Starting out in GTA Online, you should do the introduction missions. You get money, it helps you get acquainted with the game, and you’ll advance in rank safely. During this, you will get a chance to get your first Personal Vehicle. You get your pick of any car or bike you can steal off the street, as long as it isn’t so expensive (or hot) that you can’t modify it at the Mod Shop. Simeon will give you any modifications you want (that you’ve unlocked so far) for free, so take your time looking over your choices when you take your car in.
I picked a Dominator, a very good Muscle Car, well suited for racing. As your first car will also be the vehicle you use for early jobs and missions, you’ll want something fairly fast and easy enough to drive. But as races are good jobs to make money on, and unlock more upgrades for your cars, picking a good race car as your first car is a sensible option. You will already have some free personalized modifications (paint job, at least) for this car, so that can save you a little money. The Muscle cars are a good category, because there are actual choices to make, not one single car recommended as best.
Another fairly good choice is the Felon. It is a very good Coupe when fully upgraded, and a pretty fast car for missions. A Baller V2 would have potential if you wanted an SUV, but SUV races aren’t so common and it (and compacts) just aren’t that fast for cruising around in.
Sports, sadly, aren’t a great choice except for missions. The more expensive Sports cars available for purchase beat all the street cars easily. The Elegy RH8 is a very good deal once you get the money, but you can’t steal and keep one.
You will quite quickly reach Rank 5, at which point you can buy properties.
Property:
So you want to invest in real estate? Only two things really matter in GTA.
Size. They come in Low, Medium, and High End places, with 2 car, 6 car, and 10 car garages.
Location, Location, Location. What’s around the neighborhood, and how close is it to places you need to go in the game.
As far as game functionality goes, all apartments and garages of the same level are exactly equal. You get different furnishings and scenery, and views if you have windows, but while cool to show off and to sit in between missions, it won’t affect game play at all.
Garages don’t have an apartment attached, but otherwise tend to be just as useful as apartments with garages for most game purposes. You can do a lot of business in the game without ever entering your apartment.
There are two useful things which do require apartments. First, the closet. You can organize and change your clothes here. Second, the High End apartments have the Heist Room, an office where you can join or lead (after rank 12) heists.
So what to look for in a location? #1 — The Los Santos Customs Mod Shop. A lot of your activity in the game will revolve around these. Stealing and selling cars, and modifying cars you already own. They also offer an escape location from the police. Secondary concerns are things like AmmuNation (buy weapons and ammo) and Stores (get snacks and maybe quick robbery cash.
Another minor concern is the accessibility and visibility of its entrance. Your garage and apartment are a safe refuge from both police and other players. You can’t enter when wanted by the police if they can see you do it, so having a little cover or a bit of distance from view (like curves in roads) can help a bit. It often isn’t hard to run around a bit and get enough distance to enter any garage (or Mod Shop) even if the cops are in the area.
You only really need one High End Apartment. You can buy three properties, but the other two can be just garages if all you want to do is store more cars and have some convenient alternate spawn points. There are only a handful of High End Apartment locations, and they are all in the downtown and rich areas of Los Santos.
What did I do? With about $1 Million burning a hole in my pocket between preorder bonuses and early game jobs, I just took the most expensive place I could find. It is a popular area, but you can get the location without taking the most expensive apartment. The Eclipse (and nearby Tinsel) Tower has a mod shop pretty close, and is fairly centrally located, which is good for a lot of missions. I don’t regret the purchase, but I could have saved nearly half the cost and had a perfectly functional Heist headquarters.
I also bought a 10 car garage. I picked the location before I discovered that you can’t keep Simeon’s Export Cars in your garage — you must find and steal them off the street each time. I could have picked a location closer to a mod shop, but it is good for some activities, in a nice area for harvesting cars (drive out of garage with one to sell, find another one like it and sell it instead). It is also out of the way of many player’s chosen primary homes, which can be useful if I’m trying to avoid unnecessary conflicts.
Last, I picked a Medium (6 car) place in Blaine County, near a mod shop and a useful base when I want to work from that area. Or just hide away from the high energy action going on in the big city. The area has no 10 car properties, so that is as big as I can get there.
Note that your Mechanic, who you get when you purchase any property, can deliver cars from any of your garages to your location, fairly fast. So for storage, the location isn’t important, just the size.
What if you’re starting out without bonus cash? Well, much depends on your plans. You can do jobs, especially missions, and make enough cash to get a High End Apartment fairly early in the game. The downside is that you will be stuck with one car, no ability to purchase cars online, and no place to change and organize clothes. You can survive this — buy outfits in the stores, use your one car for all missions.
A 10 car garage can also be a decent choice. It is something you can use even when you get a better apartment, as extra car storage and a spawn location is always useful. They are priced in the range of a Medium apartment, sometimes even cheaper.
It can also make sense to buy a really cheap Low End place and plan to trade it in later. This gives you a working starter home, doesn’t burn up too much money, and won’t waste much when you trade it in later. A two car garage is really too small to both keep a working mission or race car and also collect up cars for sale. But it is just fine to start out with.
Weapons:
Guns! I bought them all. I like to try them out for myself and see the differences between them. I have enough money for them. Only downsides? More weapons means a longer time to switch between them, and the default on spawn may not be the weapon you really want. Of the defaults, for me I get Pistol (would rather have AP Pistol), Assault Rifle (the carbines are better), and the Pump Shotgun (not bad for intimidation but the Assault Shotgun is usually better).
Still, it doesn’t take long to change them when you spawn, and it makes you think about which ones are best for what you’re doing. The game has a lot of weapons to choose from.
Clothes: These aren’t that expensive, so it is just a matter of picking what you want. You can spend more if fashion matters to you, but it is nothing near the other areas of spending
Armor and Gear: Most equipment, like weapons and attachments, only needs to be purchased once. Then you have it forever. It is possible to drop weapons if you don’t need them, but it is rarely needed. Ammo does cost to replace, and can be a big expense. Armor and Parachutes must be replaced when used, and you will need to hit the Ammunation to get them. You can replace ammo and armor between some jobs, but you can’t get extra armor except from the store.
Explosive ammo is not cheap, and you can spend a lot of money replacing it if you use a lot. At roughly $250 per grenade and $500 per high explosive rockets and bombs, it is easy to burn through $10K of ammo on one mission or fight.
Your capacity for armor, ammo, and snacks increases with rank.
Obsessed With Cars!
The game is Grand Theft Auto after all. Obtaining and customizing a collection of cool cars is an addicting core part of the game. Once you get all the unlocks, you can spend $100K to $300K — and perhaps more — upgrading one car. And while you don’t need every expensive performance upgrade for cars which are just for showing off, it is tempting to do so anyway simply because they are your special cars. Why not make them the best you can?
I’ll divide the cars into three categories, based on what you need them for in the game, though there is some overlap between the categories.
#1: The Mission cars: Fast, tough, decent off road handling, and depending on your finances, cheap enough to afford the insurance payment to replace them when destroyed. Space for four passengers is also good if you want to use the car to move your mission team mates and crew around. Cars are much more effective in combat when they have passengers to take out targets while the driver navigates the mission. Often, a fast 2 passenger car is quite sufficient for these things, as you don’t always have three people handy to fill the passenger seats. The fastest Super and Sports cars are good for this. Speed can matter a lot, making it easier to get to missions, run from cops, and such.
The Heist DLC adds two very effective mission cars: The Kuruma (Armored) and the Insurgent, unlocked in the Fleeca and Humane Raid Heists respectively. The Insurgent Pick Up is armed but is a Pegasus vehicle, so you can’t store it in a garage, mod it, or have it available for casual driving around all the time. The Kuruma (Armored) and Insurgent come with built in armor and bulletproof tires, which could be considered a nice cost savings.
The Kuruma is the winner for this category. It is a fast sports car and it is very well armored. It is entirely bulletproof from the front and back, and only has small openings on the side (the bullet slits) where shots can get through. Since you can shoot at enemies in front of you as the driver, this makes it extremely easy to take out foes as long as you keep them in front of you. The passengers can shoot to the rear, but the driver cannot. It does have a big downside — the armored windows block you from using thrown explosives. It also is not especially resistant to explosives, which isn’t usually a problem on missions but worth keeping in mind if the enemies (like other players) are willing to blow you up. It is a nice four passenger vehicle too, which is useful.
The Insurgent is a six passenger off road vehicle, with an armored body but it lacks the bulletproof windshield of the Kuruma, so the driver is vulnerable to attack. It is much more resistant to explosives, able to take multiple (3 to 4) hits and survive. It is also a massive vehicle, able to push most others out of the way easily. And while not as fast as the Kuruma, it can take mods and become very good at getting you and your crew around the map safely.
The Kuruma (Armored) is almost unfair to use against the police. I’ve got up to five wanted stars with it and they do almost no damage to me while I’m driving. If I do take hits, I usually can run and heal (or use snacks and armor) to keep going. I took out police choppers using it, with only the Micro SMG available (best gun usable from inside it). With care, you can survive alone against most of the normal NPC opponents in the game.
In Free Roam against other players, it is easy to kill with explosives. It will cost the player about $6500 Insurance cost to do so without justification, which can act as a deterrent to such attacks, but won’t stop them. The side windows are hard to shoot through but not impossible. One time driving around, I and my passenger were picked off by a single sniper shot from the side — either good skill or luck. But if the shot doesn’t kill you, running away usually will work to keep you alive in the Kuruma (Armored). It can get funny when both players in a fight are using one.
Which happens pretty often. I think it is the most popular mission car now in GTA, with the Insurgent coming a close second. The armed Insurgent isn’t bad, but requires calling Pegasus which puts it into the class like the armed Helicopters and the Rhino Tank.
They do cost a lot, figure with mods to need a cool million (so as to have money leftover) to buy and fully upgrade each of these. If you aren’t going to use one of these two, speed and handling are probably the key priority, since driving to and during missions easily is the goal.
Most such cars also will double as decent Race Cars, and that is the next category. You can kill two birds with one stone by selecting a decent racing car as your early mission car. Or at least, trying to fit out select Race Cars with the Armor and Bulletproof Tires which help a lot on missions.
Race Cars: One “trick” or bit of trivia which is useful to know is that the “need X wins in class” to unlock really means that you need to have “X Wins” in land races of any type in order to get that unlock for that class of cars. So you don’t have to worry about trying for wins in the Compact cars in order to get upgrades for those, as wins in Super, Sports, Bikes, etc., all count.
Super and Sports are the most popular race classes for custom cars, with Offroad and Bikes fairly popular as well. You will likely want one Race vehicle for each of these classes. At the start, it can be hard to come up with the money for some of the most expensive choices. Also, using custom cars in races means having the unlocks (from race wins) and money to afford all the performance upgrades to make the best use of them.
Sports: This is an easy class because the Elegy RH8 is a great car and not that expensive. Note that price is not a good indicator of a car’s racing performance. Also, the in game shopping websites do not give completely accurate information about the cars. Legendary is especially inaccurate — do not pay any attention to the speeds shown on it.
Supers: Zentorno and Entity XF are the two top cars. The Zentorno has better acceleration, the Entity better handling on turns. Both are pretty expensive cars, making this category require a good bank account before you can really take advantage of it. Best to get some race wins for unlocks before you spend money on these, since you will need the upgrades to compete with other players with custom cars.
The new Osiris is a new top car, in the same class as the other two.
I’ve tried the other cars in these classes and while you can sometimes win and do well, depending on the race and other drivers, these are the most consistent winners. It is worth trying out every car in non-custom races, just to see how you like them. Best in short races, in order to try out more and be less frustrated if you find one too hard to use, but worth doing simply as a way to “test drive” the cars before you buy them.
Offroad: Sanchez, one of the best racing bikes out there. You do need to manage the wheelies to maximize speed, and as with all bikes watch your collisions, but nothing else is nearly as fast. The Bifta is the best off road car for racing. Most off road tracks have narrow paths, which make the larger vehicles tricky to use on them.
Bikes: Bati 801 and Akuma. These are pretty close, with the Bati being faster but the Akuma handling better, and therefore easier to keep on the path in many races. Note that bikes are the fastest vehicles in GTA (and have been for a long time in the series), despite the stats shown both in game and on the vehicle store websites.
Custom Upgrades:
For performance, the Acceleration upgrades are the most important.
#1: Turbo. Takes about 20 races to unlock, depending on class. Max is 25% boost.
#2: Engine. About 34 races, and gives max 15% boost, four levels.
#3: Transmission, about 40 races, gives a max 5 % boost. Three levels.
Note: The game stat bars for vehicles are neither accurate nor complete. The acceleration bar can be easily filled up without getting all three mods. They all do add to acceleration, which means the actual value is “off the scale” literally. If you look at the upgrades BEFORE you install any of them — especially the very effective Turbo upgrade — you will get an idea of what each one adds.
Once you get the Turbo unlocked, you should use it as the first performance upgrade on any racing car. Before that, the Engine upgrades are the best value, and they remain the best to add after the Turbo is installed.
For racing, having all three maxed — a total of 45% boost — will have only a slight effect on lap race times. Maximum speed isn’t affected, but it may make it easier to reach that speed, and certainly quicker. It offers an advantage in accelerating off the line, and in recovering if you are forced to stop.
Brakes: A good upgrade with four levels, but have only a small effect on the stat bar and a minor, but useful, advantage in the game.
Spoiler: Any spoiler gives a small boost to Traction. It doesn’t matter what type, so pick whatever you think looks nice.
Wheels: The effect of changing the wheel from stock rims is subtle. There is no effect for driving on pavement, which is where you will be most of the time when driving. When you go off roads, though, you will get a small improvement in grip with customized rims (and the tires which go with them. Offroad seems to be the best when driving off the roads, with Tuner, Sport, and Low Rider almost as good. The effect is minor, though, so you can go with whatever you think looks nicest for the car.
Everything else has no significant effect on performance as such. Pick whatever you think looks best.
Suspension and Armor both are tied to Rank for upgrading, rather than unlocked by races or other game actions. Armor improves your resistance to bullets, while suspension may improve cornering, it also can help with landing after jumps.
The in game website Legendary Motorsports does not have accurate stats for the cars shown on it. For example, the Z-Type is probably the fastest Sports Classic, despite the relatively low top speed shown for it. San Andreas stats are more accurate, but Maximum Speed doesn’t mean what you’d think it would mean. That applies for the in game stat bar as well. It is actually the maximum potential speed the car is capable of, but it may not be able to do so using its stock upgrades, and may need the racing boosters (Slipstream and the boost items) even then. Acceleration is a much better measure of relative performance in races, with the Traction stat a good guide for how well it will handle corners.
Cruising Around San Andreas
The last category of cars to buy? I call them Cruisers — cars to take around Los Santos for fun, just to show off. A closely related class are Harvesters — cars which are similar to ones you want to find and sell.
The top cars for Harvesting for me are: Baller ($9000, and a good SUV to race), Felon/Felon GT ($9000/9500 and a good Coupe for racing), and the Oracle/Oracle XS ($8000/8200 and OK for racing with the XS but not spectacular). These cars are fairly easy to find on the street, but driving one of them does increase the chance that they will spawn, especially in parked locations.
In practice, these can also be some of your racing cars, especially for the other classes, if they perform well enough. Most can be obtained off the street — steal them and customize them with purchased insurance — rather than obtained from the online stores.
So, what do I stock?
Super: Zentorno
Sport: Elegy RH8
Offroad: Sanchez
Bike: Akuma & Bati 801.
Muscle: Dominator & Gauntlet. Both are good, the Gauntlet can handle better on some tracks with tight turns.
SUV: Baller V2 (the one with the sloped roof, it is faster)
Sedan: Schafter
Coupe: Felon (not GT, because the GT version can’t take a spoiler)
Compact: Blista
Sports Classic: Z-Type. One of the most expensive cars in the game and a rare exception to the purchase price not reflecting performance.
I also have:
Adder: Fastest rated super car and looks cool, but it just doesn’t handle well enough in most races.
Coquette and Banshee Topless: The cool factor is important here. Either one isn’t bad for Sports but nothing beats the Elegy in races.
Phoenix: Just for cool looks.
Kuruma (Armored): A Mission car, you can race it but that isn’t its strength.
I had a PCJ 600 (classic of the series), Enduro (its website info makes it look like a good alternative to Sanchez), and Carbon RS (not bad looking nor slow, but isn’t the fastest bike). Bikes are harder to customize in ways that make them stand out when you look at them on the street. I’d love to see neon light kits for them.
Cars which I think would be cool and I may get: Bifta (tiny offroad fun) (Got one now, is fun for riding on the beach and hills), Stinger Classic (looks cool), Sandking – I had one but sold it for garage space. It could be fun to take on off road trips even if it won’t win races). The Rhapsody and Blade are decent cars for their class for racing, and can’t be found on the street. The Exemplar is a nice sedan, both in looks and speed. I haven’t filled up my garages yet.
Street Stealing vs Buying Online: A lot of good cars suited for racing and missions can be found on the streets of Los Santos, and customized. Some of the street Sports like the Sultan have good potential. You can save a little money by using these rather than buying cars off the websites. The customization costs will tend to overwhelm the purchase price of all of the cheaper vehicles, if you use all the performance upgrades. Some of the appearance customizations are rather expensive as well.
The cars you can buy online, and the more expensive models available online, are only slightly better than the cheaper cars available off the street (or for Supers, for the cheapest choices). The key words are “Slightly better.”
All the performance upgrades only shave a few percent off the lap times in most races. Upgrade costs tend to be based off the car’s list price as well, so a cheaper can will cost less to fully upgrade than a more expensive type. Upgrades can make almost any car outperform a stock vehicle, with the Turbo upgrade almost guaranteed to do so.
Special Vehicles
Elite, Boats, And War Stock: First thing to remember is that most of these are stored with Pegasus. It will cost you $200 each time you want to use it, and you will need to pick it up wherever Pegasus has it available. That may not be the closest or most convenient location. South Los Santos has a lot of good locations, like the Airport, Marina, Extreme Sports, Hospital, Elysium Island. For Helicopters, many heliports and airports will serve.
Once called for, any player can take them, unlike a personal vehicle. Try to be near a potential pick up location when you make the call, or at least, look to see if other players are near. This will take a little experience to get used to.
Some land vehicles are normal Personal Vehicles and can be kept in your garage. The Insurgent (not the armed Pickup model) is one good one.
Keep in mind that you can often easily steal these sorts of vehicles if you know the spawn locations. It is cheaper but a bit riskier than buying them. You need to think about what you will use them for before you spend money to have your own mostly legal special vehicles available.
#1: Get To The Chopper! A Helicopter is the most useful air vehicle you can buy. It can take off and land from almost anywhere, and can be used on many missions. It goes fast, and can carry passengers. Some missions actually require you to obtain a helicopter in order to succeed, so having one of your own handy can make that much easier. As you advance in rank, the types of vehicles which will spawn on the map will change. Once you find armed helicopters spawning at the airfields, you can take advantage of this in many ways.
The Buzzard Attack Helicopter is available at Rank 42 and is one of the more flexible vehicles in the game. Fast, has both guns and missiles, and can easily be operated in combat with one pilot. The other armed helicopters can benefit more from additional crew. The Hydra Jump Jet unlocked with the Heists can make a fine alternative, but it costs $3 Million. The Swift is the fastest helicopter (update: the Supervolito is even faster), and available at lower rank, and can be better for getting around if you don’t need weapons.
Planes and boats are nice to have for fun, but aren’t usually needed or even useful for missions. You can do OK without having them, especially as they are available to steal from the same places you’d usually go to pick up yours.
Making Money:
The general stuff that you do in the game normally will make you enough money to keep going in the game just fine. Take jobs, rob stores, sell stolen cars, go after targets and missions called for by the NPCs, etc. The Daily Objectives added with Heists are also an excellent way to make extra money. You get $25K and 3000 RP for completing them, and most of the things you need to do are stuff that you could do in the game normally — and often are Jobs that pay money for that as well. You also get bigger bonuses for doing them 7 days in a row, with longer streaks paying higher bonuses. While some of the tasks are harder than others, most aren’t too hard to pull off. A few will require another player to cooperate and join in your objective, but having one friend available can make that part easy.
You can usually do your Daily Objectives in your first hour of play, and sell two stolen cars, plus possibly one export car for Simeon. Call that $60K for pretty easy work, and it can leave time to do stuff to earn more money. The bonus for not missing any days for a month will boost this to about $100K, for less than an hour of playtime per day.
The Big Money Deals: Missions and Heists.
All of the cooperative missions, and the Heists especially, work well with a small crew of 2-4 players who can work together. These can net you an easy $100K per hour. Some Missions can be pulled off solo, but there is a payout bonus for additional players. That is, each player gets more money. Of these, some are very easy to pull off once you are familiar with them. They pay based on the time taken to perform the mission, up to 15 minutes.
Heists have a somewhat complex system for the payout, with the big money only coming in the Finale mission. The Heist Leader only gets paid for that part, while the rest will be paid for each Setup mission as well.
Note that putting these on Hard rather than Normal will increase the payout nicely, if you have a crew which can do the job. It takes little or no more time to do it on hard. Easy, on the other hand, is really only useful to get a look at a job where you don’t know what to do, as the cut in pay doesn’t make it worthwhile.
All of the other jobs which involve shooting tend to pay OK, but aren’t as predictable in pay as with the missions. They can be quite good for RP.
Activities such as sports are mostly good for RP, not money, but some can give surprisingly large amounts for that.
Bets: These are rarely worth using because you don’t know who will win. You can use the odds shown for the payoff to try to guess, as well as information from previous rounds with the same players. It requires a minimum of two bets to be placed, but you can place both if there are more than two players in an event yourself.
The Regular GTA Day: First, I sell a car. I always try to keep a car in my spawn garage which I can sell for good money. Once I sell a car, and especially if it was the last one in that garage, I try to look for another to replace it right away. If I’m lucky, as I head out to the Mod Shop to sell it, I’ll see another good car on the way. I’ll then steal it and sell it instead, keeping the car I had. Often, you will find a car similar to the one you just sold as you leave the mod shop, and can just steal that. If it looks like there are violent players outside my garage or the mod shop, I’ll use passive mode to complete the sale.
Next, I check my Daily Objectives. OK, I might have checked before I left, but usually I want to do the car sale first. I look to see which ones are easiest, and how much time I think it will take to do them. Any objectives I can quickly and easily do, I go for. If one of the objectives is a difficult one, I may actually try to do it first. If I can’t pull it off, then there isn’t any reason to do the others.
So, what are the difficult Daily Objectives?
http://gta.wikia.com/Daily_Objectives
Get a Gold Medal in a Flight School Lesson (depends on flying skill and how far along you are in Flight School, you may be just fine with this)
Any two player sports activity. They are actually pretty easy to do, the trick is finding players to join in. Tennis takes the longest to play, due to the game rules of Tennis itself.
Perform a Stunt Jump — at this time, it needs to be one you haven’t done before. Because nothing visible to you as a player lets you know which jumps are completed, this can be difficult. The “Downtown Underground” race has one stunt jump in it, which may work as a substitute, and make this one a little easier.
Participate in a 1 on 1 Deathmatch
Participate in an Impromptu Race
Both of these are hard only because you need a cooperative opponent, not because the event is hard.
Evade a 4 star wanted level
Evade a 5 star wanted level
First, you have to earn these, then you must pull off the evasion. There are places to do it, but it doesn’t make these easy.
Parachute dangerously (deploy parachute 200 feet or less from the ground)
Pull a parachute 30 meters from the ground
Both of these are hard only because judging the distance can be hard — and you can’t die immediately, so the chute has to deploy completely and give you a chance to land.
Bribe the cops then cause havoc (blow up 10-20 cars after paying the cops to Turn a Blind Eye)
This one isn’t that hard to do, but unless you have an armed vehicle it can cost you a lot of money for ammo, on top of the $5000 for the bribe. One of the least cost-effective objectives to do, as it will cut into your profits.
Participate in a Rally Race
The race is easy, getting someone to join in isn’t so much. Picking a race with an easy loop track (like Criminal Records) can make doing it less of a strain.
Overall, the reward for doing the Daily Objectives is excellent, and it is always worth trying to do them. You get extra bonuses for doing them every day (every seven and 28 days), which makes it even better.
If I see the Red Gang Attack areas, I may hit some of them. It usually only takes a few minutes to take them out, and it pays OK for the time spent – $1500 or more and 500 RP plus the points you get for kills.
If there are calls by Lester or the other NPCs to go after a free roam target, or if the Armored Truck shows up, it can be worth the time to go after them. As these are open to all players in the session, others may be closer and take them out first. Simeon’s green export car is often too much trouble to grab when other players chase it. I may let whoever gets to it first take it, rather than fight over it, because the fight all too often ends up with the car destroyed and no one getting much out of it.
Next, Jobs. First, Heists. You’ll see a lot of calls for these. I like having four good players available to start them myself (two for the Fleeca job), and it requires a couple of hours commitment to run through one full heist from start to finale. While you can take breaks between them, it tends to work better if everyone can stick together, especially if you have a group which seems to know what they are doing and can coordinate. Also, the Finale is the big payoff, and it is rather nice to have the crew which started it present to finish to get the big bucks at the end.
Missions require up to 15 minutes each, and 1 to 4 players who can work together (for the best paying contact missions). These can pay over $20K for each player, which is very good money for the time spent. Some are fairly easy to pull off, many offer interesting challenges, and you will learn which ones are easiest for your crew to complete efficiently. Playing them on Hard rather than Normal gets you 20% cash, which is worth doing as long as you can succeed. This is better than $1K per minute, which is pretty decent money in GTA.
Other jobs are less predictable in their pay per minute. If you find one which can pay well, or you just enjoy, you can keep doing it (the Replay option is available if all vote for it). Survival is good with players who can keep up through all the waves, as the payoff isn’t bad.
All jobs have the same lobby and basic loading times to deal with. You don’t earn money for those parts, so you want a job which will pay well for the active time spent playing. A lot of races are quite short, but also often can have fairly short loading times to help make up for it (especially with replays). If all players want to keep redoing a job which pays well, the Replay option can be a very good way to make more money faster.
Then there is Cruising. Just going around the world in free roam, with no special objectives. This is mostly for fun, or to relax, but can include hitting up shops and modding cars and taking care of some of the supporting business you do in the game.
Now, other players and NPCs can get in the way of a pleasure cruise around town, but that is part of the game as well. The game gives you some incentives to kill other players in Free Roam. First, Bounties. If you steal some NPC cars off the street, they may set a bounty on you because you “stole the wrong person’s ride.” Expect other players to kill you to collect it. This is nothing personal, it is built into the game. If you have a friend online, you can have them kill you to collect the bounty. Daily Objectives can include killing other players, though you can do so during Jobs and it will count (as in Deathmatches), so they don’t have to hunt you in free roam to do so. Some gun tints are locked based on player kills, but those aren’t needed to play the game so aren’t a strong incentive to kill players just to get them.
No, mostly, players who shoot at each other in free roam do it as a type of free for all open world death match. If you don’t want to participate in this fighting, you can avoid shooting at the other players, or go to Passive Mode to avoid conflict. The idea is to have fun doing it, not be frustrated.
Quick Travel: There is no fast, teleport to another location system in GTA Online as such. The Taxi — and all other NPC driven vehicles like the subway trains and helicopter rides — will travel normally to their destination. Usually at a safe speed, not the sorts of hazardously fast driving that players use.
Jobs, however, will take you to the location of the job when you join it. When you leave the job, you — and your personal vehicle — will be left in the area of that job. This can be faster than travelling normally, and your vehicle will not only get there without damage, but will be entirely repaired as well (you will also be healed when you do a job). You can use the map to start a job at a location you want. Some jobs can be started with one player and completed quickly. At the very least, the time you spend playing the job pays well, and may be no longer than your normal travel time to your destination.
Player created jobs and playlists add variety to the game. Some are very hard challenges, and verge on the impossible, but most add new fun choices to the activities you will do in this game.
