I'm really glad we won't have to worry about hackers now (at least for a while, since it's possible that someone will figure out a work around), but I still think it's sort of a dick move on PD's part that they did this out of the blue (but what can I expect anyway? That's how they do everything) without giving people a fair 'heads up.' Even just a week's warning would've been nice.
I didn't mod cars myself, but had a good few friends that became passionate about creating amazing tasteful project cars that were really fun to drive. And it wasn't just engine swaps, but people were doing whole chassis swaps, making cars with horrible sounding engines sound much better, fixing MR center-pivoting, shifter karts, etc. All that work's just been taken away. Yeah, one could argue that the modders were taking a risk and that it was inevitable that PD would patch it up, but still, some of these guys had legit hours put in.
This was a blow that GT5 didn't need though. The game was going through a resurgence because of this, people I hadn't seen in a while were coming back due to renewed interest in creating custom machinery. Hell, even a healthy number of new people picked up GT5 just because of this "feature" as well. Now, a lot of those people are gonna be closing up shop and I don't blame them.
I believe PD should've just added a new security patch for online and seasonal play so that people wouldn't be able to go online with modded cars. Let people do what they want with their garages offline, I don't think it's any harm at all at this point.
I'm going to be updating for sure, since I wasn't invested in modding at all. While I am glad that we don't have to worry about hackers in public lobbies now; It's still bitter-sweet though.
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