Escapecraft

aflycon wrote:So, I think they'll fix their shit soon enough.

How totally, thoroughly, unconditionally, utterly, wholeheartedly, unmitigatedly, absolutely, entirely, positively wrong I was. Rockstar has not fixed their shit and I am beginning to think they won't bother at all.

On day one, it took me over an hour to join the lobby for Lamar's race so I could get on with the introduction. That, I can understand - hey, they didn't expect to have so many players. But from there, it really only went downhill. Servers have been totally unreliable, and the only time I've been able to play for more than about 15 minutes without a disconnection is between midnight and 4am (Blackadder can attest to this). For the first few days, I coped with this. A few jackasses killed me on sight, and I somehow died on my way out of a convenience store without banking the cash from previous races - lost about $40K a few days in. But that's okay, right? It's GTA ... you're bound to get killed a few times.

Then the worst of it started.

Four or five days in, I joined GTA Online only to face the Character Creation screen again. What? Where was my character? What happened to Rank 17 Mike Hunt with all of my money? I was pissed, but I chalked it up to an error with my connection; I made a new character (in Slot 2, to be safe) and started again. Luckily, I found that the bank money saves to your Gamertag, not each individual character. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever, but okay - I wasn't complaining. Other than an absolute fucking idiot that got paired with me in the introduction for my new character, all went smoothly (minus the constant disconnections and loss of 3-5 ranks every now and then, due to cloud server errors) until I reached Rank 29.

I said that was the worst of it, but I never saw this coming.

In one night, I played from about 3pm to 10pm with some friends, dealing with the disconnections since the cloud servers had allegedly been fixed (and I wasn't losing any ranks, so it was okay). I got up to Rank 39, finally had exactly $217,000 for the cheapest Heist-worthy house, and was able to settle down. Penniless, I explored my new apartment and garage before calling it a night. When I came back the next day, I was irate - for a second. My clothes had changed, and the counter at the top of the screen said $141,000, not around $50 as it had the night before. And, just to the left was my RP bar: reading Rank 29. I did a double-take to make sure I hadn't spawned on the street; no, I was in my house, but my Rank had been reset and I'd gained almost a hundred and fifty grand ... after a moment, I realized that my save data had simply reverted to how it was when I started playing the day before.

So, I figured that $140K and a house weren't so bad in exchange for ten ranks, and started from 29 again. Each night for the next three days, I'd find myself up to about Rank 35 before calling it quits, and back at 29 the next day, with the same amount of money, regardless of how I saved or what I bought. Interestingly, I was able to buy and customize cars and store them in my garage, without them disappearing alongside my Rank. For a few days, I was farming GTA$ in exchange for RP, and that was okay with me. I thought I'd game the system until Rockstar fixed it, because what else was I going to do?

Leaving the Los Santos Customs in my Futo, I found some dickhead waiting outside. He shot me - one shot kill with what looked and sounded like the Combat Pistol, which was confusing - and took, then destroyed my car. Okay, he had to pay the insurance premium, and that should have been enough for me. But you can't just go around doing that, it's a shitty thing to do. So, as I passed him after highlighting him on the map, I tossed a Sticky Bomb on his car. One press of the D-pad later, I'm a Bad Sport and have been removed from the game. Turns out his shit-lord friend was driving next to him and both cars were destroyed in the blast.

Are you fucking serious?

GTA Online's Bad Sport servers are a special type of hell that no honest player should ever have to visit. Everybody there is either genuinely a bad sport or, like me, upset about being mislabeled. The difference is that, unlike these troglodytes, I do not go around taking out my anger on the other "bad" sports by recklessly killing them, preventing them from completing missions, destroying their property, etc. Originally sentenced to 24 hours, this is now my third day in the Bad Sport server; the worst weapon at the hands of an angry bad sport is the report function. Every time another bad sport reports you, another day is added before you can be "forgiven" for whatever made you a bad sport. But this function is unregulated, and available to every angsty or malevolent player labelled as a Bad Sport.

Is it not glaringly obvious enough what the intrinsic flaw in this system is? There is NOTHING to prevent the fifteen other bad sports in your session from adding fifteen DAYS to your sentence, every time you try to wait out your twenty-four hours. Luckily, not everyone who's a bad sport is also a brain-dead idiot, so I've only had about three days added to mine so far. But I've done not a single thing to warrant it! I haven't killed anyone, blown up any cars, even collected a bounty - I've barely left my apartment.

So, I'll be waiting out my remaining 30 hours offline, since I can't even risk joining a server lest somebody decides to rally the others and add two more weeks. In short, GTA Online is an absolute fucking shitstorm and should be entirely avoided until the end of October, save for logging in one time so you can be added to the list of stimulus package recipients (which Rockstar will probably never make good on). Do not even think about destroying someone's Personal Vehicle, because if you enter the nether world that is being a Bad Sport you will not see the light of day again for some time.