So GTA Online has been live for nine days now and I think I've spent more time staring at a loading spinner than actually driving anything around Los Santos. Rockstar pushed another patch today (the second big one this week, after the one on the 5th) and told people not to bother recreating their characters if they lost one. Which, ok, cool, except I already recreated mine once, on day three, out of pure impatience.
Here's what happened to me specifically, because the general story of "GTA Online launch was rocky" has been written by basically everyone with a keyboard at this point and I dont need to repeat it. I got in around 11pm on October 1st, the night it went live as part of the GTA V update. Character creation worked fine. I picked the ugly aunt/uncle option because I thought it'd be funny, immediately regretted it, and then spent forty minutes in a queue that said "estimated wait: 12 minutes" the entire forty minutes. Never moved. Classic.
Got in the next day, played for maybe three hours, did a few contact missions, bought a garage, had somewhere around $38,000 in-game plus a car I actually liked (a cheap little coupe, nothing fancy, but it was mine). Logged off happy. Logged back in two days later and my character was just... gone. Not "here's your character but broke," gone. Character select screen acted like I'd never made one. I know Im not special here, this happened to a lot of people, but it's a different thing reading about "some players report data loss" in a headline versus watching your own guy vanish.
I made a new one. Rebuilt from nothing. This time I did NOT pick the funny aunt option, I played it straight. And today, along with this patch, Rockstar's crediting everyone who's logged into Online since launch with $500,000 in-game cash as an apology, which is honestly more generous than I expected from a company that just made over a billion dollars in three days off the retail game alone back in September. Half a million fake dollars doesn't undo losing a save file, but Ill take it, mostly because it means I can finally buy the apartment I wanted instead of grinding for it.
The thing that gets me is I dont even fully understand why Im this invested in getting back to where I was. I have, no exaggeration, something like eleven unplayed games sitting in my Steam library right now, several of which I paid full price for during a sale (yes I see the contradiction in that sentence, no I will not be examining it further). And yet the game I keep opening every night is the one that keeps eating my progress. There's something almost funny about how much patience people are extending Rockstar here compared to how quickly the internet turns on literally everything else that launches broken. I think it's because everyone kind of knew this was coming — a always-online mode bolted onto a game this massive, launching to however many million people at once, was never going to be smooth. Nobody was shocked. Just annoyed.
Anyway. Not really a tech-industry post today, more just a "here's what I did with my week" post, but I've been sitting on this one for a few days waiting to see if the character loss thing would actually get fixed before I wrote about it, and today's patch notes are the first sign it might. We'll see. In semi-unrelated news I saw that Adobe's breach from earlier this month turned out to be way bigger than the first numbers suggested, and Twitter finally made their IPO filing public too, so there was plenty else going on if character loss in a video game isn't your idea of a real news story. Fair enough if it isn't.
For now my aunt-uncle character (RIP) stays deleted and unmourned, my new guy has half a million dollars he did nothing to earn, and Im going to go see if the servers can handle me actually spending it.