I hit Rank 95 this weekend and am on track to reach the major milestone of Rank 100. In many ways, Rank 100 is the level where you have finally “made it” in the game. There are a lot of Rank 100 rewards unlocked, and nothing nearly as impressive comes along after that. You do get the Minigun at Rank 120, and more spare armor capacity, but Rank 100 is pretty much the last of the best unlocks. Last health upgrade, last car armor upgrade, unlocks the useful RPG, and a bunch of vehicles and other goodies to let you show off that you are successful in GTA.
I also made nearly $1 Million over the weekend. That is above average but it includes the very nice 28 consecutive Daily Objective bonus ($500K), but even without that it would be a good amount of money. Unfortunately, the game is marred by rampant hackers on the PC.
We ran into “drive by” money shooting hackers this weekend. They cruise around and shoot money bags at players, who automatically get the money when it hits them. Of course, they can use the money hacks to get as much money as they want, which makes working hard to earn money legitimately in the game rather frustrating. If everyone else is getting tons of free money with no downsides, why work for it?
I hit on this before, but if you do get hit with money you didn’t intend to get, the only recourse is spending it right away. Best on something exotic which you don’t really need — a boat or plane for example. You can leave sessions to avoid hackers, but even passive mode is not a defense against the money attackers. In essence, the hackers use their”free money” gifts to get a pass to do whatever else they want, because other players aren’t as inclined to report them.
Rockstar’s Shark Cards are pretty much worthless in an environment where non-hackers can get as much money as they will ever want just by joining a session with this kind of hacker. They are pretty common too. This weekend, every single big public session I joined had hackers. Not all were shooting money — blocking apartment and garage locations was a problem too — but there was nowhere safe from them other than private sessions. And jobs, I didn’t see anyone using hacks in them this time, though it does happen.
Threats of bans and cheater zone banishment may discourage some of this, but obviously has little real deterrent at this time. I would think that Rockstar would want this kind of thing blocked by technical means rather than player reports, but for the time being, it is quite a problem.
On the flip side, the Jobs players are all usually pretty good. Racers especially. There are a lot of serious Race drivers out there, who treat GTA as a serious racing game despite its action orientation and simplified physics. The variety of cars and race types make it a lot of fun, especially with friendly players.
First tip: Don’t crash into other cars. You are more likely to mess up your own driving doing so, and a “clean” racer will be able to pull ahead when that happens.
Heists and Missions remain very popular and a lot of fun especially if you can get a group together to run them. They are one of the best parts of the GTA Online experience.
