the majority of the team. After a quick review by Onion, it was sent directly to Hirsch.

In this document, Disquse acknowledged some minor improvements, noting that Rockstar had finally begun providing limited access to internal resources (GTA V source code). However, he pointed out that it was disappointing that this only happened after the public source code leak.

He also expressed frustration over the fact that, while the entire community had access to the leaked sources, the FiveM team was forced to pretend nothing had happened. This left the project in a position where certain pull requests couldn’t even be merged because they contained leaked information. Meanwhile, everyone else, including FiveM’s competitors, was actively taking advantage of it.

Disquse further criticized Ethan for leaving the team in a situation where the only way to obtain internal information was to wait for a malicious actor to leak it. This was fundamentally wrong on so many levels, almost to the point where the team found themselves hoping for leaks just to gain access to necessary resources.

The largest section of the document focused on the failures in management. Disquse questioned the decision to appoint these individuals to their roles, providing an extensive list of issues and problems that had arisen due to their poor management, laziness, and irresponsibility. He pointed out that similar issues had occurred before, but back then, NTA was present to fill the gaps left by these individuals.

The extensive list highlighted several key points:

• Multiple detailed examples of security-critical reports, tickets, and pull requests that were ignored or delayed, putting both the project and players at unnecessary risk – risks that could have been easily avoided. At least 6 such cases had occurred in just four months since the acquisition.
• The RGL update that broke FiveM and RedM – specifically, the way Nihonium handled it. Instead of resolving the issue efficiently, he forced players to be unable to access the platform for hours simply because he wanted to prove that he could fix it himself without NTA’s help. In the end, he failed to do so, but the damage was already done.
• A complete lack of proper GitHub reviews. Previously, NTA managed these independently, sometimes assigning Disquse or other team members to handle reviews. After NTA was removed, only Disquse occasionally attempted to fill this gap in his spare time, but it was insufficient.
• A dramatically worsened workflow. This included excessive 'nitpick' reviews, a fundamental lack of understanding of the codebase, and stalled work that remained unresolved for months due to their inability to conduct proper reviews. The Groot Gang had positioned themselves as the only ones who could merge internal GitLab merge requests.
• The b3095 management failure, which caused a release-ready update to be delayed by seven days for no reason, despite it being fully prepared in just one day. This was followed by additional PR issues.

Disquse highlighted many more management issues, several of which had already been described earlier in this document. This time, however, he proposed a few potential solutions that could improve the situation without jeopardizing anyone’s position. The document also included some positive notes about ongoing hires and progress on the CodeWalker front.

Disquse pointed out how Nimoa was pathetically targeting his old 'enemies' and silencing those who expressed frustration about the state of the project—both externally and internally. Almost no one was satisfied with how PR and support were being handled, including those working within those departments.



Internal transparency and team dynamics were major concerns as well. It was unacceptable that employees had to fear receiving HR complaints over simple communication with the community. It was equally disturbing that certain individuals were actively trying to get others punished and intentionally provoking them.

Disquse wrote the Feedback #2 document with a clear understanding that serious issues were (and still are) affecting both the team and the project. The majority of the team felt the same way—something needed to be done. This document was an attempt to bring attention to critical problems that not only harmed the project and created a toxic work environment but also damaged Rockstar’s reputation.

Hirsch promised to read the document but never responded.

In January 2024 it was announced that NTA was suspended permanently.

Members of the community learned of this, and being sick of all the ongoing issues, they started an Open Letter on the forums.

This is a very important topic, and we invite you to read at least the topic starter message. Many highly respected and long-term community members have shared their opinions on the ongoing issues, suggested improvements, and called for action. This will help you understand the context of what was happening at the time and the seriousness of the issues affecting the project: An Open Letter.

A conversation between Disquse and Tabarra shortly before “An Open Letter” topic.

Vivian, a long-standing community member and moderator on Discord, shares an open letter addressing various concerns about the state of the Cfx.re/FiveM community and its development. The post was not meant to be negative but rather to seek transparency and engagement from those in charge. Vivian emphasizes that these criticisms stem from care for the project, not negativity, and calls on others to share their thoughts in hopes of sparking meaningful progress. Urges the Cfx.re team to engage with the community, provide transparency, and improve overall communication instead of remaining silent.


This topic turned into a group complaint about everything that was happening. Code contributors shared their frustration over the fact that GitHub was abandoned and nobody reviewed any community pull requests. Resource developers were sharing their frustration over TOS violations and slow support. And many others.


NTA’s past actions weren't forgotten and some community members shared their opinion about the exclusion, sometimes using some quite misleading points that were coming from not understanding how the project has worked internally. Not everyone was close to the project and knew about its internals, so it was understandable.

Several team members posted here, and NTA themself. They tried to unveil some myths about what was happening with the project before the acquisition and how exactly they were excluded. As a result of NTA talking publicly in the open letter topic, R* cut the payout in half. Therefore FiveM was only sold for about 10 months worth of operating income. Despite not leaking any internal information or telling a single bad word about Rockstar itself.



Speaking of the “money” part of the story. Cfx.re was sold for only 20 months of income, which was later cut to 10 months of income. The usual minimal price of business acquisition is 36 months of their income.

At some point, reading through all the comments and being frustrated over Ethan Hirsch doing nothing about The Groot Gang, the anticheat lead developer decided to comment and then a little public discussion between team members started. It’s important to read these messages on your own, we won’t quote them. You can still open “An Open Letter” topic and find these posts.


In this message you can pretty much see some core points that we’ve discussed and proved in this document earlier.

Later, Xinerki decided to join and shared their point of view. We’ve briefly mentioned it earlier. We are going to include it in full so you might get a full understanding of their POV. While reading this message you can clearly see many points that were proven false earlier in this document.


NTA left their own answers on some of the personal attacks toward them. We will leave an opportunity for NTA to cover these on their own, if they decide to reveal their point of view. You can open the forum topic yourself and read the answer.

What’s a bit more important for us, is Disquse’s message, who decided to debunk some of the lies that came out of Xinerki.


This was quite a yolo-style move from some of the members of the team. Frustration has a way of building up, especially when the things that cause it are so obviously bad and the people who promise to improve the situation continue to do nothing. The original team has spoken about in their posts that they weren't just lazy and doing nothing – they were dramatically damaging the project and the team’s work environment. Slowing down development, putting players at unnecessary risks and many other obvious things that shouldn’t have ever happened.

Despite multiple attempts over almost 4 months to bring Ethan Hirsch’s attention to these issues, he simply did nothing about it. Even after agreeing that this is now how it should work. Hirsch actually resolved some other points that the team were trying to resolve, but the main problem, the incompetent, lazy and irresponsible management remained intact.

The Issues that the original team was bringing to Ethan as an example of their mismanagement were undeniable. How could you justify that you decided to put the platform and players in security risks just because you’ve played the “ignore NTA as much as possible” game during your workday? You can’t. Hirsch was well aware of that, same as many other undeniable cases.

The work with these people later turned into “how else these guys would try to spoil my workday today?” This turned out to be very toxic in a very limited timespan. Some team members tried to isolate their communications with the Groot Gang through other people, some just tried to ignore them as much as possible. This is not how it should’ve worked.

The messages left by some of the original team members also brought internal attention from the rest of the team. Some of them shared that they’ve also been suffering from the Groot Gang members and tried to speak about it with Ethan too. Not only in the development department, but also in others.

Titanium, the senior manager behind the PR department, started to panic internally, when the rest of the team (excluding the Groot Gang) were discussing these events in internal Slack. Hirsch made a DM group where added Titanium, Neon, Technetium, Disquse and two other Cfx team members who were deeply unsatisfied with how the PR department worked, to discuss this situation and ways to resolve this issue.

The discussion quickly turned into a repeating circle of suggesting the PR department to stop ignoring problems, do their work properly and be transparent with the community. The PR department members kept asking for their opinion about how they should handle it, ignoring previous answers.

We’re sharing a discussion between Disquse and another team member that happened during these events.


Before this discussion started, “An Open Letter” thread was created.


Their very first take was that there’s not enough manpower. We don’t know exactly how 8 hours a day, 5 days a week isn’t enough to make a single monthly post and read through a community. Especially given that moderation responsibilities were delegated by NTA to community members (like Vivian or Indra) many years ago.

They ignored every single suggestion in this discussion, ignored direct questions and kept acting like nothing had happened. They definitely had no intention to continue this discussion.


That was until the lead anticheat dev, who also was participating in this discussion, the same person who was earlier reported by one of the Groot Gang members. He tried to give them advice and opinions, but got enough of their 2-face behaviour, hypocritic answers and obvious lies.

He blamed them for a criminal level of incompetence, told them that they’re unable to do any work properly because they never did it before, and after getting rid of NTA they’ve suddenly realized how much has been handled by them back then. He mentioned the report that he got for trying to communicate with the community, etc. While it was quite unprofessional, he basically said everything that everyone in the team had thought about them to their faces, after hearing these blatantly fake excuses.

Things escalated quickly and Ethan had to interrupt the shitstorm. This was the breaking point.



Disquse, one of the main developers of FiveM and RedM, being frustrated over this entire situation, shared this with one of the Cfx team members. This pretty much explains the general mood in the team. Only one party was happy – The Groot Gang, they’ve continued doing nothing and damaging the project and other people’s work environment.

Later they would close the topic, promising to address the community’s concerns...


The biggest spit in the face of the community was when they “released” the answer. 1 month later, in a February pulse post that was released in March (yeah, the usual laziness and delays).


The Community sarcastically shared how despite Cfx’s promises to “protect the community”, a server that is obviously violating FiveM’s PLA is being advertised on FiveM’s main page.

(A bit of clarification, FiveM’s PLA doesn’t allow using the Liberty City (NYC) map.)



We also want to include discussion between two Cfx team members discussing the events in February of 2024.



Hirsch was receiving bad feedback about the Groot Gang management from almost the entire team.

Later Hirsch assigned the very same people who caused this community outburst to write community sentiment monitoring reports. Hirsch also confirmed that everything the PR department is doing is recorded in Jira as tickets – There was almost nothing there, so it was a confirmation that they’ve been extremely lazy.



The next 2-3 weeks didn’t introduce anything good, except the joining of a long-term FiveM contributor and former Cfx contractor – “gottfriedleibniz”.

Shortly after the Open Letter events, it seemed that Hirsch’s management had become aware of the community outbursts and the involvement of team members in these discussions. While it's unclear how he explained the situation to his superiors, one thing was certain, he was not happy about it.

Hirsch was fully aware of everything. He had received feedback from numerous team members, many of whom had never even spoken to each other before. At the time, the team couldn’t understand why Ethan was ignoring such obvious issues. Regardless of whom you asked, it was clear that such a glaring divide within the team was far from acceptable.

In an attempt to excuse his own incompetence, Hirsch sought a scapegoat to explain the 'bad moods' within the team. During a conversation with the lead anticheat developer, he claimed that Disquse was to blame for the negativity within the team.

(The team has no plans to sell the rights to this story to Netflix – they may use it for free.)

It remains unclear whether this was a genuine attempt to determine if a single person was spreading panic within the team or if there were actual issues at play.

What we do know is that Hirsch had been receiving multiple reports regarding work conditions from various team members – including some who had never even spoken to Disquse before these events. As seen in the previously shared screenshots, the concerns were widespread and not limited to just one individual.

Retrospectively, knowing the entire corruption circle Ethan Hirsch made with the Groot Gang, it’s obvious that Hirsch was simply trying to find an easy excuse. He couldn’t explain that the people he decided to “deal with” are those who were causing all the troubles in the team, and severely damaging the project. If he did that, it would’ve immediately led to questions who these people are and what they’re doing in their roles.

To keep his corruption intact he decided to find an excuse. A single developer assigned a low-tier role, working through a contract, was an easy target.

In hindsight, knowing the full extent of the corruption circle Ethan Hirsch built with the Groot Gang, it’s clear that he was simply looking for an easy excuse. He couldn’t openly admit that the people he had chosen to ‘deal with’ were the very ones causing troubles within the team and severely damaging the project. If he had, it would have immediately raised questions about who these individuals were and why they were in their roles in the first place.



At the time, Hirsch couldn’t find a convenient ‘way out’, and it remains unclear how he managed to escape the situation unscathed. The original team didn’t fully grasp what they were up against and continued to hope that Hirsch was simply unaware or too busy to handle the issues. Meanwhile, Hirsch seems to have been playing his two-faced corporate game from the very beginning.

This was the moment when things started to become painfully obvious.

You have a team. The majority of that team is complaining that a small group is doing nothing, worsening the work environment, and actively harming both Rockstar and the project itself. These complaints aren’t coming from a single person – they’re coming from multiple individuals, independently, all sharing their frustrations and concerns over many months.

The situation is so dire that even the community is fed up, leading to a public outcry. And by this point, Hirsch had already seen proof that these people were historically lazy. Their behavior wasn’t an exception, it was their baseline.

What would a competent manager do in this situation?



‘Forget the past and focus on the future.’ That was Hirsch’s repeated suggestion. Wise words, aren’t they? But what about the ongoing problems caused by these people? Those issues weren’t even part of the past – they were happening right now.

The past was never a concern until the team started questioning who these individuals were and why, despite their laziness, irresponsibility, and incompetence, they had been appointed as ‘managers’ and ‘leads’. Why were they allowed to damage the entire team and the project?

‘Forget the past and focus on the future’—ironically, this was exactly what NTA had once tried to get the Groot Gang to do before…

Despite how bullshit Hirsch’s response was, the team remained optimistic about his willingness to discuss the issue, still hoping for improvements in the future.


Ethan also lied about having no knowledge of what happened between NTA and Technetium.

Is that why NTA was targeted and suppressed immediately after the acquisition, before even having a chance to do anything wrong?



They also discussed the management issues, during which Hirsch falsely claimed that NTA was aware of and had approved the hierarchy.

This was a blatant lie, as NTA had immediately pointed out after the acquisition that the hierarchy was unusual and that they had never reviewed or approved it.

NTA would confirm this:


During a conversation with Hirsch, Disquse began to notice a pattern of behavior that would later become Hirsch’s standard approach – portraying himself as a victim of the situation. It was the same tactic the Groot Gang had used against NTA during their manipulations.

Hirsch acknowledged that there were issues and assured Disquse that he would address them. He explained that after receiving Disquse’s first round of feedback, he had focused on improving the situation within the engineering department. To his credit, he did eventually resolve some of the problems (except the management issues), so it wasn’t a complete lie.


During this conversation, Disquse also stated that the reason for NTA’s removal was 'bullshit', arguing that reporting private direct messages from a personal space as a workplace issue was an abuse of the trust and safety system.

As seen in the screenshot, Hirsch reacted aggressively to these remarks.



Hirsch acted very salty during this talk, claiming that ‘NTA removed themselves’ from the team, when Disquse told him that this removal affected the entire team.

He also accused Disquse of 'continued and consistent negativity' that supposedly no one else in the team had expressed.

This was a blatant lie – so outrageous that Disquse initially thought he must have misunderstood.

In reality, 4 out of 5 engineering team members had separately reported Groot Gang's management failures. In the PR department, Xinerki had voiced their frustration over management issues. Tabarra from txAdmin was also upset about the ongoing situation.

The only people satisfied with the state of the team were the Groot Gang and their close associates – because they held high-paying, full-time jobs while doing little to no actual work.

These were only the people the team was aware of at the time. In reality, there were many more, some of whom were quietly removed by Hirsch later. Nearly every person placed under Groot Gang's management was unhappy with how things were being run. The points outlined in the 'Open Letter' post serve as clear examples of mismanagement at a level that could almost be considered criminal.

Hirsch also began portraying himself as the victim of the situation, claiming that he had done so much in response to Disquse’s feedback, but 'at no point has this been acknowledged or appreciated by you'.

This was yet another blatant lie, as Disquse had explicitly listed positive improvements in the Feedback #2 document, which he had shared with Hirsch a few weeks earlier, along with a warning about growing community tensions.

Hirsch then admitted that he hadn’t even read it yet and promptly withdrew his accusation of ungratefulness.

Ethan’s behavior was raising more red flags than a bullfighting convention. Still, the team assumed he might just be exhausted from dealing with the 'Open Letter' incident and didn’t take it too seriously.

In the end, NTA was the only party that directly suffered from the 'Open Letter' fallout. Rockstar flagged a contract violation, cut their FiveM-related payments in half, and terminated any work-related contact.

This delayed firing of NTA was likely Ethan’s way of buying time, preparing the team while quietly searching for replacements. This could also explain why Hirsch suddenly started putting in actual effort after Disquse mentioned he was considering leaving the team.

Looking back, just a theory, but it seems that after failing to pin the blame on Disquse for the issues caused by his own incompetence, Ethan turned NTA into the scapegoat instead. It was a convenient excuse to fire NTA and recoup a significant portion of the money spent on the acquisition. Unfortunately, there’s no way to confirm this, so it remains speculation. What is suspicious, however, is that NTA never publicly criticized Rockstar in their posts. Their statements focused primarily on personal and interpersonal matters, as well as pre-acquisition events.

Unfortunately for Ethan, FiveM is a difficult project to recruit for. Most qualified candidates can secure far better jobs elsewhere. Prospective applicants can immediately tell that it’s not a real Rockstar position, otherwise, why wouldn’t they just apply directly to Rockstar? This is especially true considering that new hires aren’t allowed to work remotely.

The job itself requires deep expertise in ASM, IDA, and byte patching, along with extensive GTA knowledge. On top of that, FiveM server owners earn far more than FiveM employees. As a result, there’s basically no one willing to take the job

However, the Groot Gang were looking to expand, and recruited more Telegram members who weren’t a part of Rockstar, but had been inappropriately feasting on NDA information in there.

On the bright side, Hirsch finally promised to provide official access to the GTA V source code, many months after the leak. The team was granted partial access to Perforce, though it was version-locked to the same build as the leak.

Another promise was made to set up a direct line for information requests, which was later implemented as a way for Disquse to request details about Red Dead Redemption 2 to assist with RedM development.

For the first time in a while, the team started to feel hopeful about improvements in management.

Meanwhile, Nihonium got his friend hired as a UI Engineer, attempting to fill his previous position.

AK, a longtime Groot Gang associate and former Cfx employee (for a brief period), was also hired.

Around this time, Gottfried returned, a sight for sore eyes. However, getting him rehired took significantly longer compared to Groot Gang friends. Gottfried was well-liked and a valuable addition to the team. He later became one of the most active developers, restored FiveM’s stability to pre-acquisition levels (which was infinitely better than the post-acquisition state), and implemented numerous features and fixes.

Some unknown new hires also joined, including a Producer and a Product Manager, actual professionals who, for the most part, knew what they were doing. These guys were competent, but they had unfortunately landed in the middle of an absolute disaster. The original team felt bad for them, there was no way they could fix things without an act of God.

The Groot Gang had been pushing for years to hire the alt:V team. At first glance, hiring developers from a competing GTA V multiplayer mod project might seem like a reasonable idea. However, NTA had historically shut down the suggestion, they weren’t impressed and suspected alt:V of stealing FiveM’s code (as will soon be revealed).

Despite past concerns, the team was open to onboarding them and even told Ethan it was a good idea. FiveM could always use more development manpower, and bringing in new employees could help dilute the Groot Gang's influence.

Let us introduce you: Tuxick, Zziger, Vektor, Fabian, and Leon – the so-called alt:V developers.



The story of the alt:V members starts with the fact that they were initially trying to sell themselves to Ethan Hirsch as tool developers, suggesting to work on “next-generation” community tools, basically a CodeWalker-esque project that ran in-game.

As a presentation of this idea, Tuxick made a design document to do this:



If you’ve smelled generative AI in this text, you’re not alone. This document is 100% generated with ChatGPT and has no real work done. See tools like GPT Zero which are quite good at detecting generative AI texts.


Imagine getting into Rockstar Games after using a 100% AI generated document as your way in.

Imagine a Rockstar manager who was totally fine with that fact.

AI is great to polish your text, to get some ideas, improve formatting, etc. However, when AI is about 100% of the text, it just shows how little you care about what you’re doing. Keep that in mind when we continue our story, this point of small effort and careless attitude will continue to show from these alt:V people, but in way-way worse scenarios.

This project by itself would have replaced FxDK, which was abandoned on release. It also would have replaced whatever Blender stuff was supposedly being worked on for the past 2 years or so prior. However, it was just a ChatGPT generated document, nothing has been done to actually develop it.

Tuxick later continued to abuse ChatGPT in internal talks and public announcements.


Tuxick described the interview process as “Nihonium was basically begging me to work on FiveM with his team”.
Tuxick sensed desperation and was able to negotiate much higher salaries for himself (120-140k~€, despite living in Eastern Europe). As he once bragged to Disquse, he convinced R* HRs to bump his own salary while dumping the team's, in order to achieve that. Even after Tuxick’s teammates' salaries were dropped, they still made much more than the OG FiveM Developers. It remains unknown how Hirsch managed to explain why these people with significantly less background and achievements than the original team, were to be paid more. The original team never cared much about pay or rank, but they probably should have. One team member says “It was a strange move for Hirsch, and others at actual R* were noticeably wary of it”.


When the alt:V team actually joined, there was a complete shift. They were told to drop the tool idea entirely, and to instead work on FiveM.

Tuxick would take another Lead Developer position alongside Nihonium, meaning that there were now 2 Lead Developers mainly pushing the Merge button on other people’s commits. The other alt:V team members were put into various developer positions, but as “Seniors”. Ethan had placed the entire alt:V team above the Original Developers of the project.

It was not long before they were given full reign over all of FiveM’s code and the build pipeline.

The very first thing the ex-alt:V has done after joining is cooperation with the Groot Gang members. This way, Tuxick almost immediately received a “release engineer” role out of nowhere in the most toxic way. Imagine yourself in a position of a release engineer, then some newcomer messages you that he’s taking away your role from now on.

Thorium (a.k.a. Fortahr) was a Release Engineer since the acquisition and tried to do some leading tasks at the same time. The engineering team members often questioned the way he was handling his responsibilities, but barely anyone had any problems with his Release Engineering work after some talks that happened in late 2023.

Unlike Thers, Fortahr actually knew how to code and some management experience. However, Thers’ incompetence and laziness not only affected those who were down the line in the hierarchy, but also those who were supposed to do their work. For instance, out of 3 engineering teams, 2 leads of these teams shared frustration over working with Thers.

Fortahr saw the performance in “an open letter” and later shared their opinion of everything.


Disquse and the rest of the team weren’t aware of Thorium’s position before this discussion. As mentioned earlier, hardly anyone on the team spoke to each other outside of work. This was yet another team member who was unhappy with Thers’ management and had suffered because of it. It was also another person who had received promises from Hirsch regarding management issues.

With Fortahr, this was the entire original core development team. Every single person responsible for the core code part of the project was unhappy about management. All of them have tried to speak to Ethan about it.

How could Hirsch ignore this? The reasons that were making other people’s work environment worse were obvious and the entire original dev team shared the same points with Ethan, separately from each other, not even being aware of each other’s opinion.

Not to mention the new problems popping out of “nowhere” due to the management. It was more than half a year since the acquisition, and while Hirsch actually did some improvements (sharing source code after the leak, hiring folks like gottfriedleibniz, etc), the core point of frustration remained intact.

Thorium, losing hope, and being tired of having to deal with this, decided to give up any leading responsibilities and continue as a regular developer/release engineer. While the team doesn't consider Thorium as a good lead for many reasons (as the team later figured out, because he didn’t even have a chance to work as a lead), with him it was infinitely better than what would happen in the future.

At this point of the story it’s already suspicious how Hirsch, disregarding the opinion of the entire team, allowed a failed manager to spoil the working environment of many other team members. He ignored any suggestions for improvement, including those that would not change the hierarchy itself.

With the ex-alt:V team joining the project, there are now four groups, each at its own level of hierarchy.

First, there is the Managerial group. This consists of Ethan and a few other new hires who are on-site at R* locations – people like Product Managers, Producers, and Directors.

Second, the infamous Groot Gang. They report to the Managerial group.

Then there’s the newly hired ex-alt:V group. They report to both the Groot Gang and the managers.

Finally, at the bottom of the hierarchy, there are the Original Developers – the ones who actually built the project and are objectively accomplished. Yet, they’re at the bottom.

While the original team was hoping that additions to the team would help, conflicts between the ex-alt:V team and the OGs would start over development.

When ex-alt:V joined, there was never an opportunity to train them. When you welcome newcomers into your team, you most likely expect them to get used to a new work environment, the codebase, and the development processes.

From the beginning, they didn’t care about anything. They ignored all communications, and just did whatever they wanted. They acted very toxic, pushing their own “way of working on things” out of nowhere, without explanation or proposals.

Shortly after joining, they tried to change the entire build system from Premake over to CMake for future projects, for no reason other than the fact they were unfamiliar with it. They did this without asking anyone, pitching their idea, or asking why Premake was used. It was only because they were unfamiliar with it.

Cfx.re was a big sponsor of Premake, donating over 50k to their project. This was not only a bad technical move, but also a bad political one.

When a team adopts a set of tools, it’s usually because those tools have been tested, optimized, and integrated into the workflow over time. If a second set of tools is introduced without a compelling reason — such as the original tools becoming obsolete or unsupported – it leads to unnecessary complexity. This creates several problems: increased maintenance burden, knowledge fragmentation, steeper learning curve, technical debt.

In this case, the ex-alt:V team forced their new tools onto the project without any discussion with the original developers, not even notifying them. They disregarded whether the existing team had the time, interest, or capacity to learn these tools and failed to justify why this change was necessary. The only explanation they had was basically some sort of “but we really want to”. Instead of improving the codebase, their actions added unnecessary complexity and made maintenance more difficult.

Their inability to properly work in a team would result in way worse things. They would immediately jump into some of the most complicated code of the entire FiveM codebase, and start breaking things. Almost everything they touched resulted in regressions, sometimes these were easy to find, sometimes it would be weeks before something was noticed as broken, and time would later be spent on figuring out what happened and why something doesn’t work as intended.

They would start to copy code from their previous employer (alt:V) and adapt it to work in FiveM for no real reason. Large sections of code would be completely re-styled in a way they’re more used to, without any good reason. They’ve been changing code that never was causing issues, until they touched it. Oftenly they were changing code that wasn’t anyhow broken or unmaintainable, but because they simply didn't understand it. And instead of asking anyone for clarification, they were simply jumping into yet another unnecessary refactor causing major issues for both, original developers and the platform itself.

When making their commits, they wouldn’t even test if it would compile, let alone debug it with breakpoints. In fact, they didn’t even know how to set breakpoints, never debugged the client properly. The team would constantly ask them to please test their code, and they’d reply to them by saying the whole project was bad – when they never even bothered to get the proper training or setup from the original team.

Don’t get us wrong, engineers do make mistakes, it’s a human factor. However, it always depends on what kind of mistakes are being made. Sometimes it might be something really hard to catch since the beginning, some hardware related or software caused regressions that are only reproducible in some very specific environment – this is completely fine, you can’t predict everything and without a QA department it’s almost impossible to catch. The QA team was promised by Hirsch for many months but never became a thing.

However, there are other types of mistakes, mistakes that come from carelessness. When an engineer changes some kind of a system in a project, they usually have to at least test if these changes are compiling and working as intended. You just launch a software you’re working on and click the related buttons to see if something you’ve changed actually works. You’re not supposed to test every single edge case if you have a QA department (which FiveM didn’t have), but even edge cases are somewhat forgivable.



What the ex-alt:V members were doing is dropping chunks of code without doing any tests, not even launching what they’ve changed and sometimes not even trying to see if it can compile.

This led to many instances of things being broken. These people never cared to read community chats to see any kind of feedback, so the original team had to do it. Sometimes it was not obvious, and original team members would have to do post-mortem technical retrospectives into what they did. Sometimes they had to do it even on their weekends. Spending time that were supposed to be with their families, collecting feedback, searching for what was broken and suggesting fixes. Don’t get it wrong, the original team always was passionate about the project and wasn’t against working on weekends, unlike the Groot Gang and others. However, there’s a difference between wanting to work on weekends to achieve something and having to work on weekends because some people were yet again careless enough to not to test their changes before pushing.


How could this be possible? Aren't there merge guards, such as reviews and approvals? Yes, there was such a system in place. Fortahr was the release engineer. As mentioned earlier, the team had issues with Fortahr’s management (which stemmed from Thers). However, after a few discussions in January and February of 2024, no one had any complaints about this specific aspect of his job. Fortahr proposed a workflow for the team, and overall, it wasn’t too bad. There were reviews, weekly canary updates, and regular production updates.

We’re going to provide a few examples of how careless they are and continue the story.

These people had no regard for backward compatibility, and would break it on purpose.

As a largely-popular production modding platform, FiveM has to provide backward compatibility and at least some reasonable timeframe in which a feature will continue to work. FiveM provided almost endless backward compatibility support. Scripts that were made in 2018 would most likely work flawlessly today.

Backward compatibility is important when you’re dealing with a large platform where a lot of server owners are dependent on other people’s work - it could be an entire game logic framework or a small speedometer script. Breaking something makes server owners uncomfortable and gives them an unnecessary burden. Even if a breaking change gave something good like an overall performance boost, it should not be enabled by default.

Scripts could be abandoned for years and if something broke, server owners would have to search for alternatives or fix it themselves. While it may sound like not a big deal, it’s a huge business point, people must be sure that something they’re doing won’t break out of nowhere for no reason. It’s especially important considering the paid Asset Escrowing ecosystem that FiveM has. Breaking compatibility would risk breaking assets that end users won’t be able to fix on their own physically. This is why the FiveM team was always very serious about backward compatibility, this is not an easy thing to follow and requires extra precautions and good understanding of what and how something is used.

Their entire attitude toward the project quickly became obvious…

At some point ex-alt:V wanted to remove version checks from the packet handlers. This would’ve broken backward compatibility with any server running an older build in a very unclear and random way. When your product is used by millions of people, you must do basic risk analysis, think about how many users and servers you would affect. Are there clear ways to minimize damage? what are the benefits over the damage that you would do? In other words, be reasonable in making a decision. Especially if your project doesn’t have any clear “lifetime” cycles, that FiveM never had.
If breaking compatibility is necessary, ensure that as many affected users as possible are going to get aware of it and have time to mitigate potential issues. This approach is not something extraordinary, it is widespread everywhere and is about simply respecting your users.

However, the ex-alt:V associates never had heard of this. They just wanted to break compatibility without any warnings or announcements, and not even try to think about how many servers would be affected. Risk analysis was skipped entirely. Disquse did this work for them and found that this change would affect a minimal amount of servers. While it might not sound significant enough, it’s important to respect your users, especially when it’s not something hard to do – these changes weren’t urgent and a simple warning with a grace period would’ve worked great.

After a fairly long discussion, during which Disquse tried to understand why the project needed these changes (as it was never properly explained), a call was held with these individuals. During the call, everyone agreed to issue a backward compatibility breaking notice and provide a 30-day grace period.

This change had no real purpose or benefit, other than removing a couple of if-statements. It was just an amateur’s attempt at “cleaning up the codebase”, when the code was not harming anything.

The next day these breaking changes were pushed anyway, ignoring the entire conversation that was discussed the day before. Being shocked, Disquse tried to figure out what happened and why they did that. They refused to explain why. They promised to make an announcement about the compatibility breakage in the next pulse post, meaning they would “announce” backward compatibility breakage weeks AFTER they made these changes. Making announcements after breaking something is useless. In the end, it wasn’t even in the pulse, so they didn't even do that as well.

This is when the team started to understand that no matter how hard you try to communicate with these people, it wouldn’t matter. They would do whatever they want. They had no interest in listening to anyone’s opinion. It wasn’t about proving that someone is wrong. It was about keeping the platform stable and in a good state.

The latent events incident that happened shortly after was a direct confirmation that this was not a mistake, but a pattern of behavior. These people found some sort of an exploit inside the logic behind latent events. There was no proof that it’s actually exploitable or used in the wild, but the explanations were reasonable enough to take some preventive actions. One of the ex-alt:V members, made a “fix” without discussing it with anyone, rushing it for no reason whatsoever. The fix was about disabling latent events by default, the explanation behind this decision was about this issue being an emergency solution and there’s not much servers using latent events given that this exploit wasn’t discovered yet. If you’re a bit confused by this explanation, you’re not alone. This merge request was already approved by other alt:V members. Disquse had to step in because even without a deep dive it was a very risky thing todo, after digging into the issue, he realized that this “fix” is a disaster and started the discussion.


First of all, how would you correlate the amount of feature users with the fact that nobody has found an exploit related to a feature? That’s some sort of crazy math and analytics that no one in the original team understood. Instead of guessing, one of the original team members suggested the ex-alt:V member to open GitHub and try to find how many resources are using the latent event specific functions. Of course, the OG team member has done this before. If this change would’ve gone through in this form, thousands of servers would be affected in a way that’s really hard to debug. Some kind of functionality would’ve been silently broken out of nowhere.

Secondly, there’s no reason to rush this fix so much if there’s no known cases of abuse. Instead of doing half-measure half-broken fixes, bringing attention to this weak spot on GitHub, take your time and make a once and forever fix instead.

Another “great” idea of fixing this issue was about replacing latent events with regular events as a fallback.

We guess you don’t have to be a genius to understand that there’s a reason behind latent events and the way they've worked. The ex-alt:V member just showed his incompetence and lack of understanding of a system he was trying to work on. Silently replacing them with regular events would’ve ended up with major network issues that would have affected thousands of servers, in a way that would be hard to debug.

Despite everything, this one particular example ended up well. None of the server owners suffered from this. This only happened because Disquse has managed to notice this MR in time. There was a race and chase game every time these people made any changes. However, many months later Heron still managed to kill latent events for no reason anyway.

Oftenly during their rare discussions with the original team they were showing their incompetence multiplied by confidence. It was really awkward to participate in this because you felt like a teacher explaining something to a kid who thinks he already knows everything. Sometimes this was quite innocent, like one of the alt:V members wasn’t aware how the temporary identifiers worked on the server and for whatever reason decided to act like a smart ass in comments, later proved to be wrong.

Some hilarious cases like “we don’t need this let’s remove” – removing without listening to the original team’s opinion. And then a week later “oh now we actually need this” – returning back.


But usually this type of behavior resulted in real project risks of regressions. They were eager to rework random parts of the project that never required any kind of “rework”, and it resulted in a large amount of regressions.

At some point, these people started using the strategy of YOLO-pushing their changes, bypassing any form of proper review or testing. Ex-alt:V member #1 would create a merge request and assign ex-alt:V member #2 to review it. Member #2 would approve and mark it as “ready to merge” within the next five minutes – obviously not enough time for any meaningful testing.

This is exactly what happened with a merge request that ended up breaking the population system on OneSync. The ex-alt:V member who proposed the change (and it was since the beginning) asked his friend to review and approve it without conducting any testing. GottfriedLeibniz, who was far more qualified and experienced, quickly recognized the potential issues and left a comment blocking the merge request. The author of this flawed request responded, claiming that the change could only affect OneSync Infinity if it had a population – since it seemingly didn’t, he argued, nothing would break.

Apparently, OneSync Infinity doesn’t have a population now. At the time of this claim, these people had already been working on FiveM for several months. Information about OneSync Infinity is readily available in the documentation – it has been the default mode for all FiveM servers since 2021. Not only were they failing to test their changes, but they also didn’t even bother to research the basic functionality of the product they were supposed to be working on.

One day, these people broke their own record: three rushed broken changes caused major regressions over the weekend. These issues broke the disconnection reasons, server permissions handling (broke permissions for the vast majority of servers), and console command handling. Things that all had been working flawlessly for years.

The original development team had to take time out of their weekend to handle this. They spent time trying to figure out as soon as possible how the ctrl:V team had managed to break so many things in a single push. This was particularly difficult because the ctrl:V team didn’t use Git properly and never documented their changes in the commit message.

Disquse and GottfriedLeibniz created an internal report with suggested fixes and requested that the broken server artifacts be unlisted, as more and more users were being affected. However, these artifacts were never unlisted because the only person who could have done so, Thers. Thers simply didn’t care, and was probably finding amusement between the conflicts between alt:V and OGs.


Their general lack of any care about what they’ve been pushing was frustrating to the entire team. Reviewing their changes was quite annoying from the beginning, because these changes were usually useless and not asked by anyone. The changes were in random areas, with auto-formatting on unrelated files, and they rarely provided any context or reasoning behind their changes, making the review process more difficult.

Sometimes, trying to pretend busy and doing something useful, they were introducing some useless changes that never affected anything. Not like just some code style or anything, literally just nothing but explained as it’s something worth doing. Such events were pointed out a few times internally and even on public repositories.

Groot Gang was completely silent about them breaking things, despite prior behavior of throwing a fit whenever the original team would break something for less than an hour.

Holding them back was an uphill battle for the team. They’d argue and try to defend their work always, usually showing a complete lack of understanding and knowledge. Anything that could be considered opinion/flavor was disregarded. Things that were asked to be tested, or to be left on the backburner, were merged anyway. Even despite the rules that were later set and agreed by everyone.

This wouldn’t be a problem in a normal organization; some of this behavior is natural coming from new employees who really want to jump in and have an impact. Their ambition is almost somewhat respectable, especially seeing how lazy some of the other members of the team were (the Groot Gang).

However, Ethan, the R* Creator Platform Senior Director, had made the ex-alt:V team senior to the original Cfx.re development team, and it went to their heads. They leveraged their Ethan-given higher authority to override the original team's decisions and vision, enforcing their will through direct commits to the codebase.

After several major regressions and accompanying arguments between the teams, the producer scolded them multiple times to be more careful with what they’re pushing, but to no avail. The ex-alt:V team continued to ignore it, simply having another member of their friend group review their code – usually granting instant approval. Later he even tried to implement a “20-minute review policy”, but this didn’t change anything either.


The issues they were creating became increasingly stupid, it got to the point where the Original Team thought they were trolling. It seemed almost impossible to make such mistakes unintentionally.

Disquse, growing tired of constant regressions and striving to maintain project stability, would later push an idea for a rule requiring approval from all assigned “reviewers” before merging any changes. The entire team agreed to this. It was stated globally across the entire engineering team and sounded like “Don’t merge until all reviewers have approved via the ‘accepted’ button in Git”. However, in the same week it was implemented, this rule was blatantly violated three times without any justification. We will cover this in more detail soon.

The alt:V people were quite aggressive, right at the start. Tuxick was openly insulting Thorium for his senior role, as if he never deserved it, during team calls on Zoom. Tuxick and Thers were brainstorming ways how they can “get rid of him” by finding some legal reasons. Disquse was told that by Tuxick himself. It’s bewildering that they hated Thorium so much since the beginning, it probably was because Thorium did a protest-like move of resignation from his role because he was against Thers’s management.

The ex-alt:V associates were also flexing their previous project like it was a masterpiece infinitely better than FiveM. They were openly hostile about FiveM’s codebase, like it was a disaster. They even claimed that “alt:V is more production-ready than FiveM” and “Rockstar should’ve acquired them instead”.

Yeah, so much better… In reality, alt:V was left in an unmaintainable state. We’ve spoken with some ex and current alt:V developers. The ex-alt:V members who joined FiveM also treated their own project the same way: giving no concerns to the community.

You couldn’t compile it in debug mode – it had been broken long ago. alt:V never had real-time debugging capabilities, something almost crucial. Instead, they would copy crash dumps from the release build and analyze them later. To compensate, they heavily relied on printf debugging.

Their codebase was terribly hacky, lacking any meaningful architecture, and was significantly worse than FiveM. Their scripting implementation was rough and unreliable, filled with bugs, poor architecture, and questionable API design. While FiveM did have some "trashcan"-like sections where numerous hooks were placed – whose are usually *ugly* by its nature – the rest of the codebase was infinitely better than what alt:V ever had.

alt:V’s code wasn’t any better than what a junior C/C++ developer or even a beginner cheat developer could produce. In contrast, FiveM’s architecture was built on a flexible, component-based system. alt:V’s build system was utterly ridiculous, and they likely had the worst CI/CD pipeline imaginable.

Most of these points are complaints that only engineers would understand, you might see it as: “you write bad code!” “No, you write bad code!”. What anyone can understand as bad, is their constant code plagiarism.

The amount of stolen code from FiveM in alt:V is crazy. They were shamelessly pasting everything they could reach.

From small features, to their entire sync - which is an edited copy of OneSync (alt:V was released a year after OneSync was made usable, "restarted" once OneSync was revealed in the open-source repository) with cut functionality. We will unravel this topic with details and evidence in the next part of this document.

The FiveM license explicitly forbids code stealing like this.

Aside from this, another indication of how they treated their own project was the fact that there were multiple serious memory leaks for years that forced servers to restart, and were never fixed. Memory leaks became something usual in FiveM too after they took over the project


It basically turned into the ex-alt:V team wanting to prove themselves and fuel their ego vs. the Original Team wanting to keep the project functioning and intact. (Feelings vs. Facts)

While there never was an official decree, it was clear that ex-alt:V were higher in authority than the people who made FiveM and RedM. People with zero experience in developing and maintaining a platform with more than 1000 players came in and were now in charge.

Disquse tried to point out that communication in decision-making is very important, especially after the lead developer of FiveM was excluded from the project. He tried to bring Hirsch’s attention to the regressions that these people were introducing, pointing out how much it stresses the rest of the team. Disquse explained why it’s unacceptable for a production platform to cause so many issues to end users. Disquse pointed out that there were multiple times when these people wanted to make extremely stupid technical decisions. The original team was completely excluded from these discussions, and only had the chance to review their code right before it was about to go public. Others from the team also shared the same frustrations with Hirsch.

Hirsch was very vague in his answers. While he again promised to take a look into this, he put forth some very strange points to explain their behavior. For example, he compared Tuxick discussing technical points in private with his friends with the fact that Disquse and Gottfriedleibniz were doing the same. This is not a valid point. Unlike Tuxick, neither Disquse or Gottfriedleibneiz had decision making authority and did not present their decisions as the only correct ones. Either way, Gottfried and Disquse have over 10 years combined working on the project, they should have been included in discussions, and their opinions shouldn’t have been undermined.

Tuxick and his friends enjoyed imposing their bad technical solutions on other team members. They would give such “advice” in direct messages, so you couldn’t review it in time before it was merged. These new developers were then spending time working on changes according to ex-alt:V’s faulty guidance. It’s important to mention the problems weren’t just about some high-level architecture or code-style. They were knowingly making changes that only a few end-users would ever utilize at the cost of degrading performance for every single player on FiveM.

The “bad” decisions weren't just bad, but also damaging.


This person decided to change the way how things work in FiveM without discussing it with anyone. They lacked any knowledge or experience in how things work in FiveM and were directly affecting the platform stability/consistency.

One of the original team members, after having to deal with this behavior for multiple months in a row, answered:

Seeing incompetent people breaking things in a piece of software you were developing for many years, for no good reason, is awful. They were highly invasive and disrespectful.

FiveM isn’t perfect, it’s technical state isn’t perfect either. The original team would’ve loved to work together, discuss and take actions on improving the codebase. However, Ex-alt:V wouldn’t discuss technical things with the OGs, instead their logic behind these changes was “because I decided” rather than making proposals, running tests, or talking things out. At the end of the day, they had full-access to the CI pipeline and were able to force push their commits.

This example will outline how incompetent these people are regarding game-engine knowledge as well. During a status report meeting, Tuxick mentioned that he designed a so-called “DLC blacklist” system and assigned it to a developer. In fact, it had already been implemented in the way Tuxick wanted. Without even bothering to discuss the design with anyone.

Knowing how bad it could be, Disquse decided to ask them how they implemented it.

The general idea was good. It allows people to use the latest game build but turn off some specific DLCs in case you don’t need the content from it. However, knowing how DLC packs work in RAGE, some packs might affect or depend on content from previous DLCs. Disquse mentioned that this could lead to major issues if some DLCs dependent on each other’s content were missing. He gave an example in how the game would react if you disabled The Casino and Resort DLC (where R* added the casino) but kept the Casino Heist DLC (it uses content from the casino). Obviously, it wouldn’t lead to anything good.

FiveM, as a platform with millions of players and creators, shouldn’t implement such an easy way to break a server using configuration files. They also don’t want people to have to “brute force” potential DLC combinations that might work.

Disquse offered 2 ways: easy and hard.

The easy way was to operate off of “DLC level”, same as game builds. It would allow you to be able to use the latest build and a lower DLC level.

The hard way was parsing the DLC lists and safely disabling some pack dependencies.

Tuxick agreed that this made sense and decided to implement this feature the easy way, as a “DLC level”.

While it ended up getting solved through cross-team communication, the project wasted development efforts on a bad-by-design feature. Without the original team's intervention, the ex-alt:V would have just broken FiveM yet again and put others in a position of having to remake this feature while being in use by some servers.

There was a merge request for a Title Update (will be discussed in detail soon). Disquse asked why there’s a merge request for a contentless Title Update. The team never did that before (with a small reasonable exception) for a reason: no new content, no new natives, no new game functionality. The players wouldn’t have used or noticed it at all. Every new game build increases the maintenance burden and slows down development, for the actual developers. It’s not too much of a problem for those who neither test their changes nor run the game at all.

Of course, no one from the original team has ever seen the mentioned “roadmap”.

Similar to the Groot Gang, the ex-alt:V people also ignore security vulnerabilities.

The original team tried to bring attention to these issues and fix them as quickly as possible, but the ex-alt:V members always took far longer than necessary to act.

In the future, this behavior would worsen dramatically – we have an entire section in this document dedicated to it, which we will cover in detail.

For now, we’ll show you an example of how they handled these situations shortly after the original team’s departure.


Many other issues are still getting ignored, many months later. Leaving the “feature request” and “bug report” categories of the forums dead. No feedback, no reaction, no acknowledgement.

Let’s make it obvious and include these activity screenshots made in December of 2024. Nothing has changed since then and you can confirm it.

This is how normal work with the community looks like.


Now let's see the community forum contributions of the Ex-alt:V associates.

Let’s also check how The Groot Gang worked.


Titanium: 8 posts since the beginning of 2024… Senior PR Manager. Personal account was abandoned in 2021.



Technetium: The Groot Gang leader, last post in 2022. Personal account was abandoned in 2021. By the way, you can clearly see the correlation when The Groot Gang members started to become lazy.



Nihonium: The so-called Engineering Lead, last 2 posts in 2024 were left in September. Personal account was abandoned in 2022. (At least there's no racial slurs here!)


Kane: The Infra Lead, 3 forum posts overall. Personal account abandoned in 2022.

The communication with the community was one of the most important parts of working on this project. This effectively became the reason why FiveM were chosen over competitors, aside from having a hard working passionate person behind it. Keeping the pulse of the community was very important to understand where the team should’ve driven the platform, what issues there are, what concerns the community had and it was very useful to understand the general project needs. This is how UGC platforms work. “U” means “user”, you must care for your users.

The granted early access to a pre-release Title Update for the first time turned out to be a disaster as well. The team had long wanted pre-release access to game updates to have more time to update FiveM to the latest build. Historically, every update was a race against time, requiring a rapid response to keep FiveM up to date. For months, they had repeatedly requested this from Rockstar, bringing it up with Ethan.

One day, Ethan told the team that they would finally receive early access to an upcoming GTA Online DLC.

This was a significant win for the team. They were excited to gain early access and eager to begin working on it. The DLC in question was the one that was set to implement Battleye in GTA Online. As usual, Disquse was assigned to work on it and began waiting for early access.

However, the DLC faced repeated delays, with months passing since its initial announcement. By this time, the former alt:V team had already joined FiveM.

Finally, the team was informed that the update was ready, and within a few days, they would receive early access. During one of the usual planning meetings for every Title Update, Disquse picked up this task.

However, Thers asked Disquse to bring in one of the former alt:V developers, show them how the team worked on Title Updates, and share experience. Disquse was happy to comply and agreed to collaborate with this person but noted that there likely wasn’t enough work for two people, as this was a relatively small update in terms of gameplay code changes. Everyone agreed to this plan.

A few days later, one of the original team members noticed that the task in Jira had been taken and reassigned to Tuxick and another former alt:V team member. Disquse approached the Project Manager to clarify the situation, but the manager simply told him to speak with Thers, as he had been instructed to work with these individuals instead. When Disquse contact Thers to ask what was going on with the Title Update, their conversation – conducted in Russian – was difficult to translate without losing nuance, but the gist of it was, “Shut up, the decision has already been made, your opinion doesn’t matter.” Already on edge, Disquse responded with equally strong language.

Frustrated, Disquse immediately went to Ethan for answers. Ethan appeared surprised by the situation and promised to get an update from Thers and Tuxick. A bit later, he returned with their statement, which consisted of various random claims – some even contradicting each other.

At first, they claimed that Disquse had never been meant to work on this Title Update. However, after Disquse insisted that this was 100% assigned to him and it happened during the planning meeting, they shifted their reasoning to new vague excuses that had no basis in reality.

Second claim was that Disquse was only meant to be invited as a supervisor rather than the lead developer. They stated it was planned that the lead developer should have been the former alt:V team member. However, this was an obvious lie, as Disquse had been entirely removed from the task. How could someone act as a supervisor without even being informed about the change? Disquse had been assigned to lead the development of this Title Update in February 2024, and that plan had remained unchanged until then.

Their third claim was even more bizarre – they alleged that they were concerned Disquse would work on the Title Update from his personal PC instead of using Rockstar’s hardware. This reasoning was absurd, as a simple request could have resolved the issue: just ask him not to use his personal PC. Personal PCs were allowed for FiveM development, though some repositories were restricted to Rockstar hardware, and these rules had never been violated.

It became clear that these two friends had simply decided to lie.


Disquse was furious at this absolutely disgusting behavior. He had planned his work week around this Title Update, intentionally selecting fewer general tasks to avoid overloading himself. Removing someone from their assigned work without any prior warning or justification is extremely unprofessional – especially considering that this task was meant to demonstrate the growing trust between Rockstar and FiveM. As mentioned earlier, the team had spent months fighting for the ability to receive Title Update files before release. They had been told it was just a matter of time and trust and that they would eventually get there. After months of waiting and anticipation, this opportunity was finally supposed to happen. But instead, a few people – who had only joined the team a month ago – suddenly took it away for no valid reason.

Some might find it strange to be upset over having less work to do, but this wasn’t just about work. This was supposed to be a milestone and achievement, a sign that things were improving for the team, Disquse took pride in his work and even was more than happy to tutor ex-alt:V, his former friends, in how to do it.

Why would the former alt:V members steal this opportunity? Later, they tried to justify their actions by claiming they merely wanted to understand how Title Update–related work was structured so they could gain their experience and knowledge from the original team. But somehow, they didn’t choose any of the other game updates that had been released earlier. Instead, they specifically took this one – the one with pre-release access.

There was no doubt that Tuxick and his friends took over this task simply because they could.



Later, one of the former alt:V team members who had worked on this Title Update unintentionally confirmed in a voice chat that all the explanations Tuxick and Thers had given were lies. He admitted that he had only been assigned the role of lead developer midway through his workweek, trying to explain why he had failed to complete some tasks during the sprint, which directly contradicted Tuxick and Thers’s claim that he had been intended as the lead developer all along, with Disquse merely acting as an overseer.

One of the original team members noticed this and pointed it out to Disquse during the call. Then, a little later in the conversation, the same alt:V member repeated this statement, further confirming the deception. Disquse and the team member immediately messaged Ethan with this information. Disquse was convinced that everything Tuxick and Thers had done was intentional, not a mistake. He tried to prove that they had been lying.

Hirsch ignored the fact that their explanations contradicted each other. Disquse thought that a direct confession from one of the participants would be enough to convince Hirsch of their bad intentions, but Hirsch said he hadn’t been paying attention.

To prevent this issue from ever happening again, Hirsch later proposed attending planning meetings himself (though this didn’t last long) and recording the meetings.

Hirsch also attempted to get Disquse and Thers to apologize to each other for their heated language. Disquse agreed – on the condition that Thers would also apologize for his behavior.

However, that never happened.

Tooling development is also an interesting topic.

There was a plan to make official tooling for the modding community even before some community projects like CodeWalker and Sollumz became an ecosystem standard. Before the acquisition, Deltanic had hired one of his friends, who was supposed to continue NTA’s prototype asset conversion into an intermediate format (FBX or glTF). We briefly mentioned earlier that there were people who did absolutely nothing for many months, he was one of those people. When they joined Rockstar, they had to start doing something, as there were bi-weekly updates. So Thers just told them to keep working on the abandoned tooling to, “keep them busy”.

Instead of having proper planning, or having them R&D, self-educating or maybe improve other tooling that wasn’t supposed to be scrapped (rage-formats-x converter or AnimKit, for instance), Thers was a truly nice manager, willing to spend manhours and company money on making this guy work on basically nothing. The team wasn’t even aware they’re spending their time on something useless. In the end, this tooling project was indeed scrapped. We’re sharing a conversation between the original dev team when Disquse heard about it.

Thers admitted to Disquse that he was “keeping him busy” doing a useless project, knowing that later it would’ve been scrapped anyway.

The entire original development team was isolated from any participation in tool development, despite being the only members with experience working on community tools and having made significant contributions to existing ones.

The individuals assigned to work on tooling were later described as "incompetent" by respected community members who had been selected by Hirsch to provide feedback on R*’s plans. The tooling team inside Cfx lacked an understanding of RAGE’s format fundamentals. Their plans were considered questionable, and community members stated that, if implemented incorrectly, their ideas would offer no benefits to the community. Any later attempts to contact them were ignored.

While part of the original development team was trying to fight for the project’s stability and going through a very toxic and stressful work environment, another team member had already decided to leave the project. After trying to bring Hirsch’s attention to a massive amount of mismanagement caused by one of the Groot Gang leaders, and returning back after a vacation, Thorium found himself in a toxic world of ex-alt:V amateurs who were also allowed to do whatever they want. It wasn't quite an appealing experience.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, Thorium already showed a massive disagreement with the management, he left his leading role on his own and tried to stay away from Thers as much as possible. The toxic behavior of alt:V members quickly made Thorium realize that there are not going to be any improvements.

Remember that the entire original dev team was suffering from the management of the Groot Gang. The entire original dev team was later additionally stressed more by the incompetence and toxicity of the ex-alt:V members. Nobody was silent about that, everyone tried to get Ethan Hirsch’s attention, and showed dozens of blatant examples of their incompetence. Sometimes Hirsch was lying that he understood the situation and promised to improve it (which was never improved), sometimes he just ignored everything that was written to him (as it happened to Thorium, multiple times).

Eventually Thorium gave up trying to get Hirsch’s attention to these issues. Being openly treated like shit on your own project isn’t the best experience.


Thorium made the decision to leave a few months earlier, the original team wasn’t aware of it until May. Nobody ever spoke to him or “demotivated him”, as Hirsch would accuse Disquse of. Everyone in the team was speaking about the same issues, the very same issues that the community was bringing. The very same issues that were damaging the project.

Ethan would learn that getting rid of people was easier than doing his job as manager.

As you might’ve already seen, the team wasn’t silent about the problems. Not with the Groot Gang management, not with the ex-alt:V associates trying to break every single part of the project. They were trying to be reasonable with their explanation, providing many facts, proofs, context about the cases and reasons why the work environment was very bad, why the project was receiving severe damage by these and how it could’ve been fixed.

Surprisingly, whenever the team complained about the Groot Gang’s behavior to Ethan in meetings (without them) or in private chats, he would agree. He agreed with the management issues caused by them, he agreed about the damages that these people were doing to the project.

Team members remember quotes such as: “they are of bad character”, “It wouldn’t be the first time people just latched onto someone talented”, and “they will be washed out in time, just be patient.”.

This could be a weak attempt by Ethan to placate the OGs, but either way, it proves that he isn’t stupid. So the question remains – why does he put so much effort into protecting them from their own actions? There are a few possible theories. We will include some of them now, but consider this all as speculation. Some of the points might become more clear to you later.

1. Ethan is playing an optics meta-game with his bosses at Rockstar
   He has falsely pitched these individuals as the so-called “leaders” of FiveM and completely misrepresented their actual impact. He needs to keep them around as paper tigers so that his lies to upper management at Rockstar don’t unravel.
2. Ethan is trying to carve out a bigger piece of the pie
   He aims to establish his own division or branch within Rockstar that he can control. This could also explain why he’s hiring 30+ staff members for a project that only requires 3 to 5 people to maintain. The more staff he has, the greater his influence becomes – but he still needs to make more progress in this area.
3. Ethan is outright corrupt and, at some point, made a deal with Groot
   This would explain why Groot’s friends received all the “senior” and “manager” roles even before the rest of the team managed to introduce themselves to Ethan. Deltanic was in contact with Ethan even before the official communication channels had been established.

Theories aside, if you read that last Ethan quote above (“washed out”), you might be wondering why the team didn’t just wait them out. That actually was the original idea. The team thought that Rockstar would either make them do their work or fire them. However, months passed, and the Groot Gang continued to get away with being lazy. They even started to damage the project and the work environment for the rest of the team. Unfortunately, it appears to be extremely hard to get fired from Rockstar’s “Creator Platform”. Despite Ethan’s private words, he will go out on a limb to protect them from their own actions constantly.

It also didn’t seem like Hirsch was expecting them to 'wash out.' He knew exactly how incompetent they were and how they had damaged the work environment for others through their laziness and irresponsibility.

Despite all this, Hirsch used the company's money to pay for the Groot Gang leader’s ”'training”. We don’t know exactly what kind of mind games Hirsch was playing with the original team, but it definitely seemed like he did not expect the Groot Gang to leave anytime soon.



But the Groot Gang was not the only problem.

There were constant lies in the “Creator Platform”, in fact the entire FiveM division was a lie. There were no plans ever to let the team dramatically improve the platform with or without Rockstar resources. The core team members begged dozens of times to advance the platform. They offered very solid technical suggestions and proposals.

The entire GTA5 source had already leaked publicly, but still they weren’t allowed to do anything with it. While the entire community could use the leak to do random experiments with the GTAV sources, the original team, when clocking in on their R* PC's, had to do everything through “reverse engineering” and byte patches.

The true objective for the FiveM team is to just ensure the money keeps rolling in, there is nothing planned for FiveM, it’s just maintenance until "ROME" can take over.

The pay was very low considering the difficulty of the work. However, this didn’t affect the Groot Gang; they were paid far more than they should have been. In fact, the Groot Gang was making two to three times more than the Core Developers while doing practically nothing. Even brand-new employees with less experience were given significantly higher pay and rank.

These issues along with: the complete loss of the flat hierarchy, the constant snarky toxic remarks from the Groot Gang lording over everyone, useless meetings, inflexible work schedules, no sense of camaraderie, stress over regressions, stress over being shadowed for no reason, lack of proper communication, general ignorance from Ethan and the fact that the "ROME" project was supposed to kill FiveM eventually - killed the desire for the core developers to stay. Of course the final straw was when Disquse was kicked from his own project.



If you recall, Ethan had already tried to use Disquse as a scapegoat for all the problems within the team, avoiding his own responsibilities as a manager. It’s always easier to blame a single person who tries to draw attention to an obvious issue by accusing them of “overreacting” or “disturbing the peace”. Back then, he hesitated when he realized that the entire team supported Disquse and his opinion.

While the entire original dev team still fully supported Disquse, provided the same feedback to Ethan, and shared their own frustrations about certain events, this time, Hirsch didn’t seem to care at all. Meanwhile, Ethan once again began to mentally blame Disquse for everything.



FiveM basically runs itself, but Ethan also wants to have pawns in the right place on the chessboard to keep his optics at R* up. The NTA drama at the start of the acquisition had cost him a lot, and by siding with the ones who actually started it, he could slowly repair his reputation.

Disquse didn’t antagonise anyone purposefully and was always fairly respectful in his code reviews. If you remember, he was actually good friends with some of ex-alt:V years prior to them joining FiveM. In fact, he was such good friends with them that he kept their very dark secrets from Rockstar, we will reveal those dark secrets later in this document. However, ex-alt:V had huge inflated heads from their overpowered roles Ethan had given them. Their longtime friendship would fall apart quickly. In fact, it was probably over already as soon as these people got what they wanted.


Ethan, while stating that he understands the concerns of the original team, in reality would always side with the Groot Gang and the ex-alt:V team.
Maybe this was because he introduced them to certain staff at R*, met with them in person several times, or just because he was buddies with them dating back to 2022 (or earlier).

One could also postulate there was more to it, who knows, the team joked about him being on Groot’s payroll.



When Disquse’s contract ended, he was let go without any proper notice. This happened just a couple of weeks after Hirsch had told him he wanted him to stay on the team. His work PC was remotely wiped without warning, and a series of emails arrived informing him that he was out. Months of unfinished work were lost forever.

Ethan would later lie to the others and say that he had a heartfelt talk with Disquse the morning of. The talk technically did happen, but Ethan claims it was more heartfelt, genuine, and sincere. “Disquse… Can you truly be happy as part of this team?”

Disquse laughs and tells a different story. He was simply informed they weren’t renewing him after Disquse came to Ethan to discuss yet another blatant violation of the internal rules, asking him to moderate the situation.
During the talk, Hirsch slandered, gaslit, and ignored Disquse.

Nevertheless, Disquse was “kicked” from the team on June 10th 2024. As his contract expired and Hirsch didn’t want to renew it.

We are going to quote the story that Disquse has shared about this last talk with Hirsch somewhere in public Discord guilds. We want to leave it intact as we know that Disquse has a very good reputation within the Rockstar modding community due to his major contributions. In addition to this story we will include some screenshots from various conversations that happened back then that will indirectly confirm the context.



When Disquse mentioned that he was discussing this conversation in “real time” with other team members, he wasn’t lying. We managed to confirm his words because of the conversations he had with them that were provided to us.



The entire original development team was “formally” telling Hirsch that he is out of his mind and should think twice about this decision. Even Thorium who was on vacation appearing to mention this to Gottfried, when the news started to spread across the team:




A couple chat logs between the original team members.





We’re attaching this screenshot with a direct quote from Hirsch.


There’s not much to say – Hirsch has been blatantly lying and involving others in these lies, some of whom subtly pointed out his lies. It seems Hirsch didn’t expect people to be honest with each other and share their experiences.

Even after receiving multiple messages from people who supported Disquse, he continued his strategy of pretending that Disquse was isolated and merely a troublemaker. The “needs”, “demands”, and “criticism” mentioned in his statements were clearly his way of reacting emotionally to the fact that the entire team was asking him to resolve management issues, enforce rules fairly, and prevent people from being overshadowed for no reason.

Yes, Disquse demanded a fair and safe working environment where everyone was treated with respect and given a voice – the same thing the entire original development team wanted. We don’t believe that advocating for this is unreasonable, especially considering how many team members shared the same concerns.

Somehow, Disquse’s request for open discussions and transparency within the team was twisted into “everyone must adapt to your view of the project, your preferred working methods, and your goals.” If “proper testing and not breaking FiveM every week for no reason” is considered a “preferred working method,” then we absolutely agree!

“Treat me like I don’t care about this project or the people in it.”
Here, we must admit that Hirsch is partially right – he does care about some people, but only if they are Groot’s friends. When it came to the original FiveM developers, their feedback, complaints, and requests were ignored for almost a year with no response. Hirsch actively ignored Groot’s friends behaviour when they were directly damaging the project and harming the rest of the team, refusing to address these issues for months. That is not what we would call “caring for the project”.

“To make it seem like the project is doomed.”
Here, Hirsch is referring to a situation where his mismanagement, combined with the Groot Gang’s laziness, led to a situation in which major security exploits kept surfacing and severely impacting the entire project.

“You refused to accept any responsibility for your actions until it became clear that your actions were not okay.”
This statement, along with the rest, is completely false. As shown earlier, Disquse didn’t even blame Thers for that specific situation (despite him playing a role in it). Hirsch was simply nitpicking random words to make his weak argument seem more valid.

Going back to the “open letter” incident, Disquse apologized for it in response to Hirsch’s “be reasonable” recommendation. At the time, Disquse genuinely believed that being open with the community in such a critical moment was the reasonable thing to do.

However, Disquse was yet again proven right. The rushed useless change the alt:V team introduced the day Disquse was fired, was indeed broken and caused a major wave of regressions on FiveM.



The members of the original team said directly to Hirsch, “in the end, Disquse was right”.

The entire original development team was watching these events unfold with extreme frustration, trying to cheer up Disquse. As we mentioned earlier, everyone shared the same opinion as Disquse. These events made it clear that all the masks had been torn off, and despite his promises and repeated assurances of "I understand and will improve the situation". Hirsch's true position was now obvious. The lies he had been feeding the original team were undeniable.

Previously, the team still had some hope – maybe Hirsch was a good guy who was just too busy or didn’t fully understand the situation. But by this point, they had already seen through his deception and heard about the lies he was spreading about Disquse in private messages.

LWSS, the lead anti-cheat developer, interrupted Hirsch’s attempts to justify why they needed to let Disquse go, cutting him off and stating that he would be submitting his two weeks' notice soon.



LWSS dropped Hirsch a few honest messages, expressing his frustration over what just happened. Another departing team member would later put it, "the dude left with a flamethrower".



Gottfriedleibneiz left after a couple weeks. He saw no reason to warn Hirsch about his departure – just as Hirsch hadn't given Disquse the same courtesy. Instead, he sent a formal email to HR, detailing his decision, outlining the management failures, and exposing the latest events. Hirsch, of course, would later attempt to reach out to him, but by then, it was too late.

Thorium, who had already decided to leave even before Disquse was kicked, was still on vacation when everything unfolded. Spectating and discussing all these events just ensured that his decision was correct and there was no hope with Hirsch.





This is how the people – whom Hirsch claimed didn’t support Disquse’s opinion – actually responded. They all quit, not out of impulse, but out of principle. They realized their voices never truly mattered, that no real change was coming, and that Ethan Hirsch was exactly who he had just proven himself to be.



After the original team’s departure from FiveM, there was a small period for 4-5 days where they vented frustrations about the entire scenario on the forum or Discord. Other than that, everyone left fairly amicably, despite the fact that they were very unhappy about how the whole situation turned out. There was no attempt to sabotage systems, start cheating/exploiting, use old secret keys to do naughty things, etc. - Despite how easy that would be for them.

Hundreds of community members would message Disquse, expressing their appreciation for what the original FiveM team had done.

Disquse also had conversations with former colleagues who had mysteriously departed earlier. What he uncovered in these chats only confirmed the entire pattern.

One of them was a support agent who revealed that he had been “kicked” in the same manner as Disquse. One day, his work laptop was simply blocked, leaving him no choice but to email HR to ask what had happened. He was told that he’s being let go. Firing long-term team members without prior warning, through impersonal emails, is extremely inhumane and clearly reflects the overall attitude toward those who dedicated their lives to this project.

Disquse recalled noticing this person had suddenly disappeared from the team’s hierarchy. He even asked Hirsch what had happened, to which Hirsch casually responded that the person had "decided to leave the team on their own."

This wasn’t true. Disquse later discovered that this person had been actively working on the backlog of support tickets. Many of these tickets reported PLA violations, but he had no way to take action against the violating servers – unlike before the acquisition. Despite his efforts, these tickets had to be redirected to Titanium, where they were abandoned indefinitely. As a result, frustrated users kept submitting the same reports over and over again, overloading the queue and preventing the team from addressing other important issues.

This was causing major problems, and the support agent repeatedly tried to get Hirsch’s attention. Hirsch promised multiple times that he would "take care of it", but nothing was ever done. The agent was then removed from the project.

Hirsch was kicking out good people who simply wanted to do their jobs more efficiently. It’s why FiveM support is so terrible.

We’re attaching a few screenshots from their conversation. They discussed a lot – everything from Hirsch’s constant lies to the Groot Gang.



The same situation happened to a documentation writer, fired in the same way without any explanation. They also shared their frustration over everything that happened after the acquisition.


You’ve already heard about the anti-cheat junior who was accused of “selling upvotes”. Yet, nobody provided any information about him, and no evidence was ever shown to prove that he was actually responsible for what he was accused of. He was kicked out in the same manner as others – ignored for weeks while waiting for a response, only to be told in the end that it was “the team’s decision”. Even the lead anti-cheat developer wasn’t informed about anything

This is a good moment to look back and remember the claims made by the Groot Gang and Hirsch – that NTA was treating the team badly. As we’ve already tried to state in this document, that was a complete lie. The only people who were treated “badly” by NTA were those who had tried to manipulate them – namely, the Groot Gang (Thers, Nimoa, Deltanic, Kane, Xinerki). Xinerki would later be “excluded” from the Groot Gang and also be kicked from the team due to their frustration over Nimoa’s incompetence.

Everyone else on the team had no issues working with NTA. In fact, most wanted to continue working with them. Ironically, these were the people who actually did their jobs, rather than just slacking off.



You can clearly see the pattern here – Hirsch has been kicking out everyone who dared to ask him to do his job. Whether it was about improving major management issues or providing better tools for support to streamline their workflow, he removed anyone who challenged him. Hirsch was eliminating every NTA loyalist and anyone disliked by the Groot Gang. One-by-one it was easy to do.



The original developers had left.

Time moved on.

Former team members quickly pivoted to new projects, personal or professional, leaving FiveM in the past. It faded into history for them - Or so they thought.

Months after leaving FiveM, out of nowhere, a "Senior R* Developer/Manager" would resurface To blackmail and threaten them. The story wasn’t over just yet.

It was obvious that something fishy was going on.

Why would Ethan spend all this time convincing his bosses at Rockstar to buy FiveM, then kick out the founder and the key developers?

Even if the acquisition was just to have control over FiveM and the playerbase, why does he retain the Groot Gang and others who are basically useless?

Why was alt:V hired when other referred talents, and promising applicants, were denied?

Why was the team blocked from progressing the project, at almost every possible avenue?

Why were these people allowed to sabotage other people’s work environment? Despite all the attempts to discuss it?

How were their fuckups tolerated, such as “an Open Letter”?

Why Hirsch is allowed to keep these slackers while Take-Two has to sell the Private Division and lay off employees from their studios.

And many more. There were far too many questions that couldn't be answered with anything simple or reasonable.

After being removed from their own project in one way or another, some of the team decided to investigate what the alt:V team had been up to.

Who were these “drop-in talents” that the creators of FiveM were replaced with?

The OGs had long suspected that alt:V was stealing their code for years, but had no concrete proof – just some common-sense observations and suspicious patterns.

The FiveM team members would spend weeks developing a complex fix or feature, only to see alt:V implement the same functionality days later. alt:V is a closed source project, and FiveM is open source. Many years ago, NTA did some binary analysis on their executable and managed to find some evidence. It was not conclusive enough to be actionable.

Although FiveM is an open-source project, this doesn’t mean the project's code is free for unrestricted use. The project had a license agreement in place that explicitly prohibited using the code in competing products. By doing so, they were clearly violating NTA’s intellectual property rights.

The former FiveM team would find out that not only was ex-alt:V stealing code while working on alt:V as volunteers, but they continued to do so even after being hired by alt:V’s new owners – without the stakeholders’ knowledge. They continued pasting FiveM and GTA5 code after R* bought FiveM, and even during their onboarding process at Rockstar; meaning they were violating R*'s intellectual property in the middle of interviews and negotiations at R*

Several screenshots would come to light, proving these facts.

They identify exactly who was stealing from FiveM, and what was stolen. Out of the five alt:V members who joined the FiveM team, four had been actively, shamelessly stealing code for years. (Zziger didn't actively contribute to the codebase.)

In software engineering, stealing someone else's code is one of the worst things a self-respecting engineer can do. Every single beginner software engineer learns the importance of Credits and Code Licensing.

They knew exactly what they were doing, sometimes they would change byte patterns to make it less possible to identify where code was pasted. Ironically, sometimes these slightly-changed patterns were broken and it would require later “fix” commits where they were reverting their “changed” pattern back to the original pasted patterns. They didn’t even test their pasted code before committing.

Here are examples of their blatant copy-pasting.



Here's the source code related terms from FiveM, just to make it clear.



We could continue showing blatant code stealing for hours, there’s dozens of blatant cases like above and hundreds of cases when they tried to change the code a bit, but still left original chunks.

To put it bluntly, alt:V at the beginning was just a pasted version of FiveM. There are some rare things that are implemented on their own, without stealing FiveM’s code, but those were developed by other alt:V contributors.

alt:V was not the first pasted multiplayer mod created by Tuxick, we will reveal some older attempts later.



Some community members have jokingly dubbed them the ctrl:V team. Some started to call them the PasteFX Collective. What name is better?

In addition, the current alt:V team members we’ve interviewed say that these individuals followed the same bad practices at alt:V that they did at FiveM: breaking the client, making unnecessary risky changes, and skipping proper testing. Tuxick in particular was criticized for being aloof, and not accomplishing much.

Now these thieves control FiveM. Stealing is illegal, and they showed a complete disregard for: engineering ethics, their ex-employers (who could have faced legal consequences), and even basic respect (crediting the Author/s). The entire time at the “Creator Platform”, they trash-talked how bad the codebase was, but at the same time they had been secretly stealing from it for years.

Back in September 2022, a hacker known as "teapotuberhacker" leaked numerous internal GTA6 videos online after hacking Rockstar Games. At the time, there were also rumors that "teapot" had managed to steal and sell the GTA5 source code. A few weeks later, parts of the source code were leaked on GitHub, confirming that someone had gained unauthorized access to the code (source). This proved that the source code was indeed circulating within certain closed circles. It was later discovered, it had been purchased and used by GTA Online cheat developers.

However, the source code remained private among these groups until December 2023.

In December 2023, the source code was publicly leaked, uploaded to MediaFire. The community quickly identified the leaker as "TickleMePickle" (X (Twitter) post about it) but how he obtained the source code remained unknown.

We’re going to reveal the full story of how the GTA V source code leaked to the public on Christmas, and who is responsible.

The alt:V team: Tuxick, Heron, Vektor, and Zziger (excluding Leon, he had poor relations with Tuxick), had been attempting to purchase the GTA5 source code for a while, after seeing the limited leaks in early November of 2023, such as the "roadpathgenerator.pdb leak".

They reached out to the individual responsible for the leak to negotiate purchasing the full source code. During this process, they were connected with "TickleMePickle", who was also interested in obtaining the code. Pickle knew people who were willing to sell it, but lacked the funds to purchase it himself. The alt:V team decided to pool their money together and buy the source code through him, as he provided proof from someone who actually had illegal access to the code and was willing to sell it.

The GTAV complete source code cost around €7,000 for them.

The alt:V team pooled their money and sent it to “TickleMePickle”. Pickle then purchased the source code from his contact and then passed it on to the group via the infamous Mediafire link. A month later, the original mediafire link that was sent to ex-alt:V team was leaked to the public by a member of their purchase group, along with the password.


As evidence, Disquse has provided his Discord conversation with Tuxick about the source code leak. The conversation is in Russian (with occasional Ukrainian words from Tuxick), but we will include a translation. You are welcome to have the translation verified by any Russian-speaking individual.



Tuxick, Heron, Vektor and Zziger secretly used the source code to further develop alt:V, placing their unknowing employer at significant legal risk.

When this happened, the alt:V team was already negotiating with Ethan about joining Rockstar. Just to be abundantly clear here - they were literally in-talks with R*, regarding employment, and during this, they bought and leaked the GTA5 source code from people who make and sell GTA Online cheats.
These leakers now work as “Senior R* Engineers” and make upwards of 140k Euros + Stocks and bonuses.

Do you remember when Tuxick began negotiations with Ethan?. It started in September of 2023.



2 Months after starting employment negotiations with Rockstar, Tuxick began the process of purchasing the GTA5 Source Code.

Disquse knew all about their involvement in the source code leak because Tuxick invited him to join their “group buy”. Disquse declined. Disquse was already working at Rockstar, and was trying to convince Ethan to get official access to the source code. Disquse had no intention of getting involved in anything illegal.



The FiveM team would not get official access to the source code until months after the leak. Cheaters had it for over a year, Tuxick and friends had it for months, the “R* Creator Platform” was still expected to reverse-engineer GTA5, even after the leak was public.

After joining R*, ex-alt:V received access to Perforce within a couple weeks. The original team had waited several months for access to the source. Ethan said this was to “build trust”. These people never had to “build trust” despite their shady history.

Rockstar became extremely paranoid after the 2022 leaks, and the company underwent significant changes as a result. The case was still under some investigation even in 2024. Disquse chose not to disclose this information for two reasons: first, he had a good relationship with Tuxick and didn’t want to hinder his efforts to join FiveM, following good intentions as described earlier. Second, Disquse hoped that the alt:V team could help improve FiveM once they became part of the team, which didn’t happen.

Rockstar is not really to-blame for letting them in, although they should have conducted more thorough background checks and properly investigated this case.

Original team members recall trying to relay information back to Rockstar around the time the leak occurred. It’s suspected this backfired, and cast lingering suspicion on them.

Once alt:V was hired, information began to leak outside of the team. R*’s plan to integrate Battleye was leaked around April/May of 2024, months before it would actually release. Then the exact release date leaked about a week before it launched (After the Original Developers had entirely left, and were out of the loop).

We thought there was no direct evidence it was alt:V, and we weren’t going to include this in the document, but then information about the GTA5 Gen9 update started circulating. ROME information started leaking as well. We found a lead.

We managed to confirm our suspicions through a person who is close enough to these guys but not as loyal as they think they are. According to our source, alt:V is in fact leaking. They were feeding this intel to their “closed circle”, which inevitably leaked it to a broader audience, including cheatmakers.

Months after being fired from FiveM, Disquse would share information about the GTAV source code leak to other members of the Original Team. Keeping the dark secrets of such a rotten person was no longer of interest to him. Original Team members, with no real incentive to keep this information private, talked about it with their associates, and Tuxick eventually got wind of this.

In a panic, Tuxick wrote to alt:V, convinced that Disquse was working for them. He started to threaten them using his position at Rockstar. He told them he no longer cared about alt:V, as he had moved his server onto FiveM. He threatened that if Disquse did not stop spreading this information, he would “stop helping” them with Rockstar. Tuxick was directly inferring that he would get Take-Two Legal to crack down on them. Disquse became aware of it when the unrelated party started to ask why they’re being harassed for whatever Disquse has done.

Tuxick cowardly deleted their entire Discord history, trying to avoid responsibility for his actions. But Disquse, seeing how Groot had done this to NTA before, this and took video records of their entire DM chat log, covering everything from their first message in 2018 to their last conversation in 2024.

The team thinks that Ethan should be aware of Tuxick’s involvement in this leak. Tuxick even states this is the case in his threatening messages, “Rockstar knows and doesn’t care”. However, members of the team remember facing intense scrutiny just for being around the leak. Ethan presumably keeps this information to himself, to cover up Tuxick & Co’s actions that resulted in severe damage to Rockstar Games.

The new alt:V owners offered an under-qualified person, Tuxick, a workplace with a decent salary, paid him a decent amount of money (that he never deserved because there’s more stolen code in alt:V than their own), and asked him and his under-qualified friends (Heron, Vektor, Leon, Zziger) to work on their platform with full freedom.

As a “thank you” for this, Tuxick sold the investors a platform full of intellectual property infringements. Then, secretly purchased the GTAV source code and started to use it in their own code, putting everyone there at huge risk. Finally, knowing that he’s going to quit for an opportunity to work at Rockstar, he decided to give them less than a week’s notice before his entire team’s departure.

This left alt:V with a big staff shortage. Disquse even tried to convince Tuxick to let his employers know that they want to depart as soon as possible, but Tuxick didn’t listen.

Disquse was not the only person he tried to blackmail or set up.

LeonMrBonnie, being an earlier hire for a more secretive project within the “Creator Platform”, had a pre-existing grudge between himself and Tuxick. They had worked together previously on the alt:V project, and did not like each other.



Tuxick believes that Leon “doesn’t deserve to work at Rockstar” (oh, the irony). Having this personal longstanding grudge, Tuxick baited him into disclosing information about his secret project. Tuxick pretended that he was already aware of it.

After getting what he wanted, Tuxick reported Leon internally for telling him that information.

Imagine joining Rockstar, and the very first thing you do is try to get rid of another employee you haven’t even communicated with during your work.

In addition, Leon also had an unfortunate earlier incident where he revealed an internal project name to NTA and others. Lots of secrets had to be kept between “Creator Platform” members.

Leon is how the name of the “soundstage” project became known to the public.

Initially, alt:V was a money-making scheme by Tuxick. The goal was to develop a monetized RP server free from any “platform moderation”, but eventually, they shifted toward monetizing the platform itself.

For their original plans, FiveM wasn’t an option because it didn’t allow excessive monetization (in fact, at the time, it didn’t allow any monetization at all). Another multiplayer, RAGE:MP, was also not an option due to Tuxick’s already poor relationship with its lead developer.

At some point, Tuxick realized that the “alt:V business plan” wasn’t going to work. After several failed crowdfunding attempts for various features, he didn’t make enough money, and both he and part of the alt:V team abandoned GTA modding in late 2021.

Tuxick then tried to copy-paste together paid cheats for Rust and other games, which just led to his main Steam account being game banned. After failing in this area, he attempted to create an asset-flip adult game (quote: "sex sim") and even asked Disquse if he could approach NTA to sponsor his "NSFW business ideas". Disquse never forwarded these requests, as they were completely unrelated to FiveM.

Their supposed "passion" for GTA and modding was easily abandoned in favor of quick money-making schemes.



In late 2022, this group decided to collaborate on creating a multiplayer mod for Cyberpunk 2077. This project was entirely profit-driven. From the start, discussions revolved around market dominance, competitors, and profit. They copied work from other mods, which is fine as long as licenses are respected. However, they showed no respect for the licenses when pasting from FiveM.

They unashamedly just used the stolen Cyberpunk source code without permission from CD Projekt Red. Ignoring copyright laws, and ensuring their project was doomed to fail.



There are a few Cyberpunk multiplayer mods available, but "alt:Punk" (the internal name for their project) never appeared anywhere. Despite having unauthorized access to the source code, this "talented" group couldn’t even produce a working prototype.

Remember their unfamiliarity with Premake? Ironically, Cyberpunk uses it, so it’s easy to judge how far they really got with their “alt:Punk” project.



This group of "passionate developers" abandoned alt:V, after realizing they couldn’t make money from it - leaving it in the hands of a few community modders.

Running out of funds, Tuxick applied to work at FiveM in early 2023 and asked Disquse for a referral.



Around this time, investors contacted the alt:V team, offering to acquire the project and team. The plan was to keep the project as it was, but bring back the former developers to boost development.

Tuxick immediately reappeared as though he had never left. Seeing there was now financial interest, Tuxick began offering the project to other potential buyers in search of the highest bid. He even attempted to sell it to FiveM, but NTA declined. In the end, no one else was interested, and Tuxick sold the project to these investors.

The modders who had kept the project alive after the group’s departure were unhappy about the sale. Despite working on the project after Tuxick and his friends had left, some of them did not receive their share of the sale.



This is how Tuxick treated the community that he and his team had managed to build. First abandoned, then sold.

We won’t delve into the ethical implications of selling a project that includes stolen code (FiveM and GTA5), violates licenses, and carries legal risks — especially when the investors were kept in the dark about these issues. But this situation should highlight just how little genuine "passion" this group had for GTA and modding.

While at alt:V, Heron, Leon, and Vektor were blatantly stealing and pasting FiveM’s code.

They also asked random modders (Ex: Transmet) to help them update alt:V for the latest GTA V build.


Long after the sale of alt:V, they would continue to deceive their investors, and left at the first opportunity to work at Rockstar. They could have warned the new alt:V owners about their departure months in advance. Instead, they only informed them a week or two before leaving. This put the owners in a precarious position with a difficult-to-maintain project and no development team. Disquse even told Tuxick to notify the investors as soon as possible, so they could find replacements, but his advice was dismissed

After speaking with several former and current alt:V team members, we learned that this group has consistently shown a lack of care for their work, stability, and security. The issues we previously described regarding their work at FiveM were also present in alt:V.

Disquse posted this message on Discord regarding the matter:




First it was “HighFive Multiplayer” which was heavily based on FiveMP. Some binaries are still available for download, and with a quick analysis, it becomes obvious that a significant portion of the code was "reused" from FiveMP.

However, there’s a simpler example that most people without engineering skills can understand. This is a description of the "HighFive.exe" file that you might find online. Now, compare it to FiveMP’s FileVersion as defined in their code – someone seems to have forgotten to change the version.


Later they were advertising alt:V using High Five resources.


After HighFive, Tuxick decided to collaborate with the maintainer of MultiFive, a fork of FiveM. Together, they started a new project called "GTA Orange", which was intended to be a complete rewrite of both HighFive and MultiFive but in the end turned into an attempt to recreate FiveMP’s code.

The result was an unusable mess filled with unfinished code and, as always, a significant amount of stolen content – this time from FiveM, once again without a copyright notice.

Here’s a "professional" comment left by Tuxick many years after abandoning the project.



GTA Orange was later remade into FiveNet, which was eventually renamed alt:V. As you've already seen, alt:V contains a significant amount of stolen code, basically a series of copy-paste projects stacked on top of each other.

It's also worth noting that alt:V was first published a year after FiveM’s OneSync became usable. They even showcased their project to the public just a few months after OneSync was made open-source. What a coincidence!

In the end, this wouldn’t have mattered if it were simply a case of inexperience or a "newbie" mistake. But Tuxick was always looking for the easiest way to make money – whether by stealing someone else's work and re-releasing it as "their own platform" or through other shady methods, such as working on paid, copy-pasted cheats. Instead of collaborating with other community members, he simply stole their work and found ways to monetize it.

His contributions to the GTA modding community? Approximately zero. The same goes for his friends. His past and present cases of blatant theft weren’t exceptions – they were his baseline behavior. Steal to make money.

Tuxick never abandoned his goal of profiting. Once he started making money from GTA-related work again, he began reinvesting some of it into his own for-profit project. He assembled a team, but the work environment was highly toxic – one person, a close friend of Tuxick, was allowed to bully and attack others (sound familiar?).

After joining the FiveM team, he gradually started moving his own project over to FiveM as well.



Have you ever heard anyone requesting a “fuel consumption” or “weather cycles” system in FiveM? Probably not – because there are already dozens of resources that provide far better results, many of them even free. People have been creating these since 2015, so there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Were these features so unique that they couldn’t be replaced by existing functionality? – No.
Were these features requested by anyone in the community? – No.

The real reason they were implemented was that Tuxick was too lazy to rewrite his alt:V server’s code. Instead, he assigned someone to “remake” these implementations while keeping the same API, making it easy for him to use without rewriting his code.

Shortly after joining the team, Tuxick and Thers teamed up on this project. Thers joined the development team and began working alongside him on the same for-profit venture.

This is a textbook example of a conflict of interest. In most companies, such actions are strictly prohibited because an employee might abuse their position for personal gain. To be absolutely clear here, they were working at Rockstar, monetizing their own GTA5 server, and using their “Senior” authority at the company to command others to do development work for their personal server on company time. It’s unethical, and should be against Rockstar’s company policy.

We believe Rockstar is interested in building a fair and profitable UGC platform that benefits everyone. We highly doubt Rockstar would be fine with someone misusing company time and money to develop features that only benefit their private business.

Disquse had been bringing Hirsch’s attention to this back when he was in the team, but his concerns were ignored. Now, they’re actually doing it. They are assigning these pointless feature requests – features that only they need – to other employees and contractors while ignoring crucial requests from the community.



Another conflict of interest stemmed from Tuxick, who registered a “roleplay” trademark in the EU and, in front of multiple witnesses, openly promised to legally “take down” “bad servers”. While we can’t say for certain whether this is legally possible, we did confirm that the trademark registration is real, and numerous witnesses have attested to these claims. More importantly, it didn’t sound like a joke.

We won’t dwell on this too much, as there were far more concerning details about this person. Just keep in mind – abusive people have no boundaries. Link: https://euipo.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/018959843

Barzakh, one of the “creators of GTA:MP”, is Ethan's right-hand man and the project director of ROME. We have decided to explore their “rich modding background” and investigate why they were invited to Rockstar before FiveM, despite never releasing their previous GTA V modding project, GTA:MP.

First, we will focus on GTA:MP, their GTA V multiplayer modification project, which was taken down by Rockstar Games in 2015 for "competing with GTA: Online", despite never being released. In contrast, FiveM's growing popularity eventually led Rockstar and Take-Two to take action.

Ever since the project was publicly announced, its marketing campaign has been massive. In their first Development Blog, they focused on showcasing the client UI, which was not yet functional but merely a mock-up. Comparing their development priorities to FiveM, by this time, NTA had already shown the first working prototype of FiveM, including its legacy synchronization.

By Development Blog Week 6, development had progressed significantly, and they demonstrated their own synchronization implementation, which they had built in just six weeks. It replicated the local player, but, as they advertised, the data was transmitted from Austria to Germany and back. While it already appeared rock solid, they mentioned that the synchronization was not yet final and could change.

In November 2015, six months later, they showcased their most up-to-date synchronization. This time, it used actual remote players in a network environment similar to the one mentioned in an earlier showcase.

While we wouldn’t accuse them of faking their synchronization demonstration six months earlier, we encourage you to review both showcases yourself and compare how different they appear.

From what we've heard from experienced developers, their earlier synchronisation footage looked more of "attaching a local "clone" ped to local player's animation playback and setting it's position locally as well, without any traces of networked replication - for sure, animation tasks looked more of game's scripting commands rather than what was shown before".

Analyzing their broader public relations and marketing campaign, it appeared more like a PR stunt. Despite this, the GTA:MP team never hesitated to seek funding from the community.

In late 2015, NTA suspected GTA:MP of stealing parts of FiveM’s code. The first thing the team recalled from that time was an old post on Avail’s abandoned blog, where NTA presented their argument on the matter.

We are including the entire blog post:


Avail, a very old and respected GTA modding community member later would leave this comment on the post.



Apparently, after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Take-Two, Barzakh and another team member attempted to develop a GTA V multiplayer modification at least twice more. In total, they made three attempts to create a GTA V multiplayer mod but never completed any of them, much like their other unfinished projects.

In total, they made three attempts to develop a GTA V multiplayer mod but never completed any of them, much like their other unfinished projects. ROME, a Rockstar-backed project led by Ethan Hirsch, marks their fourth attempt. If these claims are true, the situation is quite symbolic.

It also closely parallels the experience of ex-alt:V, multiple attempts at random projects that never succeeded, either in popularity or technical execution. The key difference is that ex-alt:V blatantly stole other people's code and even entire projects, whereas the GTA:MP team focused more on PR stunts than actual development.

On their LinkedIn page, Barzakh lists the projects they have created, developed, or contributed to. We have looked into all of them.


As you can see on their LinkedIn and the "Nomad Group" website, which we will mention later, they have indeed claimed SA-MP as a project they were involved in.

Luckily, the SA-MP client has an embedded "authors" list, allowing us to verify their contributions.

However, as you can see and verify yourself, Barzakh neither developed nor contributed to SA-MP. The SA-MP client includes a list of its developers, both past and present, such as Kalcor, spookie, and Y_Less. Barzakh is not among them. It is entirely unclear why this project was listed in their portfolio when it is an obvious false claim.

Additionally, SA-MP is a closed-source project. Not only did Barzakh not develop SA-MP, but they also could not have had access to its source code at all – except through leaked source code. Instead, they have been allegedly involved in the SA-MP cheating scene, causing harm to the project rather than contributing to it.


This sounds much more realistic. While Barzakh has never been a member of the MTA:SA team, the project is open-source, meaning anyone can contribute by submitting source code patches through pull requests. Given that they even listed MTA:SA in their LinkedIn, which is generally similar to CV, serving a similar purpose, they should have submitted quite a few of these.

However, the facts are straightforward: no matter where we searched – whether in the official credits list, which includes nearly everyone who has ever submitted patches, or in the project's entire commit log from 2009-2012 – we failed to find any trace of their contributions. Not even a single mention. We checked every single commit.

Once again, we have to ask: ?

Ironically, while Barzakh falsely claims to have contributed to MTA:SA, NTA – the creator of FiveM, who was pushed out to make space for Ethan's new team, actually did contribute to MTA:SA. Their earliest recorded contribution dates back to June 5, 2010.

Another former FiveM team member, UTIL_TRACELINE, also known as “ammonia”, was also removed from the team but made several major contributions to the MTA project in the past, such as the AMX compatibility layer. He is also listed in the official credits list under his GitHub nickname.

Overall, we’ve reviewed a huge list of contributors, including those with very few contributions, but Barzakh is nowhere to be found.



IV:Multiplayer was a GTA IV multiplayer modification started in 2009 and later open-sourced, which brought several new contributors to the project, including Barzakh. While they did contribute to the project, it remains questionable whether it is ethical to claim ownership of the project and its broader development, given that most of it was created by the original developer, and their contributions were negligible.

Another GTA IV multiplayer modification they claimed to have founded appeared to be a fork of IV:MP, with the original developer's copyrights "refactored out". However, it didn’t last long, introduced no meaningful changes compared to the original project’s source code, and was abandoned before its release.



Mafia 2 Multiplayer was first released in 2012, with its final public update to date, version 0.1b (RC2-1), released in early 2013. It is not mentioned whether they actually contributed to any publicly available Mafia 2 Multiplayer release or were working on upcoming updates that never made it to release.

Eager to investigate further, we examined the Mafia 2 Multiplayer source code, which was released by another contributor. While all source code files were marked by its appropriate developers, we were unable to find such marks left by Barzakh. Unfortunately, no git commitlog is available.

The website mentioned on Barzakh’s LinkedIn, which was tied to this project, is no longer related to anything multiplayer: https://m2-multiplayer.com (NSFW).



This project was created by the ex-GTA:MP team following its takedown. Despite receiving PR and development support from the game's publisher, it was plagued with technical issues, failed to gain traction, and was abandoned almost immediately after its release. Notably, Barzakh left the team 6 months before its first public release.

Important note: this should not be confused with Just Cause 2 Multiplayer, which was highly successful and developed by an entirely different team!

Just sharing some reviews that people left on this mod.

The positive reviews are mostly jokes or from people who want to support such developments, recognizing the project's potential.

There have been many discussions among people who anticipated a proper multiplayer UGC platform for Just Cause 3, recognizing its potential. However, as you might guess, the project was released in a terrible state and then abandoned. It suffered from crashes, poor synchronization, server lag, missing crucial features, and ultimately, a lack of continued development.


This is the only released project in which Barzakh appears to have participated in development, despite leaving midway through, that you can experience for yourself. You can also get a sense of its state from other people's experiences.



After Take-Two shut down FiveM and GTA:MP, the original GTA:MP team split into two groups. One of these groups, called Nomad Group, is particularly relevant here. Their official website (nomad-group.net) presents them as an experienced development team with significant contributions to various multiplayer projects. However, upon closer inspection, much of this portrayal appears to be misleading or exaggerated.

In this screenshot, almost everything is either fake or insignificant. We have covered some of these claims earlier.
There is no record of any contributions from them to FiveM. In fact, they were competitors to FiveM, yet they still claim some level of involvement and use FiveM's name to promote themselves.

In contrast, NTA (the creator of FiveM) was responsible for foundational work in the GTA V modding scene, including:

• Developing the first tools for custom assets in GTAV.
• Documenting and open-sourcing knowledge about RAGE functionality
• Creating a foundation that influenced multiple GTAV mods.
• (Many other points already described in Part 1)

Meanwhile, the GTA:MP team (which later formed Nomad Group) was primarily focused on media exposure for their project rather than actual development or contributions to the GTA V modding scene.



This was the latest project Nomad Group worked on before collaborating with Ethan Hirsch – a multiplayer mod for Watch Dogs: Legion designed to provide a UGC experience. Ubisoft even collaborated with them on the project.

However, the mod was severely limited from the start (a low 32-player limit, no proper scripting, and a lack of essential tools). Despite Ubisoft’s PR support, it failed and was abandoned shortly after its early access release. In reality, it wasn’t even a true UGC platform.

The failure of this project likely damaged Ubisoft’s trust in modding collaborations, making future partnerships with modders less likely. There are many multiplayer mods that, while not widely popular, are impressive either in terms of how well they function or the technical challenges they overcome within a given engine.

For instance, we could mention Nitrox for Subnautica, Synergy for Half-Life 2, or even Skyrim Together. Many of these are far from perfect, but there’s clearly a lot of effort and continued support put into these projects.

Nomad Group’s website and self-presentation follow a common corporate strategy: adding well-known projects to their portfolio to appear more experienced and skilled than they actually are. However, even within niche modding communities, they were never a significant presence.

Their pattern is clear:

• Attach their name to large-scale multiplayer projects.
• Claim major contributions (even when insignificant or nonexistent).
• Use these claims to attract clients and corporate partnerships.

Despite having zero successful projects, Nomad Group somehow secured a key position at Rockstar – under the same management that should have recognized NTA’s expertise instead.

The key difference is obvious.



Nomad Group has a track record of failed, abandoned, or nonexistent contributions. They lacked any passion for their projects, abandoning them one after another, even the very few that were actually released. They’re just fake…

While Nomad Group members clearly have some technical skills, they lack true UGC experience. Despite the false claims on their website, they have never created, managed, or maintained a successful UGC platform, meaning they don’t truly understand what the community needs.

This isn’t something that can be learned just by observing successful projects.

Every project they have worked on was either abandoned quickly, never released, or technically flawed and unsuccessful. Despite this, they somehow secured top-tier positions at Creator Platform and were invited to participate even before the FiveM team.

It remains unclear how and why Ethan Hirsch chose to collaborate with such individuals, but one thing is certain – it wouldn’t have been too difficult to see through their fake achievements and claims.

Take a look at this forum post: Celebrating One Year with Rockstar Games.

First of all, note that this post, which celebrates one year with Rockstar Games, was published on September 24, 2024, even though the official acquisition was announced on August 11, 2023, almost a month and a half later. This follows the same annoying pattern seen with Pulse posts, where the PR department, led by Titanium, failed to publish even one post per month.

If even "anniversary" posts are delayed, you can imagine the everyday internal delays inside of FiveM.

It really highlights the competence, or lack thereof, of Nimoa (a.k.a. Titanium), Groot’s friend and the lead of the PR department, and Ethan Hirsch specifically as a manager, who has been unable to resolve this issue for over a year after the acquisition.



Problems continue to this day.

Let’s examine some of the PR work here…


It’s quite strange to hear such comments from people who have contributed almost nothing to the project and have made quite-literally zero contributions to the Rockstar modding community.

The one time the team got together as a group to playtest, Groot’s group didn’t know how to control a helicopter or where Paleto Bay was located on the map. They never played on random servers to understand what the mod needed, and never showed any genuine interest in modding — neither now nor years ago. You can easily verify this by checking Pulse posts, reading their forum messages (or the lack thereof), or reviewing GitHub commits. Every single person who was truly passionate about this project has gone, and they don’t hire “passionate members of our community”, they hire Groot’s friends.


Again, this is a nice story, but luckily we can check the forum and Discord to verify if it's true or not. Their main "communication" consists of seldom small talk in offtopic channels from their personal accounts, not related to work in any meaningful way. In the best-case scenario, there are only public announcements.

Search the forum and try to find official posts from the Cfx staff who aren’t part of the original team. They’re so "active" in conversations that on the first page of any of these categories, you’ll still only find old posts from the original team, not any of these so-called "passionate" people. Feature requests and bug reports are simply ignored, even critical ones. The forums are basically dead and only used by the community itself. It used to be the main discussion channel for FiveM:


Were there actually any improvements so far? The Chop Shop (b3095) update was the latest one developed by the original team, and is the latest usable one. The Title Updates implemented by ctrl:V team remain the most broken in FiveM’s history. Server owners avoid TUs made by the PasteFX Collective, open server list and check any top server, you most likely won’t find any server that uses newer than b3095 game build.

These updates also took these people a record amount of time to work on them since 2017 – more than 3 weeks and that’s not even counting their “special early access”. The original team was implementing Title Update support within a few days and they were released in a way better state, with less regressions, crashes and issues. Even the latest update released by the original team was spoiled by the Groot Gang manager and only got delayed a week after GTA Online.

Is this what they call “improvements”? These are not improvements, but plain degradation, and it’s obvious to everyone.





As you might have noticed from our earlier reports, there are no good prospects on the support or enforcement fronts either. However, users quickly noticed this and shared their opinions on the topic.





The “example resources” topic is yet another example of incompetent management. The person responsible for these resources completed their work on these tasks many months before they were published, but their work remained unreviewed. For a long time, Disquse was the only one who provided a review, despite it not being his responsibility. The resources were published in the same form as they had been many months ago, demonstrating once again that management failed to handle completed work in a timely manner. Fortunately, this time it wasn’t related to security-critical matters.

By the way, the person who worked on the documentation and created these resources has also been removed from the team.



We’re not going to lie – after understanding the entire situation with Pulse posts since 2020, we find this statement really funny. The Groot Gang members, who worked on the same project on a paid basis for over five years, systematically failed to post a single update per month, even though it was their only responsibility. They continued this even after Rockstar’s acquisition and have now finally given up on it.

We guess this time it’s not just about general laziness but also the fact that FiveM’s development is practically dead – just like RedM. There are no major features; the only worthwhile additions are coming from the community, and even those aren’t being tested before release. There’s no vision, no growth, no progress. Tasks that should take, for example, one month to complete are dragging on for over a year.

At this point, we suppose there’s simply not much to talk about. Even if the Groot Gang members weren’t lazy, they wouldn’t have anything to discuss.



The platform hasn’t grown much since last year, but support traffic has somehow doubled. Don’t you think that’s a bit weird? This actually reminds us of something one of the former support employees mentioned. Frustrated users, whose reports had gone unresolved for months, kept creating more and more tickets. Even in some earlier screenshots, you can see people submitting multiple tickets about the same issues. We believe this clearly demonstrates that something isn’t right, especially considering the number of forum posts about unhelpful support

When the first acquisition details started to be discussed, of course it was quite scary for the team to even think about any kind of cooperation with Rockstar.

Especially given what happened in 2015, when NTA was taken to court and sued for making FiveM, forced to take down the project. Where they put NTA in court as a malicious hacker whose main intent was about cracking the game, profiting off it and directly damaging Take-Two and Rockstar. While the only intention NTA had was about building a project of their dream, not even following any “monetary” benefits.

The situation that happened in 2017, when Take-Two tried to takedown OpenIV, making some obvious false claims about OpenIV being used as a way to cheat in GTA Online. For those, who might’ve been unaware, it was never supporting online modding. Cheaters always used their own ways to workaround GTA Online’s security. Yet, they’ve followed the developer of OpenIV and started to send threat messages, not only in personal mailboxes but also to the employer of the developer. Later Take-Two decided to step out after seeing community’s outrage by reviewbombing.

The situation that happened with reGTA team, a group of talented and passionate modders behind re3 and reVC, which put years of their lives in reverse engineering and improving the golden classics of GTA series. GTA 3 and GTA Vice City were left on official stores in an unplayable state. The only way to play these classics properly on modern hardware was about installing a bunch of mods. The team put a lot of effort into doing the job that Rockstar, as a decent publisher, should’ve done many years ago – fixing these abandoned games to make it work properly. These people were claimed as malicious hackers with the only intent of infringing intellectual property and causing “irreparable damage” to Rockstar and Take-Two. The trial was terminated by agreement of both parties, each paying their own court fees. While it might look like a good ending for this story, in reality, it’s pretty terrible. The GTA modding community has lost both re3 and reVC projects, same as a bunch of very talented and passionate modders, who probably won’t ever return back. The court shenanigans are also quite different from Rockstar/Take-Two’s view, who only hired a lawyer firm and paid them, and a group of modders with no experience and no millions of dollars behind their backs, having to protect themselves in a very expensive and unknown jurisdiction. This is what these people had to pay for their passion and love for Rockstar's games.

The team, who were afraid of the project with such a background, of course has been asking about the future between Rockstar and modding. The team was told that, historically speaking, it was Take-Two’s legal department that handled modding. It was seen as a threat to IP and/or security, and not as a strategic opportunity. It was hinted that the modding ball would be moved into Rockstar’s court from then onwards, and they were eager to improve relations with the broader GTA modding community. There was going to be more outreach into the GTA modding community, and FiveM was supposed to be the start of that.

Well, it turned out to be a lie, because as you might know, Take-Two has taken down the Vice City Next-gen edition, and the Liberty City Preservation Project (LCPP). In fact, the LCPP takedown request came from within FiveM.



The Liberty City Preservation Project has been taken down by Rockstar after a “friendly discussion”. Of course, this isn't anyhow different from their previous takedowns. Except this time, some strangers who for whatever reason represented themselves as “FiveM team members”, were participating in taking down the mod.
It doesn’t much matter what lies were used during the negotiations, in fact it was a coercion to obedience. Any resistance would have ended with a DMCA takedown. After speaking with many community members and insiders, we do have information about the actual reasons behind all these actions, and we can clearly state, it’s the same as it was with the reGTA team scenario: greed, incompetence and not understanding how modding works.

While we could’ve understood if this attack happened from Take-Two’s side again: they’re probably still shortsighted on modding. It did not, this attack came right from Rockstar Games, and the Director of so-called “Creative Platform” Ethan Hirsch. Nowadays, every single action against modding is curated or consulted with Ethan Hirsch. The very same person who promised that Rockstar would bring peace and understanding in the modding community, who promised to internally help to understand this market and its strategic benefits for the company, ended up being the main enemy of the modding community.



These new-FiveM people may attack modding, they’re not a part of it, they’re fake, same as their “participation” in the community projects. The original FiveM developers wouldn’t ever participate in snitching. Please remember that if anyone contacts you representing FiveM: that these are not the same people who built FiveM, these are parasites who are abusing what the original team made through years of sweat and tears.

Note that FiveM is filled with dozens of Liberty City servers, which are streaming the entire map. You can find these servers within a few seconds using the official server browser, but nothing is done about that, probably because they’re making money off of it. The original team tried to discuss this situation in 2023, and tried to offer many solutions that would potentially make Rockstar feel comfortable with the official support of Liberty City on FiveM, but these efforts never resulted in anything.

At least, with this mod they’ve actually spoken before taking it down. We’re sure that the only reason behind that is how viral it became within a very limited timespan. The other very ambitious mod from a very talented team named GTA Vice City: The Nextgen Edition, was taken down in the very usual Rockstar/Take-Two style: DMCA’d their social media entirely without even trying to contact them first. Rockstar were hunting down and DMCA’d their social media, first YouTube, then Telegram, after that it was VK (their Russian speaking community). Under pressure, the team decided to transfer the project into the hands of the community. We’re quoting their announcement from their official VK group with a translation:



Yet another talented and passionate group of modders has been attacked and forced to stop their creative work. It seems that Ethan Hirsch is only interested in profiting from stolen and copyright-infringing content sales on Tebex, given how persistently he fights against incredible mods while turning a blind eye to the thousands of copyright infringement reports in FiveM.

Let’s not forget that he was actively advertising servers with copyright-infringing content using Rockstar’s social media accounts. He then allowed these servers to profit by selling such content to other FiveM users. This is wrong on so many levels.

At least now the community knows who’s directly responsible for such decisions.

FiveM is in its worst technical condition ever. Critical exploits are ignored. Feature requests are ignored. Bug reports are ignored. There are no new features to play with. The anti-cheat doesn’t get improved. CNL goes down constantly. … …

Most servers still use builds 3095 or below, 3095 being the last build made by the original team. You can check this for yourself on twitch.

Builds 3258 and above are buggy and broken, because they were ported exclusively by the Ex-alt:V team.

Here is a list of builds that the Original Core team ported, and how long it took them.

v2189 - 1 day
v2372 - 3 days (First Update that was not done by NTA)
v2545 - 7 days (waited for ros.dll fixes)
v2612 - 1 day
v2699 - 1 day
v2802 - 7 days (Removal of RTTI made this one the hardest)
v2944 - 2 days
v3095 - 1 day (However, despite asking, it took 7 days for Nihonium to press the merge button. See the commit time).

Ex-alt:V took 3 weeks to implement the 3258 port, and it was plagued with bugs. FiveM has never seen this broken title update support updates in its entire history. Streaming was broken, Singleplayer was broken, non-OneSync was broken (they were unable to fix it and removed it instead), OneSync had sync issues, there were crashes everywhere. On top of that, they were provided with 2 weeks long early access prior to the public release.

The CitizenFX collective always actively monitored the feedback after Title Update support releases and fixed problems as soon as possible.
The PasteFX collective, however, ignored problems as much as they could.

Here is one of the 3258 bugs: https://github.com/citizenfx/fivem/issues/2752



This bug is an issue that Vektor (alt:V) introduced by accident when the b3258 build was released in June. It was not addressed until November, despite it being a fairly obvious bug that’s easy to reproduce - simply join and play on a server for 2-3 minutes.



Disquse, who also made support for FiveM on this build for their own reasons, after having to leave the team, remembered that he also noticed this issue and fixed it within a few minutes. The update took him a few hours to implement and even this rough early build that he has shared with some community members was way more stable and finished than whatever FiveM has “officially” now.

It wasn’t alt:V who fixed it either, it was Nobelium, a brand-new hire. Just judging by the GitHub commits, Nobelium and Iridium are probably the 2 current best members of the team, while being the newest, and probably lowest in terms of rank and pay.
These are the only 2 people that put in work on FiveM nowadays. However, a lot of their fixes address the symptoms, and not the root cause. This is probably so they can check off a box in their Jira sprint, as management measures performance just by how many boxes you are checking off. Sprints can work with FiveM, but when things aren’t properly done, issues cascade into more sub-issues until you either patch every possible hole, or fix the root cause.

Without proper mentorship, their job is dramatically harder. Ethan threw them right into a toxic situation, and expected them to start carrying the team.

Despite the fact that the Ex-alt:V'ers do a worse job, and have no real passion for the project, Ethan has to pay them at least 2x more. He fires/stresses the cheaper, better workers - then hastily replaces them with corrupt expensive amateurs. A great example of his stunning management skills. (Did he pick that up at the prestigious Wharton school of finance?)

The b3258 and newer are continuing to be the most broken and unusable builds on FiveM, this way, no matter what server you open from a server list, you almost have no chance to see anything newer than b3095. The b3095 build was the latest one made by the original developers, and at the same time it’s the latest stable and production-ready game build in FiveM.

Cheaters have been running around crashing players for months now. Nobody tackles these problems. Not only are exploits ignored, the anti-cheat does not get updated, in fact it has been downgraded from what it once was with poor decisions.

The replay crashes introduced in b3258 are still not fixed, more than half a year after.



The PasteFX collective also breaks older game builds. No stability allowed. Many random crashes like that are ignored too, despite the BEGGING of the community for fixes.



Isn’t this fun when a company spends money on paid employees that are so lazy, the community has to research and suggest their fixes? These are not some hard-to-catch edge-case crashes. They literally have the source code now.





No need to tag developers. They will ignore the issue for more than a month anyway. It's no wonder people stick to older builds.



Their attitude towards security-critical issues also hasn’t changed since then. There are several active crashing exploits right now.



People BEGGED them to implement a fix. The community contributors yet again had to do the work of the paid employees and implemented their own fix. Their fix attempt was breaking other game related things, luckily other community contributors noticed this and implemented a better solution. However, this solution wasn’t merged for over a week, while the exploit was going viral! All the details were discussed in public:



They just merge stuff right away without even trying to test it.



Another Case:



In this specific case, the ex-alt:V member wondered if this was going to break backward compatibility. Those thoughts were quickly abandoned in favor of the merge button They are simply desperate for new features that the PasteFX Collective can’t implement on their own due to lack of a project to steal from. The community member who suggested this change clearly didn’t understand the amount of risk behind this, the same as the PasteFX collective member, however. By breaking compatibility like that you’re risking to break hundreds of different asset escrowed resources that nobody can fix except the original author of these resources.

Of course, despite many reports on the forum and even on GitHub, the PasteFX collective ignored all of them, as usual, so the community had to research and suggest a solution on their own, again.



More...



A community member implemented a feature, explicitly marked that he has not tested this change. How would you test these changes? Right, turn on the xmas weather and snow and see if there’s any effect. However, Tuxick, the PasteFX collective member, has approved and merged this without any kind of tests.



This issue was ignored for a month until a community member made a fix.



They broke things in every component.



These are not some kind of exceptions. Most of the things we’ve mentioned happened within the last 2 months. This is a pattern, same as the original team had smelled from them back then. The very little care they’ve shown to their own work, the same little care they show to reviewing other people’s work. They don’t care about the project, they hate it. If you take a look at older issues/pull requests you will see exactly the same situation.

We will give you a few examples how this worked before, with the original team.


A single 1-day acknowledgement for the issue, a fix deployed to production within a few days made by one of the OG teammembers, not community.

Or let’s take a QoL crash that was reported on the forum.

Disquse explained why the crash is happening and released a fix the same day, even despite the user making an obvious mistake in using game functionality.

Gottfried giving a first-day acknowledgement and making a fix.


Or another similar issue.


A Critical issue was caused by the Steam Beta Client update. Handled within a single day by Gottfriedleibneiz and merged within the next day by Thorium.



Alright, here's one last example for the document.



Acknowledged within a single day and fixed next week.

Meanwhile...

They've been breaking quit message reasons in the same way earlier, completely breaking many ways how people were handling player leaves.

Feel free to browse the GitHub repo while you can. Ex-alt:V has tried several times to take the project closed-source, so the public won’t be able to track their “work” and how they steal from their ex-employers.

The majority of the current team just tries to ignore these issues, and instead fabricate their own easy sprint tasks that are basically meaningless. If they’re going to act this way, do they really need to be at Rockstar? Is management going to do anything?

The breakage got so bad that members of the FiveM community took it upon themselves to maintain a database of broken artifacts (builds). None of the members of PasteFX collective were unlisting broken builds, even when it was mentioned internally.



We won't lie, it's just as sad as it is funny.



As we’ve mentioned earlier, even with the very little amount of features the PasteFX collective has managed to implement, most of them are stolen from their ex-employer. And it’s not even to fulfil their “yearly features quota”, it’s because Tuxick and Thers are now using Rockstar employees' work time to re-implement features from alt:V that nobody but them need. Why do they need these? To make a swift transition for their for-profit project that was based on alt:V first but moved on FiveM after the ctrl:V team has joined the FiveM team.


This is funny that the only two mentioned features were those that Tuxick’s personal business with Thers needed. Nobody has ever requested them, nobody needed them.



Tuxick continued his beloved strategy of stealing code. For instance, in this specific case, he stole code from his ex-employer, he even used his personal account for this, probably understanding what he was doing.


More than half a year after their departure, the original developers are still being contacted by desperate server owners to help with issues such as bugs, regressions, ignored feature requests, and unjustified bans.

In fact, FiveM is in such bad condition that it is the only GTAV multiplayer mod that drops trash files in the game’s installation directory. It’s amusing that this is considered an 'official' multiplayer mod. There is no pride or craftsmanship left.



Not only are these people bad at engineering and management, but they are also very short-sighted.


Their 'experiment participants' are a closed group created within an already restricted FiveM Release Engineering Discord guild. Reducing the test audience does not necessarily improve the quality of testing; in fact, it often has the opposite effect. They created this group in response to community criticism, with the main requirement for joining being loyalty.

Take a look at this announcement – all these empty words and promises look different after reviewing a long list of examples.


We've also used this text earlier as an example – they're so lazy that they generate everything with ChatGPT, putting no effort into their work.

Another interesting claim:


This is quite a fun statement given that the PasteFX Collective already can't provide transparency or development progress. There’s no “negative” correlation between “progress” and “being open source”. In fact, 99% of useful changes for the last 6 months were provided by the community, not by people who are supposed to work on this project on a paid basis.

Disquse somehow managed to provide good RedM development progress without bringing it to closed source. There even was a bit of help from Rockstar in this regard, they also didn’t say the project has to be closed source. They just said to be careful with what is pushed publicly, which makes perfect sense.

NTA somehow managed to provide both an insane level of transparency and progression without ever having source code access or debug symbols.

The ex-alt:V team simply just wants to hide their “hard work” from the public so it would be less obvious how bad it is. They don’t respect NTA’s original vision that brought this project on top.

Speaking of RedM, we are going to provide the latest blatant example of Hirsch’s incompetence and his attitude towards this platform.

Disquse’s latest attempt to improve RedM involved creating an official native reference and documentation website for RedM.

Documentation is crucial for a project that relies on the community modders, which depend on knowledge about the game they’re trying to mod. FiveM was in a slightly better position when it gained popularity – GTAV was easier to research, and by that time, some documentation already existed.

Red Dead Redemption 2, however, was a greater challenge. The game introduced numerous complex mechanics, many of which were difficult to understand. Some native functions were almost impossible to research without deep reverse engineering – something Disquse frequently did for the community. Not only was it more challenging, but the sheer number of new systems that needed to be researched, along with their tight dependency on game mechanics, hindered the development of crucial features by the community. For example, dual-wielding was only documented by Disquse years after RedM's release because it required an in-depth understanding of the game's inventory system, which had not been researched at all.

Researching the game was no easy task – it required extensive knowledge, intuition, and perseverance. The learning curve was very steep, and it wasn’t something people should have had to do on a UGC platform. Nevertheless, community members worldwide collaborated on this, gradually making more and more documentation.

At one point, an attempt was made to convince Rockstar to share some native and argument names – at least partially, for specific namespaces that wouldn’t impact Red Dead Online’s security. However, this effort led nowhere, it was ignored by Hirsch.

Beyond the lack of knowledge and documentation, RedM was in an even worse state: the research done by the community had never been properly integrated into RedM. The RedM community had to rely on outdated native names, invoke natives by hash, and use scattered websites that sometimes contained incorrect or incompatible information. The last natives update for RedM occurred in early 2020. With no official website to view the current state of RedM’s natives, the community faced yet another challenge – figuring out how outdated native names corresponded to newer ones.

Realizing that Rockstar wouldn’t share anything with the team, Disquse developed a plan to update RedM’s natives using the community’s knowledge. This alone would've already greatly improved the developer’s experience on this platform. This was a massive task, requiring multiple complex steps and cross-team cooperation. The plan included:

• Creating a tool to convert the hardcoded RedM native list file into the project’s format (with markdown files).
• Improving existing native generation tooling to make it work with RedM.
• Setting up a new native reference repository with CI/CD.
• Moving RedM’s native generation process into the project’s CI/CD pipeline instead of relying on a hardcoded file
• Ensuring compatibility with existing scripts. With over 9000 natives, some conversions could still be incorrect.
• Pushing these changes to RedM, engaging with the community, tracking potential incompatibilities, and addressing them.
• Developing a tool to convert the community’s updated native list into markdown format, ensuring backward compatibility, and monitoring potential unresolvable incompatibilities.
• Updating the natives list in the repository while identifying and fixing incompatibilities.
• Collaborating with the PR/support team to determine the best approach for RedM’s documentation.
• Opening the natives repository for community contributions.
• Implementing and hosting a separate native reference website as a temporary solution while the team decides on a long-term approach.

This plan was presented to management, including Ethan Hirsch and the producer, and was given the green light. It was not intended to be a full-focus project, as some steps required an unpredictable amount of time (such as monitoring), but still required a large amount of work with cross-team communication and coordination. It was worked on separately, step by step, starting in February 2024.

Disquse handled the majority of the coding-related work and collaborated with Thorium, who was responsible for CI/CD tasks and resolving Mono compatibility issues in RedM. Disquse spent many days monitoring and addressing compatibility issues reported by the community with each iteration of native updates. It was a stressful process, as regressions were inevitable, and Disquse had to resolve them as quickly as possible based on community feedback.

Disquse also created a temporary native reference website supporting RedM natives and worked with the infrastructure department to prepare it for hosting. Additionally, they collaborated with the PR/support department to determine the best approach for hosting documentation. Ammonia (later fired) contributed by performing repository housekeeping.

Overall, it was a significant effort that required weeks of work hours from various contractors and employees. Ethan Hirsch was fully informed of the progress, and the producer kept track of developments. RedM received its “natives” update, and the team was ready to do the final part: open-source the natives repository and host the official native reference.

However, at the very last moment (literally one hour before it was scheduled for release) Ethan Hirsch blocked the publication, stating that he needed to clarify some information with other Rockstar departments. He promised to provide an update within a few days but, as usual, continued delaying it for weeks.

On June 7, 2024, he finally clarified that Rockstar's security team had not approved the release. Disquse was disappointed by the decision but remained understanding. He attempted to highlight key points that might change their stance if discussions continued.



This didn’t change anything – RedM was abandoned without a proper native repository and still doesn’t have one.

We cannot say for certain whether it was Hirsch’s decision to cancel this project, but it is undeniable that canceling it after it was already completed was a terrible move for a manager.

Ethan Hirsch could have consulted with the relevant Rockstar departments beforehand to get their stance on the proposal. He was fully aware of the plan and knew that people were actively working on it. Instead, he allowed multiplecontractors and employees to invest weeks of hard work, only to cancel everything at the last minute – causing unnecessary frustration. Delaying the approval process until the very end is the exact opposite of what a competent manager should have done in this situation, with no exceptions.

FiveM and RedM are projects that can largely sustain themselves, and the current team simply reaps the benefits. So why is Ethan allowed to keep obvious slackers on the team while Take-Two lays off hundreds of employees from other departments (Gearbox, Kerbal Space Program, etc.)? Why not reallocate some of them to FiveM instead?

Although this article is titled “The Fall of FiveM”, that doesn’t mean FiveM is dead – it will continue to thrive as long as the player base keeps launching the game and having fun. However, FiveM’s development is practically at its endgame. If you don’t believe that, feel free to check GitHub yourself.

There is no real vision for the future, despite what some may claim. And even if there were, the team wouldn’t be allowed to innovate even if they had new ideas. At this point, it’s all just maintenance.



RedM, for all intents and purposes, is dead.



Despite Disquse’s hard work in bringing some of these improvements to life and making significant progress, everything was wiped out – including long-awaited fixes and features that took months of research and development.

As mentioned earlier, Disquse wasn’t even asked to share his work before his PC was wiped, making it clear how RedM had been treated from the start. The months of silence with no updates only further confirmed this.

However, on the same day he was removed from the project, Disquse shared very old versions of some of his projects that he had stored on his personal PC with the community, hoping that someone would continue his efforts.

The recently announced “RedM Asset Escrow” support has been done by the original team almost a year ago. NTA and Disquse was who researched and documented Red Dead Redemption 2 files formats in 2020, allowing “custom assets” to exist as a whole.

Later, Disquse completed the game code work for RedM Asset Escrowing. At the time, this was the final piece needed for it to be considered ready for release. However, it took Ethan Hirsch and his team an entire year to finally release something that had already been deployment-ready back then.







In fact, during their first meeting with Hirsch, Ethan mentioned that he was interested in RedM’s growth. Unfortunately, this turned out to be yet another lie.

Community members purchased a domain https://red-m.org which was leading to a forum topic explaining what happened to the sole maintainer of RedM.



As many community members had mentioned, Disquse was the only hope for RedM.

We’re sharing a few screenshots from different time periods reflecting the community's sentiments about RedM and the project as a whole.

Obviously, FiveM is a very hacky project. It uses thousands of binary patterns, hooks, and hacks that are nearly unreadable. The code is objectively bad, but by necessity, seeing as the source code was never available to the team (until Christmas 2023).

After it leaked, FiveM developers were able to port FiveM to the leaked source code in under 2 weeks - in their free time as a side project/PoC. They proposed many ways of integrating into the GTA Source Code, but Ethan completely shot this down every time.

Eventually the team was told something vague about how integrating into the Source Code would cause complex legal problems, as it was technically creating a derivative game.

Obviously, these legal problems could have been worked through, and Ethan really just did not want the team to create a competitor to the upcoming ROME project. FiveM is meant to be killed off some day, and the players are to be corralled, like cattle, into ROME where they can be more easily controlled and milked.

ROME developers have the obvious advantage of being able to build the source code vs. the thousands of binary patches that FiveM developers had to do. This makes development 100x easier. Before December 2023, the FiveM developers were reverse engineering everything. The team is adamant that there were never any secret debug symbols, or secret leaks from Rockstar. The only thing close being the RDR companion app for Android having some of the RAGE functions named in the ELF binary.

Given FiveM’s success, the expectations for ROME are high. With the source code, they should be able to make a FiveM that is at least 5-10x better in every aspect. We’ll just have to wait and see.

It’s known that ROME was delayed at least a few times since the initial planned release date. It’s unknown why it’s taking so long to develop. FiveM took years to be the most advanced multiplayer platform for GTAV, mainly because you had to reverse-engineer the game – something that can get very complex.

Rewriting FiveM from scratch on top of the GTAV source code would’ve taken, at most, a few months. This includes all the existing features. However, with Hirsch’s mismanagement, a simple keymaster web service redesign took over a year to be released, so it’s no wonder the progress is slow.

NoPixel has already been given early-access to ROME. They’re going to be the role models for the new platform. It’s understandable why they’re given preferential treatment, but secret clubs and deals go against the whole aspect of community openness that NTA started all those years ago.

Hirsch’s strategy appears to be one of monopolization, aiming to confine the user base within a closed ecosystem with no viable alternatives. This is inevitable given their inability to compete even with community-made projects. When a competing project maintained by a group of modders looks significantly better in terms of updates and public relations, there is no doubt that it becomes quite frustrating for him to explain to his bosses how this is happening despite spending millions.

Fully understanding Hirsch’s not-so-complex nature as an incompetent manager with no passion for anything other than his own benefit, it is only a matter of time before he extends his "efforts" beyond FiveM, targeting other multiplayer mods as well. He is not a "friend" to the Rockstar modding community – he is its #1 enemy. In fact, he is also the #1 enemy of Rockstar’s efforts to expand their presence in the UGC sphere

ROME seems to be Hirsch’s attempt to bolster his portfolio. Same as the Groot Gang, he is likely aware of his parasitic approach yet remains indifferent to the future of UGC and creative communities. The recent wave of mod takedowns serves as clear evidence of this. Moreover, he does not appear interested in expanding and improving Rockstar’s presence in the UGC market. Instead, he has somehow rationalized that investing tens of millions into developing a derivative platform – while involving individuals with questionable reputations and no history of successful projects – is a better approach than refining and improving an already well-established system.

The FiveM team has successfully built a project driven by the community’s demand for creative expression. They have collaborated with the community to demonstrate how such a model can work – how a business can coexist with players’ desire to extend their experience with beloved games. It’s not something extraordinary, many companies do this well for decades and benefit from it: Bethesda, Valve, CD Projekt RED, etc.

Instead of improving an already successful project using any of the many available approaches, Hirsch does not want to be the "second guy" on the list, overshadowed by NTA’s achievement. He wants his own project, where he can claim the title of the creator of a UGC platform with millions of users – conveniently ignoring the fact that this community was built by others and will be taken away from FiveM.

From a business perspective, this strategy makes zero sense and is nothing more than an attempt to extort money from Take-Two – funds that could have undoubtedly been spent on far more significant and worthwhile projects. How Hirsch managed to justify these expenses after acquiring FiveM remains unknown, though it was most likely through his favorite strategy: making false promises.

While it is clear that the UGC market is not a major priority for Rockstar, FiveM represents just a bit of what Rockstar could achieve in this area. We are confident that FiveM’s presence on Twitch has played a significant role in attracting a larger audience to Rockstar’s franchises. The path forward is evident, yet Hirsch appears uninterested in building innovations. Instead, his focus seems to be on spending company’s money on copy-cat projects, destroying FiveM’s legacy, and attacking talents within the community.

Ethan was given too much trust in building this FiveM department. He always was “well aware” of all the problems listed in this document. Mr. Hirsch found his type of people within FiveM (thieves, leakers, abusers, and parasites), and decided to team up with them. It says a lot about him, when he repeatedly goes out on a limb for these people.

Anyone could have headed up the FiveM deal, and done a better job than Ethan has. FiveM had gotten so popular that Rockstar buying (or suing) it was inevitable. NTA wanted to sell it, even at a fire-sale price. It’s a very profitable project despite not being monetized very hard.

It was apparent to the team that others at R* were also doubting Ethan’s management, and rightfully so. It’s not hard to pattern-recognize who does their work, and who doesn’t do their work. The most crucial skill for a strategist is the ability to discern talent, and put people into rankings like S/A/B/C/D along with deciding their department. You should be enabling those who can do good work and removing obstacles for them, not empowering lazy narcissists who get in the way.

This document was extremely hard to organize, compared to how easy it is to tell lies, or omit facts, to private parties behind closed doors. Lying is a strong tactic, not just at FiveM, but in general.

FiveM is the world’s most popular multiplayer mod, that’s the community’s achievement. It’s not Ethan or Groot who made it successful, and everyone can see that. It’s easy to take a successful project and ride it into the ground, it’s much harder to build success from scratch like NTA did.

We only hope that Ethan Hirsch is an exception, and unlike other businessmen at Rockstar Games.

Hirsch, despite giving everyone a very good first impression of being a professional, polite and reasonable gentleman, is in reality, just a typical covid-era short sighted businessman with no passion for anything other than their own career

If you’re his subordinate, as soon as you try to ask Hirsch to do something he’s responsible for, and take care of problems, (including those that are damaging a product you’re working on) - you will immediately hear false promises, lies and other evasions of responsibility. He would agree with your problems, he would promise to resolve them, and then just forget about everything. This didn’t happen once with the team, but many-many times according to various different people from different departments. Even outside of the team, we heard similar complaints from those who had associated with him.

If you’re his boss, Ethan would lie to you about the current state of affairs within his area of responsibility. The team multiple times noticed how Hirsch was moving all project problem discussions from public Slack chats to direct messages (such as An Open Letter discussion). There’s almost no doubt Hirsch is hiding a lot of information from their leads.

Regarding Hirsch’s leaders, the team never had a chance to speak with them or bring their attention to these problems. It’s unknown how they stand in all of this, but hard to believe they all condone it.

If you think about it more carefully, the whole story starts to seem suspicious.

What are the chances that Hirsch wasn’t just an incompetent manager who didn’t care about his project or subordinates? What if he did all of this on purpose?

Let’s outline some core points that you could’ve noticed while reading through the text.

Why was the Groot Gang continuously allowed to damage the work environment? Different people from the team were sharing their frustration over their management and nothing has happened about it at all.

Why were the Groot Gang’s obvious mistakes ignored? The way they put the project and players under unnecessary risk by ignoring security critical reports or other events that resulted in the “An Open Letter”. This damaged the project, and Rockstar’s reputation.

Why was the Groot Gang allowed to justify their actions with “interpersonal” relationships when ruining other people's work? When they intentionally ignored NTA during work and made it impossible for them to work, it was justified with “bad” interpersonal relationships. When Disquse came to Hirsch to speak about rule violations, Hirsch claimed it was “interpersonal” and scolded Disquse for this.

How was the Groot Gang allowed to be extremely lazy at Rockstar? This affected other people’s work because you had to wait for weeks for a simple answer, or for them to press a Merge button. They even gave up with Pulse Posts again because the PR team couldn’t make a single post a month.

Why was Groot Gang and their friends allowed to treat the original development team like shit? After the Groots and ex-alt:V’s had teamed up, they were allowed to do whatever they wanted with the project and the team. They forcibly pushed broken changes to FiveM every week, and immediately had much more authority and pay than the original team.

Why did the Groot Gang become “invincible” at Rockstar? If you combine all the earlier points, how long would these people have lasted in their positions if there was a normal manager, and not a corrupt one? They were allowed to do anything without any responsibility.

Keep in mind when we’re speaking of “The Groot Gang” in case of management, we mainly mean 3 people: Deltanic (a.k.a. Technetium), Thers (a.k.a. Nihonium), Nimoa (a.k.a. Titanium).

Other Groot Gang members weren't managing anyone. Xinerki was suffering from Nimoa’s management and Kane, from what the team remembers, was the only one from the Groot Gang who actually showed signs of being busy at work, but he was alone in his team.

There’s way too many factors combined that make this just a coincidence, or plain incompetence. Even if we consider the corporate political games that Ethan was playing, the amount of wrong here is at a ridiculous level.

Replacing the talented development team, who basically created this project and maintained it for many years, with incompetent thieves and fakers who had zero background and experience behind them also wasn’t a part of reducing operating cost. The incompetent thieves were paid way better than the original team, despite lack of any relevant experience, achievements and background. They were less productive.

Taking everything into consideration, it’s extra suspicious that Groot and Hirsch had started negotiations months before involving NTA. Reportedly they even had an in person meeting in London in Summer of 2022.

Even if we consider that Groot might have managed to trick Hirsch into thinking that his gang are the actual masterminds behind the project, Ethan has 100% noticed that there are some holes in their story. Throughout their time at the “Creator Platform”, members of the team remember Ethan subtly and occasionally ask if certain members of the Groot Gang actually accomplished certain tasks.

Corporate political games might’ve made it hard for Hirsch to abandon/lessen the investment he put in these folks, they were probably fraudulently pitched as some sort of modding-gods to Ethan’s Bosses. Even so, why wouldn’t he try to smooth over the problems made by these incompetent people? There were dozens of ways to resolve these problems. Hirsch constantly agreed that there are problems and he’s going to work towards improving the situation.

If he didn’t like Disquse, Xinerki or LWSS for their public posts about the problems (that were made only after months of ignoring the blatant problems affecting their work environment dramatically). Why did he also ignore other team members, like Gottfriedleibneiz, Fortahr, Tabarra, etc, after they tried to share their frustration over the Groot Gang management?

Where did this Groot Gang favouritism come from? It’s easy to understand why Hirsch treats NoPixel “special” compared to other servers, as it’s uber-popular and there’s a plan to use it. It’s not that clear what use he has for such incompetent and lazy people.

It also remains unknown what the Groot Gang had to offer to Hirsch to get such “special” treatment.

Maybe it was part of their “sweetheart deal”. Maybe they promised to push NTA into selling the project. Maybe they even had planned to bait NTA and get the price cut in half. Maybe there was something else. It’s all unknown and the only thing we can do is speculate.

What isn’t speculation though, is that Groot and friends acquired a very large sum of money while at Cfx, and after Cfx,they were gifted no-show R* Senior positions and preferential treatment from Ethan.

Whether it was real corruption or just some extreme level of incompetence and ignorance, does it actually matter when you can easily confuse one with another?

Even if we exclude the rest of the points, Hirsch is somehow allowed to keep objectively lazy and talentless people in his team, while Take-Two recently had to lay off 5% of their workforce and close their studios. While real talents from gaming studios are losing their jobs, the people who are incapable of doing a single post a month keep their positions.

Hirsch surrounded himself with those who were as close to him in spirit as possible: grifters, corrupt abusers, blackmailers, leakers, thieves and slackers. He allowed the worst people in the community to get away with what they’ve done against the original team, against the Cfx.re projects, against the modding community and against Rockstar Games in general.

The original FiveM developers were always one of the biggest Rockstar fans. Being a part of a modding community is already a huge sign of passion. You can’t just waste years of your life on a game without true passion and love towards it.

Most of the original dev team members started their journey from being a small part of the Rockstar modding community. They’ve been contributing their knowledge, research and tools to other passionate people free of charge for many years. NTA, following their idea of making a true UGC platform, spent more than a decade of their life on building FiveM. Disquse spent 7 years of their life on this project. The rest of the original dev team spent less, but also was a part of the community. All of them weren't just making money off FiveM.

The original FiveM dev team has no complaints against any other Rockstar employees, even those who managed Hirsch. It’s understandable that most of them are very busy people and taking care of GTA6’s development.

The team knows for sure that Ethan hasn’t been able to hide the outburst of “An Open Letter”, and his leads have heard of these events. Back then Hirsch did manage to “explain” this and get away from any responsibility. But still this does seem like a viable way for the community to protect their well-being and interests.

Unfortunately, with the departure of the entire original team, the community now has to do it on their own. There are no people interested in listening or working together with the community in the so-called “Creator Platform” team anymore. And even these bits from the original team of people who cared, are left scared to speak up about the problems after what happened.

Other Rockstar employees the team had a chance to speak with were very polite, frank and helpful. If they promised to help with something, they would do it. Communicating with them was one of the best things the team has remembered about Rockstar. Some employees still had that old school Rockstar-vibe with the classical types of jokes that you’ve seen in all of their games. Some of them shared their admiration towards FiveM and some of the technical things that the team implemented.

If Hirsch didn’t have a tendency of lying and giving false promises, the biggest part of the original development team would’ve left shortly after NTA was suspended, just like Disquse wanted to back in late 2023. Working in such a terrible work environment was painful, and despite their true love for their work, it got so bad that some of them wanted to leave.

None of the original development team members regret their decision to leave the project. It was a terrible environment that also was draining everyone’s mental health. However, all of them regret that they didn't try to stop NTA from selling the project. We know for sure that some of the current employees share this feeling as well. Some of the original team members regret they didn’t leave shortly after NTA’s permanent suspension.

The team is incredibly proud of what they managed to achieve – building such a large project, finding success, enduring countless challenges, and becoming an integral part of the great Rockstar modding community. While this is certainly not the last great creation from the people behind the original team, there are still many mountains left to conquer. FiveM and RedM will always remain in their hearts, despite everything.

In the end, no matter how bad it was, it was still an experience.
The original team learned a great deal from it. Some never imagined that people could be so greedy, pitiful, careless, ungrateful, or irresponsible. It’s also difficult to believe that such corruption could exist within a large corporation. A single corrupt manager can create an extremely toxic work environment for an entire team while simultaneously manipulating his own superiors.

It was pretty obvious from the beginning that this deal wouldn’t go well, but the original team hoped for the best – you should trust your intuition more!

Everyone we spoke to would like to explicitly say that they have no hard feelings against R*, and still consider themselves fans. They speak positively about R*, and don’t consider FiveM or the “Creator Platform” to be anything at all like it.

It’s important to distinguish that FiveM is NOT Rockstar! FiveM is owned by R*, and FiveM takes orders from R*, but they have much less Dev power than even Grove St. Games, and a lot of that comes from the GitHub community.

Even if FiveM was considered a part of Rockstar, it would be less than 1%, a very very small department and Ethan is the one supposed to be managing things.

Rockstar has thousands of employees. Don’t extrapolate the actions of FiveM to R* or Take-Two! Rockstar employees don’t get away with embezzling money, bullying their boss, or doing nothing for years.

Rockstar has actual world-class developers.

GTA6 is going to be good, go buy it when it comes out!

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