• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

GTA Online is a bit of a mess

Ludens

Banned
So I recently bought GTAV on Steam, after I played the sp on PS3 thanks to a friend to try GTAO, since people keep saying it's good.
After 5 hours spent on it, I can say this mode has potential, but sadly it's plagued by a lot of issues:
-HUGE loading times. Really, when you start an activity, loading times are way too long, I think I spent at least one hour looking at a loading screen.
-lobbies can and should be improved, because often you enter a session with an inactive player, you exit and you enter that session again, because the game won't find a new one.
-inactive players make you waste your time: if you enter a mission and there's an inactive player, you are screwed because if you leave the mission (and you do that several times), the game will force you to play with people who do the same forever. People can stay inactive up to 15 minutes, I think it's really too much.
-the way you take some activities and missions via sms is too confusing. There's a lot of stuff to do, but there should be an easy way to access each thing, for now the game feels like a giant Babel to me.
-Rockstar/s ban policies. Of course I never triggered a ban, but I read they ban you even if you mod the single-player portion of the game. This is just stupid, because there are a lot of good mods you can't try without getting banned. Why don't do two separate exes for sp and GTAO? So you can mod the SP game without getting banned from GTAO. I agree there should be an anti-cheat system in order to keep the game sane, but by stopping the use of mods...it feels like the shortest way to do that, having no care for the player at all.
 

Fret

Member
I got 300 hours of fun out of it by playing with friends. Yeah it has issues, but honestly I don't think rockstar had any idea how popular it was going to be and just had to roll with it. RDR2 multiplayer will be very seamless I think.
 
that's mostly my experience too. a lot of waiting in lobbies, than a 50% chance that the host is closing the lobby just before a match/mission is about to start

it's probably better if you play with friends (see second post) but alone it is very frustrating. every two months i get the urge to try the online mode, because on paper it sounds fantastic, but after half an hour i usually quit
 

Shari

Member
A AAA game based on a P2P networking architecture. Its a miracle it works at all.

Given the money they're milking out of it they could put in place some damn servers.
 

tuxfool

Banned
A AAA game based on a P2P networking architecture. Its a miracle it works at all.

Given the money they're milking out of it they could put in place some damn servers.
Yup. However those massive profits don't make themselves.
 

Paasei

Member
Only a bit? Lol, it's terrible online. If it would all work well, without interruptions, massive loading times and less cheaters then it can be really fun.

Also you better play it with at least 5 others or so. If not, don't even bother.
 

Ludens

Banned
Only a bit? Lol, it's terrible online. If it would all work well, without interruptions, massive loading times and less cheaters then it can be really fun.

Also you better play it with at least 5 others or so. If not, don't even bother.

My problem is I have no friend to play with. I tried this morning to play with one of them, and we spent exactly 40 minutes just to find each other in the same mission, and this after he created a lobby.
 

RocknRola

Member
"A bit".

It was (stopped playing it after beating the heists on both the PS3 and PS4) and likely still is a total mess. No thanks R*, you can do SP but your MP sucks.
 

Yarbskoo

Member
I got 300 hours of fun out of it by playing with friends. Yeah it has issues, but honestly I don't think rockstar had any idea how popular it was going to be and just had to roll with it. RDR2 multiplayer will be very seamless I think.

After having my GTA V mods repeatedly broken by updates that only really affect the online mode, I'd prefer they keep the multiplayer completely separate from the single player.
 

Savantcore

Unconfirmed Member
I went on it for the first time in months yesterday and I just had no idea what was going on. Dozens of notifications and icons and names for things popped up and I didn't understand half of them. Then I tried playing with my friends but it couldn't put us together for whatever reason, and there was a good 45-second loading screen on either side of each attempt. Just gave up in the end.
 

Mendrox

Member
A bit? :( I rebought the game on PS4 cause I wanted to play Multiplayer there.

The loading times are a crime and I never touched it again after two hours of trying shit. Fucking horrible.
 
I still play it, it works fine for me. One big loading screen to get in but after that, it's fine. I guess I'm just lucky? This is on PC, by the way.
 

E92 M3

Member
It's fun to troll people in free roam. When the game came out it was even more of a wild west type environment which I miss a lot. Now it's a bit too structured for my tastes.
 

breakfuss

Member
Yes it is a bit of a mess. But I still maintain that heists is some of THE most fun I've had playing online...ever. Just need to run it with people you know. GAF was a great place to link up but not sure what the community is looking like now.
 

Putosaure

Member
Load times are a pain, but it's okay. What I don't like is when I choose to Quit the game in an activity, it loads free roam mode instead of.... making me quit the game. It adds an annoying step.
 

Z3M0G

Member
...but by stopping the use of mods...it feels like the shortest way to do that, having no care for the player at all.

What % of PC players actually use mods? I would assume it is only a small elite portion... not the general mass of the players.

If there is even a small chance of using mods to gain an advantage in the online mode, I say block them completely.
 
It's almost pointless playing it solo, but with friends it's amazing, and the Heists are some of the best co-op experiences you'll find. At this point GTAO has so much more to do than the SP that the SP game feels a bit lifeless by comparison.

The loading times do suck arse though, and it's nearly impossible to play most of the specific (non-mission or heist) game modes with randoms, due to the weird way Rockstar have set the matchmaking systems up. I really hope that for RDR2 Rockstar go back to the drawing board when it comes to devising a matchmaking philosophy for various game modes. In GTAO they honestly don't seem to care that with every update they just introduce new game modes that will be unplayable a week or two after release.
 
A bit of a mess is an understatement, if anything. It can be really fun, but the UI for finding missions is horrible, it defaulting to the open world setting multiplayer environment is a drag and I just wish it had some kind of server browser without having to jump through so many hoops. I played it frequently for maybe a week and really enjoyed the Cunning Stunts mode, but getting into most other game modes was a pain and most of them weren't even populated. I really wanted to play Top Fun, but the mode was empty.

EDIT - all on PS4, by the way.
 
Match making is still worthless just as most jobs are because the incentive to do them is almost non-existent and even if they were again, the match making is still worthless.
 
Match making is still worthless just as most jobs are because the incentive to do them is almost non-existent and even if they were again, the match making is still worthless.
It's not so much that the matchmaking systems don't work, it's more that they don't funnel players into the game modes.

If you're the only person trying to play a game mode, then it doesn't matter if the game has the most mind-blowingly amazing matchmaking systems on the planet... because the matchmaking system can't force people to play game modes, and if there's nobody else trying to play that game mode, you're shit out of luck.

The problem isn't really the matchmaking systems, it's the fact that nobody is playing those game modes. Whenever a game mode has double RP and GTA$, the matchmaking works properly because people actually try and play those modes.
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Still, huh? I tried playing it in the early days, and it was utter shit. Tried a few times, gave up, and never went back.
 
My friend and I got it recently. Honestly as you say it has a lot of potential but they have some weird fucking design choices that kind of ruin it:

- locked content behind levels: when you start the thing you are immediately turned off because so much shit is not accessible until you level up more. Want to play tennis/golf? You have to level up more. Want to spawn planes in the airport? You have to level up more.

- mission delivery structure: I have no way to confirm this but I'm pretty sure I'm correct. When I first started this game back in the xbox 360 era you could call your npc contacts to give you missions/cars to pick up. Now it's all under a daily timer. Shit unlocks at different hours. Also if you don't want to play pvp multiplayer games then you're fucked because that's 90% of the shit being offered now.

- blatant f2p feel when it's not f2p: this one bothers me the most. It's really hard to make money in this game. Shit doesn't give you enough and all of the nice crap is way too expensive. I was barely able to afford an apartment. Buying a nice car is completely out of my budget right now. They want you to buy the shark cards. You can't do shit without money.

- playing with friends is a pain: this one is the most surprising and something they haven't fixed. When a friend joins your server you don't get a highlighted marker on your mini map/map. You have to highlight them yourself. It doesn't tell you specifically "x friend joined". There's no way to use the quick GPS function to go to them. And finally if you do missions with them the likelyhood you end up on a different free roam server are high. Now you have to rejoin them again.


You would think Rockstar being a AAA dev wouldn't do so much of shit or would have made it friendlier for people who just want to fuck around and do co op missions with friends. But nope.
 

Sephimoth

Member
It has potential but it's kinda frustrating. Mainly load times, but I'd kinda also like it if other players didn't show on free roam map unless 1) they've just shot (like COD/BF) or 2) they're in your party/friends
 
- locked content behind levels: when you start the thing you are immediately turned off because so much shit is not accessible until you level up more. Want to play tennis/golf? You have to level up more. Want to spawn planes in the airport? You have to level up more.

Oh god, you've just reminded me of that. I grinded a lot in Cunning Stunts just because I wanted to play Top Fun, and when I finally reached the required level no-one was playing it anyway!
 
Yeah the loading times are absolute shit, putting it on an SSD helps a little but not much.

Its really fun when playing with 1-3 other friends, playing solo it pretty much sucks sadly. With friends however you can have some AMAZING fun in it, since the tools it provides are crazy especially with some of the custom stuff people have built.

Just free roam stunts, or doing the long heists PVE missions, or just mayhem PVP it can really bring out crazy emergent scenarios.

I mean, this is from a stream 2 years ago...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPyroNWIk1M
 
I actually gave GTAO a try again and I found myself doing a Stunt Race playlist with at least 7 other people. It was fun, but once the playlist was done and we all went back to free roaming I got what reminded me of why I really stopped trying GTAO. The sudden problem where everyone 'leaves' but it turns out that you did. Which is odd since I never had a disconnect during the Stunt Races.
 

Anth0ny

Member
the fact that you get banned from online by doing a SP mod is annoying. I have two separate installations of GTA V on my hard drive for that very reason... mother fucker takes up like 130GB total ; _ ;
 

Cepheus

Member
So I recently bought GTAV on Steam, after I played the sp on PS3 thanks to a friend to try GTAO, since people keep saying it's good.
After 5 hours spent on it, I can say this mode has potential, but sadly it's plagued by a lot of issues:
-HUGE loading times. Really, when you start an activity, loading times are way too long, I think I spent at least one hour looking at a loading screen.
-lobbies can and should be improved, because often you enter a session with an inactive player, you exit and you enter that session again, because the game won't find a new one.
-inactive players make you waste your time: if you enter a mission and there's an inactive player, you are screwed because if you leave the mission (and you do that several times), the game will force you to play with people who do the same forever. People can stay inactive up to 15 minutes, I think it's really too much.
-the way you take some activities and missions via sms is too confusing. There's a lot of stuff to do, but there should be an easy way to access each thing, for now the game feels like a giant Babel to me.
-Rockstar/s ban policies. Of course I never triggered a ban, but I read they ban you even if you mod the single-player portion of the game. This is just stupid, because there are a lot of good mods you can't try without getting banned. Why don't do two separate exes for sp and GTAO? So you can mod the SP game without getting banned from GTAO. I agree there should be an anti-cheat system in order to keep the game sane, but by stopping the use of mods...it feels like the shortest way to do that, having no care for the player at all.

I think they only ban you for using mods in singleplayer if you forget to disable them before using Online. Otherwise, you should be fine.

I have a love/hate relationship with GTA Online. On one hand, the world is enormous, there's always something to do and it's great to play with friends. On the other hand, bad load times and general connectivity issues. Also, the amount of hackers on Online that run around unbanned is ridiculous. You are guaranteed to find at least one hacker on every single server you join, and that is no exaggeration.

And because of how ridiculously expensive everything is because Rockstar wants you to buy shark cards (£100 for a plane? Really?), it's like you need to hack to get more money to get anywhere. The most expensive cars are about 2 million GTA dollars, and you only get about 10-20k for coming first in a race with a full lobby of people. The most expensive thing you can buy is that plane for 10 million. Again, impossible to save up for without spending stupid amounts of real money or accepting money off of hackers. Custom cars are beyond broken in races and rammers are commonplace, so if catch-up and slipstream aren't turned on and someone makes you spin out, it's not possible to catch up and you'll stay in last place for the whole race. I don't even play deathmatch because I know that half the people in the lobby will have infinite health/ammo etc. At least Rockstar just ban the hackers who give out free money and not people who accept it off of them...
 

Nikana

Go Go Neo Rangers!
I tried going back few months ago, and maybe I'm dense but I couldn't figure out "what to do." They added all that content by I have no clue where it is.
 
What really bothers me is when you get disconnected from a Lobby, you see a everyone leave and it's just you on your own, it's really annoying at times, especially if you were in a Lobby that was really fun.

What really annoys me though is that you can't rejoin lobbies at all, it would be an awesome feature to make the situation a lot more convenient.

A bit? :( I rebought the game on PS4 cause I wanted to play Multiplayer there.

The loading times are a crime and I never touched it again after two hours of trying shit. Fucking horrible.

The loading times of the current gen version is a godsend compared to the last gen version, goddamn!
It would take like 5 or 10 minutes just to load a game mode lobby, and then occasionally get stuck.
Now it's like a couple of seconds or a 1 minute or 2 at the most.

The biggest problem is how slow it is to get gta cash and how much it promotes buying shark cards.

The new adversary mode "Lost vs Damned" pays really well, there's two teams, Angels and Demons, Angels get guns in the morning and can score by killing the other team, Demons get them at night and can score during that time. It's pretty fun and the winners get 10K per round, and something like 50K for winning a match.
 
It's a terrible, disorganized mess.

Even in spite of the horrible design, it can still be fun. There can be moments in this game that aren't possible in any other game, but just the basics of playing matches with other people are infuriatingly terrible becaus of the horrible design.

Oh god, you've just reminded me of that. I grinded a lot in Cunning Stunts just because I wanted to play Top Fun, and when I finally reached the required level no-one was playing it anyway!

Yep. Some of the best, most original game modes in any multiplayer game ever, but because the game was so poorly designed, nobody wants to play them. If they're not 'grindable' then nobody will play a mode no matter how fun it is, and people who want to play the fun modes will not be able to find other people who want to play. With millions of active players, it's impossible that nobody wants to play these modes... There have to be at least 8 people looking to play them somewhere in the world, but because of the poor design of the "invite only" SMS/phone message system, lobbies for modes like this will never fill up.

Other modes liek the 16 player, 4-team, 3v3 games are brilliant, stealing drugs, fighting against each other, some people in choppers some on bikes, some in sports cars, etc. But like Top Fun, because you can't grind them for payouts or XP, most people don't play them, and even the people that do play them don't know that you're playing them. What you end up getting is a never ending lobby invite screen, nobody in yoru game, and then you MIGHT get 3/16 players into the game, the game launches, and then you find yourself on a 2 vs 1 or 3 vs 1 because there's no system that makes equal teams.

BUT AT LEAST YOU CAN SPEND $25 (Real dollars) ON UNDER CARRIAGE LIGHTS FOR YOUR LO RIDER

Even worse, when they do make something a featured play list, like doing a 2x RP and 2x GTA$ reward, it gets players in it, but the only people who play are people who want to grind the mode for XP and $. In the escort games, for instance, it's a 10minute escort match with 8 players. 6 of them switch to 1 team, 1 of them stays on the other team, and 1 person is the escort. Everybody moves to the finish line and then just puts their controller down and stands there for 9minutes. Then at 9:30 the escort cross into the goal... Nobody shoots anybody, nobody does anything. They just stand there for 10 minutes. Why? Because you can get $20,000 and 800 RP for a 10 minute game, and so people will do this over and over and over making $140,000/hr, and fuck off to anybody who wants to actually play the mode.
 
The new adversary mode "Lost vs Damned" pays really well, there's two teams, Angels and Demons, Angels get guns in the morning and can score by killing the other team, Demons get them at night and can score during that time. It's pretty fun and the winners get 10K per round, and something like 50K for winning a match.

Here's the problem with this... It's that the majority of lobbies, people are grinding the mode. It's currently a 2x payout because of halloween, and the majority of players are entering the mode and trying to make the games last as long as possible and go as many rounds as possible to grind money and RP, not actually trying to win until the final round.

The result is a like 22 minutes of doing nothing, and then 60 seconds of trying to actually win.

Every mode breaks down like this.
 

Saganator

Member
Empty server is the best time to do some of the CEO missions :) I like GTAO, it definitely has its flaws. If they did a better job of incentivising missions and funneling players to them, it would be 5x better. I like the changes they've made to Free Roam though, if you get into a lobby where CEOs and gang bosses are active, it can be a load of fun. On their next go around, I hope they continue to make Free Roam more compelling to stay in and either offer way fewer missions or none at all.

One thing I really wish they'd do is offer some kind of civilian and cop modes in free roam. Be a truck driver or something and you can call cops (AI or players who decide to play as a cop) when people fuck with you.

Loading times are helped immensely with an SSD.
 

Calabi

Member
It's amazing what you can get away with by just being Rockstar. A shitty mess of a barely functional thing and people still spend millions on it.
 

Vuze

Member
I never understood how people got banned from GTAOfor using SP mods.

Scripthook automatically exits the game if you try to access GTA:O (unless you have the unofficial, patched version - in which case you should be very well aware of the risks...). Do you inject your mods directly into the original archive files and go online with those or what?
Before OpenIVs mod folder approach popped up, I simply put them in the update.rpf. File has a load order higher than the huge original rpfs and can be comfortably swapped from your desktop with like two lines of batch/powershell code.

Used a heavily modded version of GTAV during my singleplayer playthrough with tons of nice scripts and rpf modifications and my GTAO character is healthy and prosper at level 60sth. Have been swapping between modded SP and GTAO on a regular basis too. I agree they could have added a sanity check for rpfs though before entering GTAO. I imagine less versed players simply don't know that they get banned for that since it's not necessarily cheating or anything.
Though I was in a online modder lobby last night and I fear they might've dropped some money because I can't remember having like 400k on hand. But maybe it was just from the Lost and Damned matches before.

Anywaaaay, I agree. The whole structure of GTAO is a big clusterfuck with all the loading screens and horribly cluttered UI. It's still very enjoyable with friends however, though I hope for some more exotic updates in the future. The rumored (but probably just fake) hunting DLC would be sweet.
 
The load times are a direct result of it trying to find suitable peers to connect to since it's a P2P game. I have no idea why a company with the resources Rockstar has would opt for P2P networking, especially in the age where it's much cheaper and easier to spool up instances like the way other games match make/host.
 

Falchion

Member
It's fun but the crazy load times and the fact that it would never drop me into the same world with my friends when we finished an activity pushed me away. I'd come back for more heists though.
 

renzolama

Member
It has some really major design flaws regardless of how you feel about cheating, content quality, etc; the combination of matchmaking bugs and load times made it a terrible experience for me. I have it installed on SSD with a 4790k and 16GB RAM and it takes minutes to load in and out of every matchmaking instance I attempt to join (due to network structure and matchmaking algorithm as someone else already stated). I had fun with most of the content, but I'm not someone who is willing to spend 1/3 of my gaming time watching a loading screen.

Edit: I guess they needed more of The Benz
 
Top Bottom