GTA Online’s seemingly endless load times will soon become less disgusting, because Rockstar has confirmed that it is implementing a fix for a problem encountered by a player. At the end of February, someone known as “t0st” did a good research on the GTA code to find out why Online loaded much more slowly than singleplayer and found a solution that made it 70% faster on your PC. Well, Rockstar says it investigated, confirmed the problem and made some changes that we will see in a future patch. Incredible scenes.
Update: can it now be live? Surprise!
t0st wrote a long blog post detailing their reverse engineering investigations and how they found that loading stopped for a long time while the CPU was analyzing a JSON data file. They thought that the method used for this was extremely inefficient, so they wrote their own patch that connected to the game with a faster method. This made GTAO load 70% faster for them, a number so wild that I was a little skeptical. While some game fixes made by players have worked miracles, others have been less reliable or problems totally misunderstood. Apparently, this is real.
“After a thorough investigation, we can confirm that the player did, in fact, reveal an aspect of the game’s code related to the loading times of the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved,” Rockstar told the excited RPS fanzine PC Gamer. “As a result of these investigations, we made some changes that will be implemented in an upcoming title update.”
I’ve never been so thrilled to throw my hands up and declare I was wrong. I was wrong, and oh God, how wonderful that I was wrong. It is sad to think that now, at least an entire day of my life has been spent unnecessarily on these stupid loading screens.
Rockstar did not say when the solution would arrive, or what kind of improvements players could expect. It’s one of those issues that can benefit some computers more than others, you know.
Update: A 380 MB patch arrived today. Although Rockstar has not released patch notes yet, many players are reporting huge increases in loading speed. I wouldn’t say it loaded quickly for me, but I also didn’t have time to prepare a three-course meal, so maybe that’s it?
As for t0st, they said yesterday in an update to their post: “I just received $ 10k through your H1 game reward as an exception :)) (usually just for security reasons)”. Nice.
t0st has also released a “proof of concept” correction for people to see for themselves, although they warn that it could lead to a ban. Having already been banned once for a mod mess, yes, I will not risk it again. I am happy to wait for the official correction of a problem which, again, I am incredibly happy to have been proven to be wrong.
Disclosure: Do I have any friends who work at Rockstar on, idk, things?