Rockstar: Missing GTA Online Characters Are Gone Forever

Karloff

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Rockstar: Missing GTA Online Characters Are Gone Forever



The cash stimulus is Rockstar's way of saying 'here's some money.'

If your Grand Theft Auto Online toon vanished, as if it had been eaten by a Grue, and you were hoping to get it back, Rockstar says No. Any characters or character ranks that have been lost are gone for good and all, and the cash stimulus [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/128609-Rockstar-Creates-GTA-Online-500k-In-Game-Stimulus-Package] announced last week is Rockstar's way of making up the difference. Rockstar remains committed "to fine-tune the game to address any and all issues," and it asks players to keep an eye on the Rockstar Support site for further information.

An upcoming patch [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/128566-Rockstar-PS3-Patch-Fixes-Many-GTA-Online-Issues] should fix the vehicle loss issue, and there's more Online content to come, including Heists. But if you were hoping Rockstar was going to say when Heists and other content will become available, Rockstar doesn't know just yet. It hopes to have a confirmed release date soon. Some players are still reporting cloud server issues and having difficulty getting online, to which Rockstar says "we are still working on smoothing out the early technical issues with GTA Online and things should be getting much better now."

It's been a rocky launch for Rockstar, and though the game has a lot of fans it doesn't take much imagination to see why so many of them are peeved. Cash buys stuff, but it doesn't replace lost ranks; only grinding will do that. Here's hoping you like a lot of frustration tacked on to your life of crime.

Source: Rockstar Support [http://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/51565/grand-theft-auto-online-half-a-million-gta-stimulus-package-this.html]


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mad825

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Mar 28, 2010
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With all this negative press about Rockstar's poor QA I'm almost certain that they hired staff from Bethesda or even Obsidian for that matter.
 

JayRPG

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It is these kinds of things that make me wonder why rockstar are so loved, all I've seen since GTA V was released is horrible news about game-breaking/ruining bugs.

Vehicle loss, Game breaking when you get too much money, missing characters, the squillion GTA online issues.

If your character was lost, surely there is some way to retrieve the data from rockstars end or has it been totally obliterated from all of their servers?... somehow.

My WoW account could have been hacked 6 months ago and I wouldn't know because I don't play anymore, but If I tried to log in now and found out it was hacked, blizzard could restore the account to exactly what it was 6 months ago, with ease.

I find it more likely that rockstar just don't want to take the time and effort to find people's lost characters - which again just makes me wonder why they get so much love.
 

CriticalMiss

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Isn't one of the advantages of having an online game supposed to be the ability to store character data remotely so it doesn't get randomly lost? And keeping a backup copy in case it does somehow vanish. I could understand single player character files being gone for good but why are the online ones gone?
 

Ham Blitz

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This is kind of cool, I mean I guess I will get 500k for starting my first character, since to this day I still can't connect to the cloud servers. I've kind of lost most of my interest in the online at this point.
 

Mahorfeus

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I can't imagine that anyone was at too high of a rank when this happened; my brother was barely past 20 when he lost his character, and pretty much played nonstop from Day 1. I was a bit more fortunate, but I imagine that the experience was frustrating.

Funnily enough, Rockstar's already made grinding jobs harder, and has been patching out all the little cheap RP tricks little by little.
 

Smooth Operator

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CriticalMiss said:
Isn't one of the advantages of having an online game supposed to be the ability to store character data remotely so it doesn't get randomly lost? And keeping a backup copy in case it does somehow vanish. I could understand single player character files being gone for good but why are the online ones gone?
Because no one considered that high priority data, I've been around MMO town a few times and newcomers always make these exact mistakes and only slowly start adding security measures after their houses burn down a few times.
 

Glaice

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This is why you have it keep a copy of the character locally so shit like this does not happen.
 

Karloff

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Kalezian said:
just a heads up:

when you die, regardless of what activity you are doing, it will remove medical expenses from you bank account, anywhere from $600 to $3000. per death.
Just wanted to add: according to the Rockstar support boards, even if you pay the fee for the carebear version of Online, you can still get killed by car explosions and the like, and the medical expenses cash will still be removed from your account when you die.
 

an annoyed writer

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Jun 21, 2012
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Well, so much for the CLOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUDDD!

Seriously though, there's no backups for players' characters on their own machines? That's just lazy. Cloud gaming needs a system of backups for the data if it's going to be viable. Imagine the outrage that would happen if this happened later when people have gotten up to higher levels. My bets are that the Rockstar servers would be burning down their HQ due to being overwhelmed by the excess of flaming hatemail incurred.
 

Zeren

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Kalezian said:
just a heads up:

when you die, regardless of what activity you are doing, it will remove medical expenses from you bank account, anywhere from $600 to $3000. per death.

so, enjoy that measily $500k while it lasts, because several groups have already said they are going player hunting to make sure it get's wasted on nothing but medical bills. Hell, I'm going to help out with that, there are more problems with the game than giving people free money because they lost a character.
It's not bad at all when you consider in that you can easily make 50K+ in an hour. If you die enough to waste 500K then you are doing something wrong.
 

martyrdrebel27

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man, i may be a fanboy (correction, i am DEFINITELY a fanboy) but i don't understand all the negativity here. from my first day of playing GTA 3, all i could think is "this would be AMAZING as a multiplayer game" and they have finally delivered it to us. is there problems? of course. but point me towards one major mmo-style game release that didn't have a few launch issues.

i also think that the issues being touted as game-breaking are more rare than lead to believe and the result of an extremely vocal minority. I've been playing GTA:O since the HOUR that it launched, and while I have had the occasional server issues, mostly in the first days, and one lost car, it didn't ruin anything for me. in fact, i think the 500k is going to more game-breaking than any of the issues that have arisen. but i trust R*, so i'll remain quietly skeptical.
 

OCAdam

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Everyone of my friends who lost a character did so because they tried to make a new temporary character while servers were being faulty. After a while there was a loading screen specifically saying not to do that, not to mention if failing to connect to not retry. So it probably wasn't data being deleted, but rather just overwritten. I managed to lose about 300-400k from a car getting eaten (managed to sell it when trying to sell another car when my garage was full, my fault) and a 217k apartment not saving (not my fault). Since then, I've pulled enough money together to get back that car, the apartment, and a 'new' Stinger GT (yay classic race car). Honestly I don't see how R* giving 500k is going to help anything. Just race those 90 second races that give ~11k for a win (or 3440 for 3rd in a 3 player lobby even!).
 

ViciousTide

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Got the Hospital centers and Los Santos Customs Exit spawn areas marked for head shots yet? Make them poor. When you get the $500k, spend it all immediately! Have fun. Then Christmas will be here to play better online games.
 
Apr 28, 2008
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Karloff said:
Kalezian said:
just a heads up:

when you die, regardless of what activity you are doing, it will remove medical expenses from you bank account, anywhere from $600 to $3000. per death.
Just wanted to add: according to the Rockstar support boards, even if you pay the fee for the carebear version of Online, you can still get killed by car explosions and the like, and the medical expenses cash will still be removed from your account when you die.
Guess it's a good thing my connection usually kicks me out of lobbies into my own lobby so I won't have to deal with annoying people trying to kill me just because I got money from Rockstar.

Having shit internet finally pays off! Woo!
 

tangoprime

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May 5, 2011
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OCAdam said:
Everyone of my friends who lost a character did so because they tried to make a new temporary character while servers were being faulty. After a while there was a loading screen specifically saying not to do that, not to mention if failing to connect to not retry. So it probably wasn't data being deleted, but rather just overwritten. I managed to lose about 300-400k from a car getting eaten (managed to sell it when trying to sell another car when my garage was full, my fault) and a 217k apartment not saving (not my fault). Since then, I've pulled enough money together to get back that car, the apartment, and a 'new' Stinger GT (yay classic race car). Honestly I don't see how R* giving 500k is going to help anything. Just race those 90 second races that give ~11k for a win (or 3440 for 3rd in a 3 player lobby even!).
This. This is exactly what was going on. I lost one, and it was my fault for overwriting that slot while cloud services weren't available. Rockstar warned us that it was going to be rocky and to play for the first week or so at our own risk. The price of being an early adopter. I'm pretty impressed with how quickly they've been able to fix everything. Getting a chunk of cash as a 'thanks for bearing with us' is a nice bonus.
 

ThunderCavalier

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All I'm getting from this is that MMO launches are always extremely rocky.

*resists urge to make a SAO joke*