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GTA Online Is Full Of Abandoned Modes (kotaku.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: GTA Online just had its most active month ever. It is consistently one of the top-selling games on Steam, Xbox and Playstation. It is always in the top 10 of the best selling games each year. The community is huge. Yet players looking to play a wide variety of modes modes will have trouble finding anybody to play with or against.
The problem, paradoxically enough, is an overabundance of content. GTA Online has a huge variety of things to do, including missions, races, heists, and deathmatches. When the game first launched, this variety was great. But the game has only gotten bigger. Now, after four years and dozens of updates, GTA Online almost feels too big and empty. The player base has spread out across too many jobs and events, making it hard to play anything but the latest new thing.
The problem, paradoxically enough, is an overabundance of content. GTA Online has a huge variety of things to do, including missions, races, heists, and deathmatches. When the game first launched, this variety was great. But the game has only gotten bigger. Now, after four years and dozens of updates, GTA Online almost feels too big and empty. The player base has spread out across too many jobs and events, making it hard to play anything but the latest new thing.
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Interested in a job as a target practice, car crusher or a fellow bank robber? Sing up now for the service! Thousands of clients are waiting for that experiences only you can provide. Service guarantees.. GTA Online citizenship.
players looking to play a wide variety of modes modes will have trouble finding anybody to play with or against
So, you're saying the problem is too many modes?
Slashdot online is full of abandoned threads too.
WTF!
Or is this part of the ongoing series "First World Problems: Maslow nailed it better than we ever could have imagined"?
What the fuck is a 'mode' in this context?
They need to select a few featured daily modes and offer some reward for doing those. Rotate all the modes through this, changing the list on a regular basis. That will concentrate the player base while still allowing people to experience variety.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
You can only play GTA online if you buy GTA5. the online is not stand alone and therefore not it's own game. even though Rockstar says it is. you can't just buy online. You also have to load GTA5 and go into single player first. lest on the xbox 360 as if you select to try and load directly into online it will just hang or give a error.
They don't care too much about abandoned modes as much as they do their in-game currency.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
If it's remotely a decent game, it'll survive and attract people to the different modes. ArmagetronAD, a Tron light cycles game, has TONS of different arenas and rules that you can play by and it's got players for each so long as you're willing to look for them. Why is Armagetron important? It's been around since at least the late 1990s and still has quite the following among those of us who are addicted to it. If GTA Online has a good following and the game is actually fun, the people will come. Of course ArmagetronAD succeeds because it's also open source so there's no retarded corporation to suddenly decide individual servers can't exist so there's that... We'll see...
When the game first launched, this variety was great.
This happens on all MMO games unless the developers do targeted promotion of old content. People will either play the newest thing, the most profitable thing, or the most entertaining (and typically popular) things. The rest of the content will mostly be empty. It's pretty obvious common sense. Just look at WoW for a general idea of how to solve this problem, if the developer wants. They did a decent job of rehashing old content in a way that was fun to play again even though it isn't perfect.
These kind of games need constant community building and manipulation at a social level to encourage playing old game content. It's been a while since I've played GTAO but I mostly remember it just throwing content at you inside the occasional "event" that was really just a press release for that new content. This isn't inherently bad but the results are exactly what you'd expect. People play the new content and then go back to their routine or another game until new content.
GTA online has only one mode: toxic.
When the game first launched, this variety was great.
I never really understood this.
Was GTA Online different to GTAV? Because it looked almost identical when I saw a mate playing it a few years after I had finished the SP game.
When I bought Grand Theft Auto V on my Xbox 360 back in 2013, there was basically only a racing mode (which I didn't really care for) and no one to play against, and that was it.
Is this one of those things where the release some kind of half-arsed game and then release another identical-but-incompatible game that you're forced to purchase?
I stopped played GTAO before heists came out (nearly 3 years ago at this point). Even then, it was hard to find people to do certain races with. For example, everyone wanted to do the Supercar races. Nobody wanted to race sedans.
I am sure that it has just gotten worse since then.
I had thought about picking the game back up again, but I missed the opportunity to port my PS3 character to the PC version. I almost bought it anyway, but I was concerned about exactly what the article is talking about. Not being able to do anything except the latest content, and then getting kicked out of groups for being under geared / having no clue what I was doing.
and other first world problems! The game you paid for, but don't really own has too much content, and has been kept running to long! Indeed GTA was so old school that they couldn't predict just what sort of abuse gamers will put up with. This problem has since been solved with purchased additional downloadable content and shutting down the servers after a few years. #MAGA
Just dynamically raise the rewards as less people play a mode and lower them for popular modes. Maybe display a stock market like screen and allow futures betting.
I don't play GTAO so I may be blowing smoke. But why can't a player select multiple games they want to play, then when the server can fill a game it puts the player game-match on hold and starts the game.
You know why all the other "modes" are empty? Because loading times are awful and the payouts are small. The open world missions (CEO, Bunker, Hanger, Motorcycle Club, and the VIP missions they all unlock) are very active all the time. the payouts are much larger, and there is no loading times.
The summary is so full of shit that I didn't bother reading the article.
I played quite a lot at the start of the release (PS3) and then played some more on the higher def re-release on PS4, but ultimately dropped it for over a year.
I've returned to the game and while I still have a fairly reasonable leveled character and I've actually accomplished most 'normal' missions in the game, I am having real difficulty finding anyone for one of the earlier heists, which is actually a shame.
There actually *IS* a lot of 'single player feeling' (or at least co-op feeling) content in the game, for those who don't want to just shoot each other (think, Left 4 Dead)
Many of the missions still have proper voice acting, good comical writing, utilising some of the B tier single player characters (Lester, Lamar).
If you're a fan of the single player game and of the gameplay in-itself, there *IS* enough there to at least push out another ...10 to 30 hours of gameplay which feels, /mostly/ like the single player. It's quite fun.
Alas, can't partner up for a heist, at least not without coordinating friends and that is a little difficult as an older, time constrained gamer.
It's all about 'quantity over quality' now. Nobody plays the adversary modes because they're unfun and don't pay out? Doesn't matter, saying we added tons of new content 'looks good on paper'. Content is so grindy it takes a full week of constant play to afford a single new vehicle? Doesn't matter, saying we sold lots of Shark Cards 'looks good on paper'. QA teams being told to spend more time flooding the database with minor flaws and wasting everyone's time rather than thoroughly searching for actual bugs? Doesn't matter, the higher number of reports 'looks good on paper'.
Red Dead 2 is probably going to be the last actually good game they make unless they get rid of the "bigger number must equal better, right?" ethos, and even then I expect to have a wild west version of shark cards shoved down my throat at every opportunity
Lemme guess: you plucked out the 'mind virus' by inhailing excessive amounts of paint thinner because the Jews told you not to do so and they must be opposed?
Racism means judging someone by their external appearance rather than the content of their character and actual positions. Now see, I don't know your skin color (although I'm 99,5 % sure you're a working class white male subscribing to Alex Jones (watch out for the gay frogs) but I don't need to know your color to know you're full of shit.
Here's a tip, as a white male myself, if you truly care about the future of our race: never ever breed, we have an excess of idiots to begin with.
Lots of games have this problem. The worse I've seen killed another game because it wasn't about lack of players. They only let you link up with people after connecting through social media. They somehow thought the average person will happily sign up into facebook, get a friend to do the same, then link up and play together. The result instead was that no one used the multiplayer mode in the game and the game flopped. In effect, it had no multiplayer.
And thus Fear Of Missing Out has been replaced with Regret For Playing Along
I was fully expecting some nonsense from a mgtow loser in response to this. Sort of disappointed :(
Never tried GTA V online, but it sound like it has the same problem than L4D2 has:
lots of mod, yet you can only see the game if you chose EXACTLY the same thing.
It should be like in the old days of starcraft on battlenet where there was "use map settings" for every single possible map mod ever made.
(Note: I haven't played GTAO for about a year)
The issue isn't just that there are too many modes to choose from, but that the matchmaking is terrible.
There's no way to look at open matches, and random joins are spread across lobbies, so that every lobby ends up with a few players, but never enough to actually start the game. If you want to join a lobby, you just hit "Join [Mode type]" from the in-game menus, and hope you end up in a lobby with a map and options you like.
With racing, for example, you might be joining a land race, an air race, a water race. It might have weapons enabled or not, the host might set the number of laps to 1 or 99, might restrict you to a certain type of vehicle, might not allow custom cars... You can see how many potential dealbreakers there are for players who are joining, and there's no way to filter it out. You just have to wait through loading screens until you see options you want.
And it's even worse if you happen to be the last man needed to get a game going. You don't even have enough time to leave the lobby before the impatient host hits start, forcing you through another loading screen to start the match so you can quit this game you didn't want to join. And in some modes, when a player leaves, dropping below the minimum players for the match, it will end the entire match, forcing the other players to go through another loading screen to get to another 20-minute wait at the next lobby screen.
So how do you get a lobby with the options you want? Host a new one, and add to the problem. But if you don't mind waiting 30 minutes for enough players to finally stay in your lobby long enough to start a race, you can play one race, then wait another 20 minutes for the one-and-done players to be replaced.