Your missing character issues may be going away — Rockstar says they’ve got a patch coming that promises to fix game progress issues in Grand Theft Auto Online, which has been facing serious problems since it launched last week.
You won’t get your zapped characters back, but at least the mass character deletions — widely reported by players of Rockstar’s online game for the past few days — might be coming to an end soon. The patch is already live on the PlayStation Network, and it will go live on Xbox Live tomorrow.
“This title update will resolve the cause of players losing their gameplay progress except for some specific instances where players purchase a vehicle and the save does not occur due to a cloud save failure,” Rockstar writes. “A fix for that particular issue is being worked on and we will provide an update as soon as we know when this will be resolved.”
Via Rockstar, here’s a list of all the fixes:
- Fixes multiple issues causing character deletion or other loss of progress
- Fixes issues causing infinite loading, infinite sky cams, and missing interface options between jobs
- Fixes an issue causing the “replay” option to be locked out on certain jobs
- Fixes an issue where a player would become stuck in the mod garage when respraying a Sanchez motor bike
- Fixes an issue where the Player became stuck inside Los Santos Customs during Online tutorial flow.
- Fixes an issue causing the loss of guns and ammo
- Fixes issues causing GTA races ending early because of players spawning too far ahead
- Fixes issues in Last Team Standing where sessions would not progress past the lobby
- Fixes issues with network errors when joining Last Team Standing using Quick Job
- Added clarifications around when a player is using a temporary character in GTA Online during Rockstar Cloud server outages
- Adjusts the monetary penalty for being killed in a One on One match
Sadly, it doesn’t seem like Rockstar plans to restore characters that have been deleted, but the company apologizes for the bugs and reminds us all to save before we quit:
In the meantime, please always remember to save your game before leaving GTA Online, otherwise you may lose any progress since your last save — this can be done by exiting back to Single Player through the pause menu. Until downloading the title update above and in order to minimize the chances of any further data loss, if at any point you receive the message “Rockstar Cloud Servers are unavailable”, please do not either select the “Retry” option or create a temporary Character to play GTA Online. Instead, you should exit to GTAV Story Mode and try entering GTA Online again through the menu in Story Mode. Please also stay tuned or subscribe to the GTA Online Status Updates article at the Rockstar Support site for the latest word on common known technical issues and fixes.
Launch has been rocky for GTA Online, as Rockstar predicted it might be — server lag, random errors, and character deletion have plagued the multiplayer portion of Rockstar’s gargantuan open-world game since it went live on October 1. But we’ve enjoyed what we’ve played so far, when it works.
Comments
39 responses to “New GTA Online Patch Promises No More Missing Characters”
Yeah, so far it might not be the hardcore rock-solid multiplayer experience that we’re used to with refined titles like COD and Halo, but regardless of the issues, it’s honestly been some of the best fun I’ve had online in ages.
(now if only I could get some more time to play it!)
Same here man. But to be fair we haven’t been affected by this. If we spent 40 hours only to have all our progress wiped just before we get the ‘good stuff’, we’d be pretty pissed off.
The most annoyed I’ve been so far (first world gaming problem) is that the Coquette I ordered for $150K was the targa top variant. So no roof and no windows. Which means I can’t make it look exactly how I want. Kind of annoyed that you have to play the lottery with that model hoping to get the right one, while other models have an actual convertible variant you can order separately.
Yeah i totally understand that. I’d be annoyed losing all the progress, but seeing as I have a total of $15k and my biggest investment so far is a pig mask, then i probably won’t be at a big loss if I lose my character…..it’s a pretty sweet pig mask though
I ran around for most of the MP game so far in my shorts, flip flops and a pig mask! 😀
I’ve made a whole back story for my character and everything. Actually, we’re trying to make it a clan thing, coming up with back stories, just for some fun.
Yo! Sorry about the party thing last night. It’s hard when there’s 3 bunch of people doing completely different things. 🙁
We should play this weekend though!
Cloud technology. Why couldn’t we just save on our local drives? Its just a game. Wait, microtrnsactions. Shit.
Well….. this is awkward.
Not really. Its only awkward if you choose for it to be awkward.
I want to be awkwardly running around in just underpants like Trevor.
I think I’ve hit all these bugs but I’m still having fun. Last night I stole a ute from an NPC and the NPC put a bounty of $9000 on me…..I did not even know NPCs could do bounties, let alone a $9000 one. I thought of doing what everyone else seems to do and high tail it to my apartment but then I thought bugger it and drove around….I killed 5 potential bounty hunters before the sixth one caught me while I was buying (shoplifting) some cigarettes and shot me in the back of the head…good times.
The whole NPC bounty thing sucks… normal players will only spend money on a bounty if they are really pissed or have a lot of money, NPCs drop thousands on you and players just start a hunting….
I wondered why ppl had so much spare cash to throw away on bounties, fun for me hunting though
I’m still waiting for them to fix the issue when you do a mission with friends from a closed session and then after the mission go to freemode… it splits you up onto different sessions.
Sucks
I concur. It’s not a major problem but it would save some time.
Also I hope they’re not fixing the Like + Retry exploit yet. 😉
care to divulge? I have noticed replay doesnt work anymore
Yes of course. So after you finish a mission and it goes to the summary screen, press Y to like (I assume it’s triangle on the PS3) and then quickly press the right trigger to restart the mission. Or R2 I think on PS3.
This lets you replay missions over and over again. The best one being Base Invaders for $25,000 per run. Takes 7 – 10 minutes but since they now nerfed Violent Ducts, it’s probably the best buck for time mission.
might have to check that out, me and a mate thought we were doing well repeating one for $5,000 haha, we are only rank 15 or so and are doing the bumboy missions, pick up drugs, steal car etc etc
I believe you have to be level 27 to get the Base Invaders mission.
Today’s patch disabled the mission replay (aka: grind) feature.
Indeed it did. I should have used it more (only did it a small handful of times).
Mainly to make up for all the glitches. Like spending tens of thousands on upgrading a car only to have all those upgrades vanish when I return to my garage. >:(
Rooftop Rumble is currently the best. I made 300k in 20mins from this mission not to mention the levels I also gained. Then they patched the replay option lol
Since we’re on the topic of exploits, the other one I know of is that you can take a car to LS Customs. You then go to sell it and immediately after you confirm the sale you press Start and go to the Xbox Marketplace or PSN. Then after that loads, you get back out of it and get taken back to LS Customs with the cash in your inventory but you still have your car.
I only tried this once to see if it works and indeed it did. I suspect that it would be a massive exploit if you kept selling an upgraded car. However these are the sort of exploits I avoid as it invalidates the progression completely.
They fixed it with today’s patch (1.03).
THIS!
I don’t normally say this and I personally didn’t experience any issues, but seriously… WTF Rockstar? People have been doing just this and losing their characters.
It can’t be that hard to do a query and dig up a backup of player’s characters. And if that’s not possible because for some reason there aren’t backups, then it’s just shit back end design if a roll back cannot be performed and really slack on their part.
There’s people that have sunk 40+ hours into this and then lost their characters.
Lucky the game is fun to play no matter what your level is!
Exactly. I’ve lost five characters so far, all well above level 20. My last character to disappear did so just a little while ago, post-patch.
:O
Whoa, that really sucks. I thought the point of this patch was to address that problem.
the reason people lose their characters is because GTO is still performing background processes involving the save file when the user quits, corrupting the save file (Very similar system to a USB drive and ejecting that).
The going back to story mode and saving thing is due to the fact that GTAO does not save whilst in free mode, so any money from bounty’s and such are lost if you dashboard.
I’m pretty sure both of these guys were quitting back to single player each time they stopped playing. So it’s more than that. And by pretty sure, I mean 100% sure because the learned not to go to the dashboard way before this happened.
Regardless, there should be backups of the characters so I don’t get why they can’t roll people back.
Yeah… this doesn’t really help those who’ve lost characters and progress.
I probably won’t be returning to Online until the heists are added.
Have I missed something? When are we able to do heists in online mode?
heists will be added within a few weeks!
YAY!!! Thanks for the reply 🙂
how do you even save your game in online is it the same as single player?
It auto-saves every so often whilst your playing, then when you’re done you’re supposed to select “Leave GTA Online” from the pause menu, which initiates another save process. Not that this has really worked for me (see below).
Downloaded and applied the 1.03 patch this morning.
Played a while earlier today: all good.
Went to play it again just now: MY CHARACTER HAS GONE MISSING!
This is my fifth character to have been permanently assassinated by Rockstar’s servers.
Someone has got a serious bounty on you! 🙁