Since I've been grinding my way through research items burning large amounts of money to try and get the unlocks I want I've been playing a lot of GTA online in the week.
It seems like the hacker problem is worse than ever as almost every session I join seems to have someone hacking. Even ones that look normal and seem like they will be a good easy session to just quietly run some cars and the odd supply mission to keep research running ends up with some player bombing me and 10 other players all over the map at the same time then laughing about it in the chat.
Normal public session shenanigans can be frustrating but this is a level above that there is no way to escape or out run them if they decide to fuck with you you have no recourse.
I've had some good public session and one where people play as opposition to a mission or something then go their separate ways. I tried doing one of the freemode challenges where you drive a briefcase across the map. Two other guys intercepted me and blew up my car with a buzzard. I took theirs out with a homing missile then raced off. They shot me before I got away so I spawned a buzzard and flew low over the highway raining fire. They shot me down and I raced after them with a sniper rifle one picked up the other in an insurgent and made it to the drop off. It was a fun exhilarating fight that both sides were using just the tools available to them where neither side had any particular advantage and it was not malicious just playing the game.
When it's hackers you either swap sessions or hope they don't fuck with you and every new session there is that question of is this one full of hacker scum just waiting.
And so I stumbled on a way to get a solo public session. I don't like having to do that but with the prevalence of hackers it's getting to be the only way to get anything done. Most days I've tried to play normally and been hit with some hacker nonsense so it seems like until rockstar get their house in order this is the only way to get things done.
It's a pretty simple trick I stumbled across it when having some odd connection issues I just turned the wifi off and on relatively quickly. I popped back to GTA expecting to have to log back in but instead everyone left I was still online but now in a solo player but still public session. There is a bit of a trick to it you need to interrupt the connection for long enough to trigger the system to go single player but not too long that it disconnects entirely. Too short a time and it just carries on too long it disconnects and goes offline. Get it right and the game switches to solo public session and tends to stay that way for a while. Eventually it will start adding people back in but often that's after quite a while of solo play enough for an evenings work.
I've noticed the missions seem to have built in difficult adjustments for solo public play. In the car missions when selling you always encounter npc opposition in super fast karuma with uncanny accuracy. Getting a car through unscathed is basically impossible but you can still get a good amount of cash. The fact that it reacts to solo sessions seems to indicate they designed it with this possibility in mind which makes it odd that they want to prohibit it. Having a PVE option would solve a lot of the issues being able to run crates or what have you solo without hackers or with friends but against ai enemies would improve things a lot.
It shouldn't be this way but that's how it is at least by having a way to get to a solo public session it's possible to play the game without hackers just fucking everything up.
Comments
Public sessions with hackers is the one thing stopping me from paying for a shark card. What's the point in spending the money when you can't enjoy it? I'd rather by cosmetic stuff in Elite Dangerous or Rocket League.
The other option to a shark card would be to give serious consideration to the Criminal Mastermind achievement and to earn $10m.
That's interesting. However, we've never really managed to stay alive and the guide is quite clear about that!
And even if we perform flawlessly, there are all those mentioned glitches which could force a restart.
There is a fairly long list of things that we would have to get past (like finding a group of 4 who all want to do it, putting all the time in, changing how we play away from doing crazy\fun things), but I would be willing to give it a go for the challenge.
It would be a challenge to attempt I think our main issue would be getting 4 people consistently and the same 4 people.
The not dying part would be a challenge but we could mitigate some of that risk with the dedicate heist clothing with all the heist benefits and always use a karuma whenever possible getting fully snacked and armored up and just burning through that stuff then restocking post heist. We would still have some tricky missions we would need to plan for. Prison break, where one of you is completely unarmored and has a pistol. That final part of pacific standard where you're on the bikes now that the karuma exploit is patched. I can see us getting 90% of the way there then having it fuck up and have to start again. Still even without the mastermind bonus the payout from heists is pretty good so money wise it wouldn't be bad.
It would be fun to try if we can get a group of 4 but we'd have to have fun with it.