Rockstar Games runs through some of the issues that many players are encountering when they try to sign on with GTA Online in the latest post on the Grand Theft Auto V developer’s Newswire blog. A big one that’s now been resolved on the PlayStation 3 side was a studio-set limit placed on the number of concurrent users, effectively blocking people from playing completely. Other issues relating to both the tutorial and the main portion of GTA Online remain, and all known issues are being logged to a Rockstar support page.
For the tutorial, many people have been running into issues with progressing through the mission, either from certain chunks of it not loading or from an assortment of progress-halting error messages. We can confirm this based on our own time spent in the online version of GTA V‘s Los Santos. There’s no one reliable fix, as it seems to be an issue of traffic overload. Some people suggest clearing your system cache or deleting the latest update or swapping characters or even just trying again later. All of these work, and none of them do, as is often the case with issues relating to a hammered cluster of servers. From our own experiences so far, it’s possible to get through the tutorial and into GTA Online proper if you’re patient and persistent; just keep trying to get past whatever the game is jamming up on, and it should eventually work.
The issues don’t disappear once you’re beyond those first steps. Sometimes you’ll see an error when you’re trying to link up with friends in freemode, or when you’re trying to join them on missions and competitive multiplayer showdowns. Other times you’ll error out when you just try to jump into any form of GTA Online lobby, with or without friends. As with the tutorial issues, our advice, based on our experiences so far, is just to be patient and persistent. You’ll get in eventually, and it should become easier to do so with each passing day. It’s not like Rockstar didn’t take steps to warn its users that there would be post-launch issues with GTA Online.
As a result of the ongoing issues, the ability to purchase “cash cards” – microtransactions that allows players to buy in-game money for real world dollars – has been disabled. Makes sense. Some of the issues being encountered relate to progress not saving or stored vehicles disappearing (again, firsthand experience here on both counts). It would frankly be foolish to buy any of those cash cards right now, and in turning off the feature completely, Rockstar inoculates itself against having to deal with angry fools alongside the pile of technical concerns.
The good news is that GTA Online shows a lot of promise when it’s working. Many of the promised features – like co-op heists and content creation – remain promises for now. But the straightforward experience of running around the giant open world with actual, living people is there, and it’s filled with delightfully emergent moments. You can participate in a number of adversarial modes, including races, team deathmatch and “Last Man Standing” (a one-life-per-round TDM variant), rob convenience stores and gas stations, and generally just raise hell as you might in your offline game. We’ll have more to say here at DT Gaming about GTA Online tomorrow, so stay tuned for that. For now, keep watching Rockstar’s support page and let us know in the comments below how your own adventures through a multiplayer Los Santos have felt so far.
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