Rockstar Apologizes For GTA Online Issues

[jon_sf]

This happens with almost every MMO and I'm not terribly surprised to see it here either. You'd think someone would have come up with a better way to do this by now.

Scaling is hard. I work in the software industry (though not the game industry), and what they're trying to do is extremely difficult. They're suddenly turning on the firehose of millions of users connecting to their servers, which simulate extremely complicated worlds, and needing everything to happen with really low latency.

Bottlenecks that don't appear when you have 10s of thousands of connections can suddenly appear when you have hundreds of thousands of connections. The bottlenecks can be in the software they wrote, or in the operating systems they're running on, or the databases, or network topology and load balancers, or some other hardware problem. If any link in the chain is weak, the whole thing goes to hell.

So, I give props to them for doing something so ambitious. It probably would've been a lot easier for them to slowly allow people to join over the span of a week or two, but a lot of people would be upset if they ended up as the last people allowed into the party. Maybe a beta program would've helped.

I appreciate how they were upfront in saying "we're gonna turn this on October 1st, and there will probably be glitches, so we appreciate your patience as we work it out." As long as companies are honest and treat me with respect, I'm willing to cut them quite a bit of slack.

 

[weirdee]

This happens with almost every MMO and I'm not terribly surprised to see it here either. You'd think someone would have come up with a better way to do this by now.

it's kind of like trying to figure out a safe way to crash

sure it's possible, but it's going to take a lot of messes before we figure it out

 

[Rebel_Raven]

Blah! I'm not even able to do -solo- stuff, or "invite only" games so I can litterally do things with no one else connected to me. I still can't frikking do anything because of the servers! I could understand it maybe if I were trying to hook up with my crew, but I'm just wanting to solo! What's this "waiting for other players" crap?! THERE ARE NO OTHERS! It's just me'n effing LAMAR the NPC!!

What, will this be the "always online" gaming revolution? Spending days, weeks, MONTHS waiting for the game servers to get their shit together?

I wish they had something like Red Dead Redemption's online. IIRC it was pretty damn stable. Yeah, the world was less robust, but maybe, just maybe people soloing could do something without being do dependent on other people.

Anywho, sorry for the rant.

 

[Something Amyss]

Beyond that, however, my only issue with GTA Online is the griefing...just going to the ATM is literally a life-and-death situation as at any given moment some chuckle-head can come flying around the corner and gun you down while you're trying to make a deposit.

Use your phone. That doesn't stop everything, but it's quicker and easier to access.

GTA is supposed to deal with griefers, but I don't have a lot of faith in that. I got a guy who was, from what I could tell, killing people, entering pacifist mode, chasing down another person, gunning them down and repeating. I don't see them dealing with people like that.

I've basically taken to private or crew lobbies only...Except the shitty setup of the game will kick you into a public lobby if you dare do something like a job and then further dare to leave when it's complete. even if you leave with a whole crew.

Otherwise, I steer clear of the public lobbies. Let them be assholes to one another.

 

[RJ 17]

Beyond that, however, my only issue with GTA Online is the griefing...just going to the ATM is literally a life-and-death situation as at any given moment some chuckle-head can come flying around the corner and gun you down while you're trying to make a deposit.

Use your phone. That doesn't stop everything, but it's quicker and easier to access.

GTA is supposed to deal with griefers, but I don't have a lot of faith in that. I got a guy who was, from what I could tell, killing people, entering pacifist mode, chasing down another person, gunning them down and repeating. I don't see them dealing with people like that.

I've basically taken to private or crew lobbies only...Except the shitty setup of the game will kick you into a public lobby if you dare do something like a job and then further dare to leave when it's complete. even if you leave with a whole crew.

Otherwise, I steer clear of the public lobbies. Let them be assholes to one another.

As I mentioned 5 posts above yours: I was kinda joking when I complained about that. This is GTA Online we're talking about...griefers are to be expected. Hell, the Free Mode is nothing but one giant sandbox for griefing. Yeah, it's annoying, but it's also 100% expected and pretty much the name of the game.

It does get out of hand, though, I was in one server where the messages on the left saying who killed who announcing another kill almost every 30 seconds.

 

[Strazdas]

Regular EA online launch= problems, EA blaming users, Users blaming EA, everyone hates eachother.
Regular Rockstart online Launch = problems, Rockstar apologizes for the problems, Users still hate them for everything.


WE always hate them. thing is, they are upfront about it, and letrs face it we all knew its going to happen, so theres really no big deal imo.