Grand Theft Auto Online received one of its most game-changing PC updates on March 16, and Rockstar Games developers weren't responsible for it. A programmer who goes by the online alias t0st managed to improve GTA Online's loading times by as much as 70 percent. The patch was implemented by Rockstar and has saved certain players minutes every time they log into GTA 5's online mode. Rockstar paid t0st $10,000 through its bug bounty program, but why didn't the company address its sluggish load times for more than seven years?
GTA Online has remained one of Take-Two Interactive's most lucrative sources of revenue since its launch in 2013. The game mode has garnered a player base ranging in the tens of millions and was raking in as much as $1,200 a minute in 2020. Rockstar has long issued weekly GTA Online updates, yet glaring loading-time issues somehow slipped under the radar.
An anonymous Reddit poll from 2020 with 285 participants found that half of the gamers who chose to vote had to wait three to six minutes before GTA Online would boot up. That's a surprisingly long time for a seven-year-old game, and Rockstar was seemingly unaware of the issue before t0st published their fix. After the company caught wind of the fan-made update, it told PC Gamer, "Player t0st did, in fact, reveal an aspect of the game code related to load times for the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved." So what was going on under the hood, and why didn't Rockstar notice GTA Online's crawling load times sooner?
GTA Online: Why Did Load Times Take So Long To Fix?
The company never issued a statement explaining why GTA Online load times had remained slow for years, so there's no way to tell exactly what went on behind closed doors at Rockstar. Still, Ars Technica published an in-depth breakdown of exactly what t0st's code fixed, which gave some context as to why the issue might not have been a top priority task for Grand Theft Auto Online's developer.
The problem bedeviling GTA Online's load times was inefficient code. The game was essentially writing and checking data in a one-by-one entry format instead of using more optimal functions that would let the program do the same thing in a fraction of the time. In essence, the GTA Online code was going down an extremely lengthy spreadsheet and checking each datapoint manually, instead of using a formula that would let it complete that task in bulk.
The suboptimal solution worked, it just could have been better, and now it is - thanks to tost. The load time issue might have never raised any alarms at Rockstar because it wasn't severely affecting GTA Online's overall experience. It likely prioritized churning out new content for the Los Santos' weekly updates to keep long-time fans interested and attract newcomers to continue growing Grand Theft Auto Online. There's no way to tell if Rockstar developers had ever looked into the issue prior to t0st's update. Still, based on how everything panned out, load times were a quality-of-life problem that wasn't as immediately important to the company as other tasks.
Source: Reddit/yellow-memes, PC Gamer, Ars Technica
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April 01, 2021 at 02:14AM
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Why GTA Online Load Times Took Rockstar Over Seven Years To Fix - Screen Rant
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