Postcards from Los Santos #spoilers

We're rolling again! Naomi is now big enough to make Sunday nights a possibility once more and Lack-Of Inc, Plc, Ltd and MC were once more out in force. Let's start with some classic EMW flying.

This image is the correct way up. I'd died early on in this "nick the titan" mission and was watching in 3rd person applying various filters for a laugh. EMW decided to go knife edge through the city but only managed to go a little bit knife edge and into a building. Nice.

"So everyone knows I'm American" says England-born Big Rob. Satre, sitting opposite, is sporting white look for the fun of it. It's the yin-yang of GTA outfit choosing.

"So, we're going to be naughty and stuff and probably die doing it."

While trying to get into the military base, EMW manages to get his insurgent stuck between the road and the edge of the bridge. We were 5 stars and the world hated us! Hilarium.

Comments

Like a hot knife edge through warm reinforced concrete.

Bigger Rob's picture

HAHAHAHAAH! Excellent. I've just noticed that you're slumped over the turret on the last one. You fought valiantly.

brainwipe's picture

Hoping to do some more shinanigans tonight!

brainwipe's picture

I'd forgotten to upload a few...

They didn't have any big spoilers when Big Bob went into Spoilers R Us.

YEHAW! We totally done gone and nicked all your guns, innit?!

"Deliver the Product" is what past manager of mine have said. They didn't mean this.

brainwipe's picture

hmmm had a bit of a bad session today the first session I was in some guy was cheating and teleported everyone on the server to the airport (some 28 people) then machine gunned them down. I promptly switched servers the next one I was in seemed ok a little full for ceo/mc action but I gave it a go then I started getting odd payments for completing ceo missions I hadn't been running and then my in game cash started rocketing up. No idea who was doing that but I promptly quit the session and logged off. I reported this to rockstar so hopefully I won't get banned for this the money was all in the cash section of my wallet so neatly divided from my actual funds so hopefully they'll just reset that.

Getting banned would be an absolute arse as even if you get a temporary ban they take away all your ingame money items unlocks rank and properties basically resetting you back to level 1 and wiping out all progress.

Now I'm just waiting for some sort of response from rockstar as I don't want to risk playing while I have that fake money. There are a couple of notes in the support about new hacks being about so fingers crossed they'll accept I was just an innocent bystander.

Evilmatt's picture

Got an email back from rockstar support that was basically a form letter saying they routinely do sweeps to check for cheaters etc and dole out bans as a result and so long as I've not been cheating I shouldn't be banned. They also added they might remove any illegitimately obtained cash.

I guess I just sweep that ill gotten gain into my bank so it doesn't go wandering then either leave it alone or I suppose spend it.

Not really sure what to do with that.

Before the money thing happened I'd decided last night to invest my savings in a car garage to try out the car boosting stuff since I know Rob is planning to pick up the gunrunner bunker stuff when it comes out so rather than both of us having that on launch I figured I can get that later on and I should put my savings into the car garage and we can collectively have access to all the updates available for better play opportunities.

I'd just picked up my first couple of cars (I gather you are better off filling up a certain number of cars 32 I think so you then always get the high tier motors to then sell) when the money thing happened.

Now I have this tempting sum of money sitting there with the somewhat ambiguous instructions from rockstar suggesting they are not really bothered by it but it might get taken off me assuming it's still there when they do a sweep.

Given there are a lot of issues at the moment with hackers either dumping money on people or taking money off people I would guess there will be sweeps soon.

Evilmatt's picture

Ran some more car missions now have 9 cars in my garage some high end I should sell off. Collection missions are a bit like crate pickups you go to a place and then a variety of things happen. So far I've had to steal a car from a crime scene, a car meet, from a stunt jump, from a posh house where the security had the keys, from an active race, from an npc criminal who got there first, and finally from an off shore barge using a cargobob helicopter. Depending on the rank of the car (there are 3 rankings) the resistance during and after gets more powerful. It cost nothing to source cars and nothing if you fail to return them to the garage the cost is done through damage to the car keep it intact or only a little damaged and it costs nothing this is supposedly where a cargobob is really useful as you can grab the car and fly it back with likely no damage I've gotten bewteen 5k and 14k damages the worst was the stop the thief one as it was high end so the most expensive and I had to riddle the thing with bullets to kill the guy. Not tried selling any yet but I've also unlocked two of the special mission types and the thrid is at 12 cars. Seems pretty fun so far.

Evilmatt's picture

Sorry to read about your cash issues. I hope they just take your honesty and gift you the cash. They might.

The garage does sound like fun. What's more, it sounds like fun a single person can have. For those evenings when I have an hour to spend, it would be good to have some more mishes you can do alone. I'm impressed with the variety of pick ups. There sounds like lots of places you can boost cars from.

Do you think boosting would be fun with more than one person or is it a lone CEO thing?

There's another thing I don't quite understand: when do you get the cash? Do you get cash for just getting it to your garage or do you have to then sell it on for it to be worth anything?

I am indeed saving for the bunker. I'll keep my pennies for that. When the Real Estate goes live, I'll get the best I can afford. The whole Mad-Max feel to it reminds me of a grimey Interstate 76, which I loved. And the Mad Max game, which I also loved.

brainwipe's picture

It was just annoying to have a hacker foist that on me. I've banked that cash and am thus far ignoring it will probably just go away the longer it sits there the more tempting it will be to spend it.

Yeah it is reasonably varied in terms of what you are boosting plus even the low end cars are nice sports cars so you get to drive fun fast cars that would cost you anything from 500k to 3mil to own. Not sure if the pickup part of it scales with people but it could still be fun to do get to the thing deal with enemies nick the car outrun or take out any pursuers and get the car back in one piece.

There is also the special missions that boosting cars unlock with the special vehicles. Those end up being another class of ceo missions you can just run probably even in a crew session and likely for a set payout.

You get money when you sell the cars on a sort of commision for them and there are three levels of commision each requiring different risk for reward. As I understand it the lowest level a private sale you get the smallest payout (15k for low 30k for mid and 40k for high) the mission is a simple drop off with little or no resistance. Next step up is Showroom where they require a certain amount of modifications before they take them so if you fail to deliver you are out that money but the payout increases ($26250 payout with $3750 cost low $43750 payout $6250 cost mid and $70000 payout with $10000 cost high) the mission also then requires you to pick up some forged papers enroute before you can drop off the car. The third level of sale is the Specialist Dealer these require even higher end mods upfront and have a harder mission (not sure what it is probably varies a bit) payout for this are $37500 payout with $7500 cost for low $62500 payout with $12500 cost mid range and $100000 payout with $20000 cost for high end.

So for high end cars with the full modifications you can get 80k minus any cost you lost getting the car.

You can sell up to 4 vehicles at once with associates taking the other vehicles so potentially you could make 320k but the more cars you sell the longer the cool down before you can sell again. As far as I know there is no cool down on the boosting missions you can run them back to back till you run out of space in the garage which holds max 40 cars.

Like other ceo missions the sales cash (and the costs) are all given to the ceo and the associates get their salary. There is one more option where the associates get extra cash the collections option. The sales system also has listed special collections of cars which you get a bonus for selling as a group and the associates also get that extra money. The catch there is the collections are rare sets of cars you need to have all of them and the system is random on what cars you get. I can see boosting to get some collections in the garage and then keeping them for when we could sell them on.

Evilmatt's picture

picked up a few more cars and then decide to give selling one a go. It was sort of the reverse of one of the simpler collection missions the only antagonist was other players and my worst enemy my own driving skill. I picked a high end car to sell and then the highest reward so I had to spend 10k outfiting with a bunch of mods then I drove the thing as carefully as my patience allowed to the drop off. Luckily it was a quiet server and no one bothered me. I still had a few prangs enroute and incurred a 1.7k loss of value so came out of it with $78300 in profit.

Recon it would be another area where a cargobob would come into its own especially with a buzzard escort pick up the car with the chopper fly it there and land it in pristine condition for the full pay out. Buzzards blow away any player that approaches. Or fleet of cargobobs and drop of multiple cars :D

Maybe I'll save up for one next

Evilmatt's picture

SUPERB!
After doing some Icar last night, I popped in for a bit of fun. I was most of the way through a beer so did a Headhunter and Sightseer before getting into some special races.

The [b]Rocket Voltaic[/b] races are bananas. I noticed that they have added a bunch more options in the racing, allowing for things such as other cars being "ghosted" to reduce push-off. Hitting the rocket boost was good fun on the mental-in-the-sky tracks. It's the very best of a modern Stunt Car Racer. I managed a 3rd place (of 6), having been overtaken by a very canny use of boost on the exit of a hairpin (great driving by the other chap) and found myself tittering along. Oddly, I won the most money coming 7th in a race of 16. Just shy of 10k, which was nice.

The other car I had fun driving was the Ruiner 2000 (it's KITT), with its jump boost and the parachute. I doubt either of those things would be any good in usual driving but they're a laugh in levels designed for it. There aren't enough places in the GTA world to give you the altitude to make the Ruiner fun outside of the races.

I didn't manage to get onto one of the retro top-down races, which is a shame. I'm still shit at navigating the menus - worse after a single beer.

brainwipe's picture

Right! Let's begin with a shot from 2 weeks ago. EMW and I were having a lark in a public session and decided to nick a couple of bulldozers and go all KILL DOZER, ending up on the motorway pushing cars off the edge of a bridge. This kind of ad-hoc fucking about is what GTA is all about.

Let's go pick up some drugs. Let's use a golf cart.

Bad arse gangsters ride in gold carts because we're that hard. Discovered that the golf cart isn't much use "off piste" or "off road".

And now from last night!
We start in the Lack-Of Inc offices. I needed a snap of EMW in his new outfit: brand new pants, double bow tie and a red bowler. Lack Of Inc dress code policy is having a bowler hat. ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION, BIG R? ;-)

Here's EMW flying the Cargo Bob having surrepticiously nicked a blue car (it's so daft, I love it). In the background Big R provides very capable air support. We would have been bollocksed without it. Go Lack Of Inc!

Big Bob dispatches another attack chopper!

EMW kindly flies us to the start of the "special vehicle missions" in a posh helicopter. Being in any aircraft with EMW is a sickening experience because he's managed to master "rowboat in a storm".

This delightful monster was used to help us nick some drugs off the Police before they could use them all. EMW, CEO of Lack-Of Inc has even kindly installed a seat for me on the back. I'd rather be in the spacious cab but beggars can't be choosers.

brainwipe's picture

Starting with one from last week that I forgot to upload. Here's EMW having a good ole laugh with some angry wasps.

And from tonight...

Big Bob decides that the mission was too easy as scripted so we had to go for a swim. EMW's all ready on the back...

It was bound to end this way...

Another slice of hillarium, thanks guys!

brainwipe's picture