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Hi all and thanks for clicking this blog. This is my second part of the GTA V blog I started last week. This one will be talking about the online portion of the game, released a week ago.

One week ago Tuesday, GTA Online was released, 2 weeks after the release of the game. This was supposedly to iron out any problems with the game and so that family and friends of rockstar could get a first look at the multiplayer. I assume these family and friends are not video gamers first and foremost, because any person with thumbs could have found some of the problems in the game had they been. More on that later.

Firstly, I will talk about the online connection, or lack thereof for the better part of 3 days. Many, many people could not even connect to GTA Online for a long time, something that I feel should have been foreseen, given 15 million copies were sold. Rockstar posted in a blog saying that they didn’t expect so many people to buy the game. At this point I feel that alarm bells should have been going for the developers, as releasing servers to every player at once has had bad consequences before (Error 37 anyone?). However, Rockstar continued on their way and the servers were released.


Fond Memories Anyone?

For the people who could access the game (I was happily one of them), it was not much to rejoice about. No missions in the multiplayer world would load. For what had been touted as an amazing multiplayer experience, without the missions it was just another GTA multiplayer at this point. Not to say it wasn’t fun, GTA with friends is always fun. It just disappointed me greatly that after 2 weeks of playing campaign and being super excited for this new online world, it kinda sucked.

Then came server save problems. I suffered these multiple times. I lost around 3 levels and a collective 15-20k in money which, at a time when no missions were working, was a decent amount to have. These save problems originated from a failure of the Rockstar cloud servers to save the server data. Sometimes you couldn’t even connect to the servers. You were given a message saying the Cloud Servers were down, while your friends were happily playing.


Rockstar giving us their best Blizzard impression.

It was a rough first few days for Rockstar and its players, but things turned around. For a little bit.

Numerous hotfixes and a small title update were released which made missions playable and things started becoming super fun. The missions were really well made and felt like a mini campaign again, but co-operative. However, there came a mission which would sort of break the game (omg drama ). Earning 9,000 dollar for each completion and around 1.5k experience, the infinite replayability (new word creation ), as well as time taken to complete, of Violent Duct made it a terror for Rockstar. In around 90 seconds a player could mission the mission, leading to a super high economy and lightning fast levelling for the players, which probably wasn’t Rockstar’s initial expectations. This is where the thumbless testers come in. Surely the people testing the game would have been able to reach the level required to play this mission, realise it’s completely stupid, and flag it? Right? RIGHT? Nope. This led to my friends and I grinding out Violent Duct for hours upon end until it was patched a couple days later. This didn’t fix it . Turns out that Rockstar allows players to restart missions even when you complete them, so rather than going to the vote screen and pressing replay, you just click restart and you play again. Thus began the cycle of restarts. Now, I haven’t played for a few days due to Uni coming back from holidays so I’m not sure if THIS has been patches as well, but from watching streams, it doesn’t seem like it.

From the power levelling granted by Violent Duct, an even greater monster arose. At level 75, a mission was given that earned $25k and 4k exp per playthrough. This mission only took around 10 seconds, as you can just blow up the objective and pass the mission. When I watch GTA streams, the chat is like an open market for setting up lobbies for this mission. It’s like Halloween candy for little kids, they just can’t get enough.

Rockstar’s “’ol Reliable”, AKA the Cloud Servers, struck again, with the servers losing character progress, leaving a bunch of players needing to restart their character. This happened to a friend of mine, don’t think he was impressed


How I imagine my friend looked upon character deletion.

While I have whinged a lot in this blog so far, I in no way dislike GTA Online. It’s actually the most fun I’ve had in an online game ever. This mission are a buttload of fun to do with friends, even the ones not worth stupid amounts of money and experience. There’s also nothing like a round of 9 hole, par 36 golf, which I am pretty good at. I feel like I’ve spent nearly the same amount of time chilling and playing golf as I have grinding out Violent Duct, which make me pretty weird in my eyes. Choosing golf in a video game over infinite money and exp… Who does that?

My criticism in this blog is based purely on my experiences in the game and about things I think could have run better. I have no idea about coding a game or the capability of the servers that Rockstar own, and so I have no idea about the difficulties of rewriting the replay/restart function after mission or about changing the rewards at the end. Also I am not able to properly understand the situation of the release of the online world and so server failure comments are just about my issues with losing progress or not being able to play.

One silver lining of the problems is that the cash cards that I was worried about have not had an effect on the game as everyone’s economy is high enough to not need them Also, things are unlocked at certain levels and so even if you have millions of dollars you can only have the guns your levels lets you have.

That’s it for this blog. Sorry for whinging a lot this week but a massive thanks if you reach the end. Not sure what I’ll talk about next week, give me some suggestions and I’ll see if I can get anything going for one of them Thanks again

Exile5 makes these blogs possible by kicking my ass into gear and as always credit goes to Western Digital, nVidia, Cooler Master and CM Storm; you guys are making our gaming dreams possible.