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Jun 16

GTA V Online: Legit Play Vs. Boosting, Glitching, And Cheating

Boosting, Glitching, And Cheating

Finding ways to do things in the games like GTA which go far beyond the design intent is, in a sense, just another part of what makes playing games enjoyable. In single player games, the use of CHEAT CODES and game mods are built into the game (or easy enough to add) to expand the ways players may enjoy their game. No matter how overpowered they might be compared to playing normally, nothing you can do in single player will do anything worse than mess up your own playing experience. It is your game, after all. Play it however you wish.

GTA Online, as with most multiplayer games, has an expectation that everyone is going to play using the same game rules, to be fair. That isn’t the same thing as being equal. Ranking systems, unlocks, and acquired resources can make an experienced player more capable in the game, and thus have a competitive edge.

That’s just fine, as GTA Online as a whole isn’t really a competitive game. There are jobs and situations which involve winning and losing, but there are many others which are cooperative. Players with better weapons in the open world will tend to kill more easily, and better custom cars will make winning races easier. Everyone can strive to gain such advantages, so it remains fair overall. The game as a whole is much more a shared, cooperative world than a constant conflict between players — more like a typical MMORG than an FPS. The point isn’t to have balanced teams competing, but to have fun playing.

Rank Up Fast. Make Money Fast: These are commonly found when searching for information about GTA Online. There are loads of videos providing hints to accelerate your progress through the game. Players have made new jobs which offer high pay and RP — or at least advertise doing so. “Grinding” — playing select jobs over and over — to make money and advance faster doesn’t have to be boring in GTA. Yes, if you keep doing exactly the same thing over and over it could get tiring, but there are enough variations within jobs, and different sorts of jobs offered out there, to keep the game fun even while working hard to get ahead.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with trying to find the jobs and ways to play which will bring the most “Bucks For The Bang” — GTA$ and RP per minute. Some are decidedly easier to complete than others, and the pay in both RP and money can be quite a bit more.

Is it wrong to look for and play, especially repeat play, where you can take advantage of an opportunity within the game which lets you make far more than expected?

Glitches, exploits, boosting, cooperative team mates, all can make it easier to score higher in the game. Rockstar has patched many exploits — like the Challenges, which are temporarily disabled — and can be expected to work to keep the game fair.

One that players “advertise” are jobs which offer one player an advantage over the others, by design. The game’s betting system can make these attractive, as you can bet on the advantaged player, and when they win, get extra money from knowing that you are going to lose.

Players can deliberately throw a game — boosting — and thus determine the outcome. This requires a cooperative group of players, or at least a pair, in order to work. A certain degree of trust is needed to pull this off. This is popular for races, where wins — 1st place — are needed to open up more upgrades for cars.

Some jobs can become very easy if you take advantage of map positions, new vehicles, or other situations. By doing this, you can “farm” money and RP and advance much faster than players who simply play the game normally — as the designers originally intended.

Higher rank also brings with it more armor, health, weapons, and vehicles, which will give you an advantage over lower ranked players. By choosing to play with “inferior” players, you can score more wins than if you were competing against approximate equals.

OK, that happens in the game, and some of these situations can be hard to avoid. But are these BAD THINGS?

All players are free to play the game however they want. There is no special award for either ranking up faster than others by finding easy paths. Nor is there anything to indicate that a player has played the game with an eye on fairness, never exploiting any easy loopholes to get an advantage.

Your own game play isn’t harmed or affected when others try to “farm” RP, GTA$, or race wins. Everyone will eventually advance in rank and win races, and the advantages of higher rank and resources aren’t infinite. It is up to you whether the easier path makes you feel like you’ve spoiled the game, or if it makes it more fun to find short cuts to success.

Bets in GTA are generally a losing proposition. You can’t predict the winner, and you don’t win enough to make up for all the times you lose. Players with more cash (it requires cash, not money in the bank, but you can use the phone app to get cash during a job) are the only ones who can afford to take the risk without it being risky.

There are only so may cars and properties you can buy in the game — three properties, up to 30 cars in those garages. You can spend a lot of money here. I’d estimate it at about $20 Million, but once you reach that, you don’t really need more. In fact, you’ll pass the “I need this to feel competitive” level in terms of useful racing and mission cars and safe houses well before that point.

The highly useful militarized and other vehicles stored with Pegasus can eat more money. But you only need a few million to get the ones which are most useful. The others are just something to put all your hard-earned GTA$ to use in the game, and to show off.

I won’t say this isn’t a lot of money in the game, but it is well within the reach of normal players who play for reasonable amounts of time. I haven’t hit that level yet after six weeks of play time since PC release, but I have pretty much got the things I consider most useful. You don’t “Gotta catch them all” in order to feel like you are a good player, or are having fun in the game.

Making An Honest Buck

So let’s look at money and incomes. You can make $100K per real day without working very hard. The Daily Objectives — came out with Heists and this always on for PC — pay $25K and 3000 RP, with additional bonuses if you keep them up for seven or more days in a row. Most are fairly easy to do, and often include things you’d do normally. Selling stolen cars and other common activities can being you up to $100K for your first hour or two of play.

Daily Objectives alone can earn you $1.6 Million per month ($500K on the 28th consecutive day) and the jobs you do during them will boost that to about $2 Million.  Add in selling stolen cars for another million, and doing a moderate level of jobs beyond that, and you could run $5 Million per month.

Heists and Missions offer big bucks for good crews. The full series of five heists can get you a couple million each time, which is pretty decent money. The one time bonuses can boost that up quite a lot, and a good crew could get a lot of extra money for their time. Plus they really do go better when everyone knows what they are doing. Missions pay pretty well too — most are about $20K per player for 10-15 minutes, or $80-$120K per hour. Between working Heists and Missions, you should be able to keep your bank account well stocked.

Of course, it is also easy to blow through money fast in this game. Not waste, most of the time, as it is money spent on things of use in the game. Some things add up fast.

Ammo. I’ve paid over $20K to reload after a mission which required a lot of expensive killing. Or just shooting up cops in free mode, or in general, any time you go on a killing spree using your own ammo. It is the explosive weapons which cost the most, but even bullets do add up. The kind of jobs which will consume that much ammo tend to more than pay for the expense.

Modding cars is a big money sink. You can drop $100K easily on a car on simple upgrades, with several hundred thousand in costs possible as you try to make a high end car both perform the best and look and sound the coolest. Add in the purchase price for the fancier cars, and you are into some serious bucks. I believe that this is biggest category of expense.

Unlike the others, modding cars never has to end. You can sell cars you no longer want and buy new ones you like, forever. Your garage space is your only limit. Note: If you create a second character, they will share bank accounts and can buy their own set of properties with garages. You can double your stock of cars this way, although each character can only use their own set.

I’ll mention clothes and equipment together. These don’t eat up nearly as much money as the others, but they do add up. Weapons can get expensive, especially with all the weapon mods available. But you only need to purchase each weapon ONCE. After that, you just pay for ammo as you use it. Same for clothes and most of the equipment you can buy.

OK, military and special vehicles. First thing, many are locked by level or Heists missions, so you can’t just make a lot of money alone to get them. The Rhino Tank requires rank 70, the Buzzard Attack Helicopter rank 42. The armed vehicles are fun to use to wreak havoc in free mode, and some are also very useful on missions and some other jobs. Aircraft and boats, even without weapons, can improve your mobility in the game.

You don’t need every single one in order to have enough to be useful, but it is fun to keep collecting them.

The Heists add some nice vehicles which are very useful for jobs, and fun for just cruising around. The Kuruma (Armored) and Insurgent (the unarmed one) are both very nice to have in your garage. They’ll set you back over $1 Million, especially when you upgrade them — expect the pair to consume another half million bucks. But they are so tough and effective, both in free mode engagements and on missions, that it is hard to use anything else once you have them.

The keys to quick money: Fast, effective missions, and with a good crew, Heists. Always set the difficulty to Hard for the increased money. If that makes the mission too difficult, you’ve picked the wrong mission to farm money. Farming means doing similar missions over and over again. Fortunately, some can be a lot of fun to repeat, and there are many good choices. There are only FIVE Heists, though, but at least all of those offer a definite challenge, as well as paying well.

Many jobs can be finished quickly and easily, and pay $5K to $20K, some even more but those generally take longer. The job payment system uses time played as a factor in the payout, so succeeding quickly doesn’t necessarily make for more money per minute. The key factor to consider is the payout per minute, and to a lesser but close degree, how easily you (and your crew if any) can manage the job. You can use the Replay option to repeat missions which pay well, and this works especially well if the players are all Friends or Crew.

I also want to mention, again, that the common, low level, ordinary game play actions will net you a good bit of money. Sell cars. You can score better than $8K per real hour by remembering to hit the Mod Shop with a high value car for sale. It pays better to use the rare cars, but you need to consider the time it takes to find them. A $7K car sold now can be better than taking five minutes to find a $12K car, if you use those five minutes to score money on a job or other activity. You can store sale cars in your garages, and have them available every time you log into the game.

Store robberies and Gang Attacks (when unlocked) get about $1500 or so and are pretty easy, and don’t take long to do. I’ve become reluctant to rob the stores, as their owners are pretty nice and they sell me tasty treats (Snacks). But it is a pretty easy way to make money, especially at the beginning.

The Daily Objectives include things which encourage you to kill other players. The Bounties do so as well. You don’t get a great deal of money for these things, unless they are part of your Daily and you get that bonus money, but it usually isn’t too hard to kill other players in this game. There is a risk that you will start a vendetta, but try to keep that phase short. It can be fun to be involved in a fight, but it doesn’t pay well.

Races are generally a quick and easy way to make some money. While some races will take a lot longer than others, they pay based in part on time. Winning is the key to getting more unlocks in the mod shops. Each car class has different numbers of wins needed for the unlocks, but despite the wording, it only counts wins in LAND RACES with any sort of vehicle, not just wins using that class or type. Roughly, you’ll get the Turbo around 20 wins, which is the single biggest acceleration booster, and the last Brakes, Engine, and Transmission around 44 wins. Chrome paint is 50 wins, and that is the end of the unlock series for land racing itself. There are paints which require wins or actions in other types of races, including sea races.

To score wins, short races are better because you can get more wins in less time. You may want to strike a balance, because longer races and more laps gives you more time to compensate for accidents and mistakes, and also pays better. Especially early on, ranking up and making money can outweigh getting the unlocks faster. Plus at low rank and with limited money, custom cars in a race will be a disadvantage, because the higher ranked players can have all the upgrades and you can’t possibly match that. On the other side, using custom cars when you have upgrades not only can give you an advantage, it is fun to show them off, so often players want to have them on in races.

If you get into a lobby where you do well in the race, vote for Replay and see if the others will cooperate with the rematch. Doing the same track over and over can make scoring wins easier, and players may be more than content to learn while losing and hoping to win, thus giving you a chance to rack up more wins on your score.

The payout for racing is better with more players in the race, but it is fundamentally easier to be #1 among 4 players than 14. If you are good enough that isn’t as important, but while learning this can be your best shot to actually score some wins.

The feeling of being a big winner is great, but all too often I’d be in 2nd place, or anything which else which doesn’t pay bad but still doesn’t count as a win. When I was working to get Turbo unlocked, this could be frustrating. It did make me try harder.

One helpful thing to keep in mind is that the custom performance upgrades are of the greatest use — and only really worth spending money on — if you race with custom cars.

What can happen to make this a bit easier is when you get a lobby where everyone is trying for the same goal of quick wins. There are a lot of short tracks — Criminal Records set at one lap is a good example — where you can have a race which is quickly decided and won. You also can use these to try out cars you would otherwise not use, because it is harder to win with them and not worth spending several minutes driving a losing race.

A downside of winning races is that you’ll have more very expensive performance upgrades to buy for your cars.

Racing Custom Cars: There are a lot of reasonable choices, but only a few very good ones in each category unfortunately. On the plus side, there is enough difference in handling to make it worth taking a car which you like driving better, even if it isn’t the fastest. In both races and driving around Los Santos, speed alone will lead you into crashes. You need to be able to maneuver in order to win, and that is more subtle. The game stats don’t show enough to let you know how a car handles. The only way to really know is to try and drive one.

My Picks:

Super: Zentorno. The Adder can be faster in the straights but can’t turn as well, but it is so cool that you can be tempted to get one anyway. The Entity (which I haven’t bought yet) is a good contender too. In my race testing of the super cars, they are really fairly close in times despite different stats, and you actually can win with any of them. It is just easier with these ones, as they have a sight edge. I rate the Turismo pretty close as well, and like the Cheetah. OK, they are super cars, that means they are cool and worth considering even if you may not win races with them.

Sports: Elegy RH8. This is a good deal for the money, for a racing car, and you can use the money you save by not buying a more expensive car on upgrades. I also have a Banshee and Coquette, neither of which are as good for racing but they are cool to drive. The Jester and Massacro racing sports cars are fun too. Note also that you can get away with customizing cars you get off the street, as some of them are decent.

Sports Classic: Z-Type. I couldn’t afford one until very recently, and the class as a whole is pretty expensive. But they, like the Super cars, have such a coolness factor that you can get these simply because you want to drive around in them.

Off Road: Sanchez. You do have to handle bikes differently from cars, but it is faster than any of them if you do it right. I got an Enduro thinking it might be competitive, but no, the cheaper Sanchez is still the winner. The Bifta seems like the best dune buggy for off road driving if you don’t want a bike, but I haven’t bought one yet.

Bike: Akuma. The Bati is perhaps faster but the Akuma is easier to manage and still very competitive. I had a PCJ 600 and wanted to love it based on past GTA games, but it just didn’t offer anything better. I still have a Carbon RS, but rarely use it as the Akuma simply seems better. It is hard to make a Bike’s look standout, it would be cool if there were more highly visual mods you could put on them as on cars.

Sedan: Schafter. It handles well, decently fast. Also good for “harvesting,” finding similar cars when driving to steal for sale. An Oracle XS would be a decent choice to keep for “harvesting” too, but I prefer to keep unmodified ones as they seem pretty common and are easy to farm.

Compact: Blista. The Rhapsody looks like a good alternative but the Blista is quite fast enough, and you can get them off the street.

Coupe: Felon. Not the GT, because that can’t take a Spoiler, which improves handling a little. But it probably isn’t that critical, so either could do. Both are high value cars for sale as well.

Muscle: Gauntlet. If it could have a spoiler it might be even better. I have a Dominator as well. It was my first car in the game, and it is about as good as the Gauntlet, just a little harder to handle. I also have a Phoenix because I like the look.

SUV: Baller, V2. One of the cars with two models and one name, the 2nd version with the slanted roof is faster. Another one of the top sale cars.
Kuruma (Armored) and Insurgent: These aren’t for racing, though you certainly can mod them up and use them that way. No, they are tougher than the usual cars and do very well on combat based missions where you can use your own vehicles, as well as Heists.
Racing Choices: Most races use Super, Sports, and Offroad vehicles (as some tracks are purely offroad by design, the last is almost an essential choice). Muscle, Bikes, and Sports Classics are also fairly popular. Compacts and Sedans get used on a few tracks by default, Coupes seem even less popular, and SUVs are near the bottom, rarely chosen unless the racing group knows each other and wants the challenge.

As a result, you really only need a Super, Sport, Offroad, Bike, and Muscle car to have a good custom vehicle to help you win races with custom on. Note that you can get the Sanchez off the street, and it is pretty cheap anyway, and likewise for Muscle cars. Only the Super and Sport really have tempting high price offerings, and it is the Super car which will really require some savings to get. Note that there is no need to buy a car for racing until you have won enough races to give it performance upgrades. You do save a little money on entry fees if you use your own car.

Player created jobs and races can be fun, but some are pretty strange. There are some stunt tracks which require making jumps, and they can feel more like platform puzzle games than races. I’ve run into some where nobody knew how to make it through the race, forcing everyone to quit to avoid endless frustration. Most aren’t like that, and you can expect tha someone will figure out how to work with the new situation and finish.

Arena Death Matches, where there is an open battleground and walls to prevent escape, can provide a quick and intense battle. Some may limit weapons to melee or pistols, but I’ve seen RPG Death Matches which pretty much end with mass destruction with enough players. The “King Of The Hill” variants can be challenging too, where there are useful pickup weapons accessible only after climbing and jumping to the key spot, and everyone else has to make do with melee or weak weapons.
The Bad Stuff: Single player mods and hacks exist, but single player already supports cheat codes to let you modify how the game plays. But some of the same modifications work in GTA Online, and that can cause trouble.

Having a whale (or is it shark or dolphin?) fall from the sky, or a UFO appear, or trees grow up instantly along the side of the road, can be funny and strange, as long as no one gets hurt. But the same hacking tools allow for invulnerable players, super lethal weapons, teleportation, invisibility, instant money, instant remote death, and many more ways to warp the game far outside its normal play.  Rockstar has made attempts to counter this, but often the only solution is to leave the session.

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