Rockstar: Missing GTA Online Characters Are Gone Forever

[Poetic Nova]

Good thing I don't give a damn about GTA Online and lost interest in V within one and a half week since release.

 

[Psychobabble]

Maybe it's time these companies realized that the idea of the "always online" game being technologically feasible is a few more years away. Well unless you want to build your game with the agonizing slowness of a true MMORPG.

 

[Mad World]

Rockstar could have done a better job. For all of the acclaim that this game has received, it sure is buggy.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

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.

I'm enjoying the uncanny parallels between GTA online and the US Congress.

 

[weirdee]

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.

you would have thought rockstar would have had enough stacks of cash to hire a seasoned consultant to point out everything for the multiplayer up to the launch

hell, a random basement dweller who has played MMOs for a decade could have told them about these things

 

[purplemonkey555]

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.

I hope you know the bank is shared between characters. Just make a dummy character, put all your cash in his/her wallet, then switch back to your main. There's also, y'know, passive mode....

Also, player hunting? I don't know what game you've been playing, but that's more or less all free roam is anyway.

 

[Megacherv]

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.

Not even that probably. From my own experience debugging C++ is a ***** and a half, they probably couldn't even be arsed.

 

[ZZoMBiE13]

I'm just wondering how many people here are old enough to remember what a Grue is

HA! Good call. Being old enough to recall the Grue, it didn't even occur to me until I read your post. That made me smile.

As for the "Stimulus", it isn't going to change the fact that I get murdered in GTA: Online constantly by people who are just wandering around trolling. I remember reading that players doing these kinds of things would be segregated to their own instances, but that hasn't stopped them from ruining my games multiple times when I'm doing nothing more offensive than walking down the street.

I've made 3 characters, and each of them has been gunned down, run down, or shot in the middle of tutorial missions for no reason. This just isn't really that fun though even when you ARE doing the game itself so I can see why people are making their own fun. Robbing stores to make virtual money to buy pretend real estate; who'd have figured that wouldn't be an engaging experience?

 

[Something Amyss]

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.

Nah. Rockstar was on it in under six months. Obsidian and Bethesda would be ashamed.

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?

Incompetence.

They really had no idea what they were doing with the online portion.

Even wore that online corrupted people's offline games. I mean, seriously. How screwed is that?

 

[Genocidicles]

And here is yet another example of cloud servers failing.

Truly the future of gaming!

 

[Rebel_Raven]

Yeah, I lost several characters. Luckily most weren't all that well off, but one certainly was! X( A small apartment in little seoul, and considerable RP and purchases. I caught up again, minus the apt as I'm wanting to get the 400k one. I settled for a 2 car garage for the time being.
You can only own 1 property. When you buy a new one you get a small fraction of the value in the one you have.

Well, some news on that 500k. It's going to be paid out in 2 $250k installments for economy/balance issues, or something like that. Kinda goes over my head as I don't deal much with other people. 1st is some time next week with a patch/update, and 2nd will be towards the end of the month.

Confirmation of the 2 payouts over one large lump sum is up on the Rockstar social site under "don't spend it all in one place."

Frankly I'm pretty glad I don't play with random people. Especially thanks to the news earlier in this thread that people are trying ot forcibly make people waste said money on medical bills which sounds pretty realistic to me. And then there's average person that'll kill you just for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
I ain't got time for dat! I'm happy partitioning myself from the majority, and keeping my misanthropy.

It's going to be a painful, painful tightrope walk in saving 250k for 2 weeks or so to get the 400k apartment.

Also, welcome to the joys of "always online."
Really irks me when my PSN randomly goes down, or my internet, and my gaming gets interrupted.
Then the sever issues on their side.

 

[tangoprime]

The price of being an early adopter.

Sad that the term "early adopter" now applies to software instead of just hardware. "Back in the day", a person could buy a game for their computer and it would work, as advertised, right out of the box. And if it didn't, you could return it to the store for a full refund.

Being able to release software patches has made developers lazy

I agree with you on all counts, this has been one of my biggest gripes in the last few years regarding gaming, no more need to put out a finished, tested product when you can just patch it. The only reason I used that line with regards to GTA:O was because they specifically said it was going to be rocky and likely wouldn't work well at first. GTA V, the game we bought, the single player, worked flawlessly for me (though I know there were garage bugs, etc., but from my playthrough, everything went just fine). GTA: Online isn't just GTA V Multiplayer, as many of the people are complaining that their product they bought didn't work right are claiming, it was advertised as a separate product that you're getting for free with your purchase of GTA V, and they admitted that it wasn't quite ready yet and would be rough at first. They were correct, as they'd warned, and it went about as well as could be expected from an MMO launch with this many customers and having to integrate with XBL and PSN infrastructure to boot.

As I'd mentioned before, if anything, I respect them for being able to get it playable as fast as they did with how many initial launch issues they had, it's pretty clear that they were working on it 24/7 for these first 2 weeks while leaving it live... seeing how fast they've been able to correct some of the issues they've corrected while leaving the service live is simply impressive.

 

[Strazdas]

So we got to expect this problem to be solved by the time it comes to PCs, good.

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.

the same reason bethesda is loved. huge, gamebreaking bugs, sure, but whats left is so amazing that it makes up for it. and that worked for GTA as well, there is a reason it is the best selling franchise on PC, even before GTA5 launch.
The cracters can be retrieved if they were marked as unacessible. if they were actually deleted - nope. the space was overwritten long time ago. this is a question of the way server handles accounts. in wow you got unique account which NEVER gets deleted even if you delete it, it will sit in database inert. Apperently Rockstar didnt made such system for some reason, so it can be traced back if its actually deleted.

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.

from 600 to 3000, so lets say it averages at 2k. that means you need to be killed 250 times. thats A LOT of deathmatching. and any server that isnt meant for deathmatching will ban random deathmatchers. or did they forgot to include ability to do that?

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.

Its not how much you loose, its the fact that you did that hits your hardest. you can grind the levels back, but the fact that you need to grind something you already did is the worst part. its like with game crashes. sure you had an autosave 10 minutes ago, its no big deal, but you have to do those 10 minutes AGAIN and that makes you feel much worse.

The price of being an early adopter.

Sad that the term "early adopter" now applies to software instead of just hardware. "Back in the day", a person could buy a game for their computer and it would work, as advertised, right out of the box. And if it didn't, you could return it to the store for a full refund.

Being able to release software patches has made developers lazy.

Early adopters in software always existed. It just usually were limited to programs rather than games and were more often used in busness talk than on gaming forums, because noone bothered to patch games and thus all gamers were early adopters anyway. yes, it does seem that betas and launches are just developers saving up on testing tiher game thinking their audience will do it for them, but that says more about developers than about tecnique itself. early adopters of software always existed. early adopters of ways of thinking always existed. early adopter is a term mcuh more wide than hardware.

capcha: speeding bullet
no, bullet costs more than 500K

 

[Genocidicles]

So we got to expect this problem to be solved by the time it comes to PCs, good.

Well considering how bad Rockstar's previous PC ports have been, it'll likely be replaced with a whole new host of problems.

 

[Strazdas]

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.

from 600 to 3000, so lets say it averages at 2k. that means you need to be killed 250 times. thats A LOT of deathmatching. and any server that isnt meant for deathmatching will ban random deathmatchers. or did they forgot to include ability to do that?

so far the only way to get rid of players in free roam is to vote to kick. It's hidden beneath a few menus and I didn't even find it until I had over 28 hours of game time put in.

if we say it's generally around 2k per death it will indeed be about 250 deaths.

But factor in ammo, repairs/insurance, and armor and it starts going up. Any deaths in any mode count, so you can end up paying that much in races, parachuting, missions [both vs and co-op], essentially you can die in any mode, and that death will cost you.

It doesn't make sense to play in a TDM, die about 12 times and have to pay $24k just because you wanted to have fun.


Hopefully the PC version does get some sort of server support, but for the consoles you have to have other people on your side to keep a session grief free.

Vitekick is the only mechanism? but thats an awful emchanism to begin with. join with your friends, votekick everyone else, go to next server, repeat. and the perosn can come back very fast if hes a real griefer. votes are not something you can trust to begin with anyway. i remember being votekicked for saying "i know a better server than yours"[footnote]ididnt mention the name or ling or anything thats advertisement[/footnote] when somone boosted that "This is the best server". this system seems awful, its like rockstar never playing any online game or something. with such thing as GTA Online requirement you got the liberty of having unique game ids for players. allow administrators to ban those and you will lover griefing A LOT.

Yes, extra factors such as ammunition will cost extra, but you didnt mention them, you said "will make them waste it on medical bills alone". and this was followed by couple users commenting about camping at medical stations, so no chance to buy anything else to begin with right?

Every online player has to assume that free roam means deathmatch unless enforced otherwise. that is the reality of internet. and this is why free roam modes never appealed to me to begin with.

If PC servers wont have that im sure there will be "Cracked" servers that adminstrators can do what they like. after all SAMP is still running high and that is a multiplayer created by modders alone.

So we got to expect this problem to be solved by the time it comes to PCs, good.

Well considering how bad Rockstar's previous PC ports have been, it'll likely be replaced with a whole new host of problems.

I would agree, but then Max Payne 3 was okay wasnt it?