An open letter to Rockstar Games | Hacker News Reader

An open letter to Rockstar Games

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155 pointsMattBearman48 comments

Author of the paste (and post) here:

Wow, didn't expect this to reach the top of HN! To answer some points raised:

Maybe I am taking a game a bit too seriously, but my friends and I have put a lot of time into GTA online, and had a load of fun. I just don't want RS to do something that could ruin that.

I agree that in the GTA world $500k isn't really 'rich', maybe the title was a little link baity, but my point remains, I truly believe that $500k would have a detrimental effect on the game.

If this never reaches rockstar, or they ignore it, I will simply have to exercise some self control and keep my bank balance > $500k at all times.

I too wouldn't actually be that averse to Rockstar wiping the servers clean, as long as I didn't have to play through the tutorial again :)

And finally - loose / lose - damn it, and I'm usually a stickler for grammar, my only excuse is that I wrote this pretty quick.

Thanks for all the feedback, and if any one on HN is from Rockstar or knows someone, I'd love to hear what they think about it.

*quickly

hey - you asked for it by claiming grammar stickler status :)

An alternative would be for you to blow that $500k on some expensive cars, and then drive them all into the ocean.

This.

It's an extra mission: You just got some illicit bag of money you have to get rid of, so buy cars from a shady dealer and drive em to the compactor (there is a car compactor in GTAV, right?).

The Brewster's (half) millions mission

Right. Another alternative is to call yourself Santa Claus and give it all away to other players during December.

Sure, but the other players are sitting on 500k as well, so the warm feelings of charity are a little lost.

Only to those who have been playing during the month of October... So by December there will be a new wave of users who didn't receive the nice charity of half a mil.

Ah... That's why I should read the entire article.

Bring on the Christmas.

I have to say I agree with you man.

I'm still working my way through the single player. I've played a few multiplayer games and it's been awesome. I haven't had any of the server pain that other folks are experiencing. It seems a bit silly that I'm about to increase my savings by 1000% through pure chance.

You could always just give the money to someone else.

Buy expensive car. Don't buy insurance. Apply sticky bomb. Kiss $500K good by. I'm assuming this works. I have not bought a car yet so I don't know if they come with some sort of automatic/permanent insurance. If that doesn't work, steal car, pimp out LS customs. Apply sticky bomb. Rinse and repeat until $500K disappears.

This does make all garages completely worthless unless Rockstar lets us own an apartment and a garage later via patch...

$500k is not going to ruin the game. That's chump change at the higher ranks. What is going to ruin the game is R* focusing on GTA$ instead of fixing the serious gameplay flaws like keeping your friends in one session and giving worthwhile activities to progress together. And give us heists already.

If anyone has played WoW before, it's like you go into a zone and for the next 20 levels there's literally only 1 quest that's worth doing because all the other quest rewards and xp are terrible. But there's an ability to replay this quest so you do it because that's the only efficient way to level up. So Blizzard nerfs the replaying of the good quest, doesn't add in better quests or scale up rewards, and gives away what seems like a lot of money (because you're low level) to keep people from seeing the real problem.

I really like this idea, and I hope Rockstar considers this because making it optional is probably the best of both worlds for the player base.

Personally I will use my $500k to buy a nice apartment and a nice car (honestly $500k in GTA:O is not what I would call "rich" money - many cars cost way more than that), and then I'll be back to having $100k or less in the bank, so that making $10k on a mission will feel good.

It's funny how analogous this is to the underlying debate driving modern politics.

Should the state (Rockstar in this case) offer direct monetary provisions to the citizens without requiring productivity in exchange? The tough part is that both sides of the argument make sense. It's not fair that some players have had an unduly difficult time getting started, but it would also be unfair to diminish the value of the achievement of people who have succeeded by distributing gobs of cash to satiate the masses.

The analogy breaks down in that there's no inflation in GTA (as far as I'd guess, haven't played), but interesting nonetheless.

I think the analogy also breaks down with regard the opportunity gap that exists in the real world between those born into at least some level of affluence and those born into poverty.

In some ways, you could say being gifted $500k is more like inheriting money versus those who've had to earn it themselves.

Yup, if every one of us had $500k, we wouldn't risk going to jail for a $10k job. Wouldn't that be cool, if we could negociate our salary in GTA?! My character is already day-trading, anyway.

'Loose' and 'lose' seems to be the new their/there/they're.

Wow, I do this all the time (and it really annoys me to no end when I notice). But I've never seen anyone else make the same mistake. I'm kind of happy to know I'm not the only one.

I notice people using "loose" when they mean "lose" probably twice a day on average, but I get unusually distracted by spelling mistakes. I don't think I've ever seen the reverse mistake.

its/it's for some reason seems the most annoying to me.

A lot of Hacker News superstars make that mistake. Rayiner makes it the most often. Of course he probably knows the difference, he's a really smart guy, but it's odd that he gets it wrong so often.

I used to look down upon people who would make these common mistakes... I don't anymore, after recently having been called out on making them myself. The human mind just makes these mistakes, I imagine because the sound link is very strong. The process of thinking of something and then writing it down is not instantaneous. When I've thought up a sentence, I will write it down without thinking much about it... it's then in that process of transcribing the thought to written text that the mistake is made. The only way to improve is to review your writings often, take note of what mistakes are most often occurring, and proactively watch for them in the future.

Great point! Re-reading what we write is great advice. I have found several mistakes by reading my own pull requests before I submit them, even.

These mistakes are viral. Expose yourself to a pattern often enough and you will reproduce it. I was immune until participating in online forums but by now have made virtually all of these mistakes. The way to improve is to expose yourself to more correct patterns; read more well edited material than forums.

My account has been deleted about 4 times now. I've given up trying to earn money and have resorted to blowing people up. I'm limited to a .50 gun and a crap car. It sucks for me.

Today I was offered a chance to change my character. I took it because I had to do it so many times I randomised everything. Hopefully it stays.

Similarities to the basic income idea are there.

500k makes things easier to buy, but will players who would have played more play less? It will make for some interesting datapoints in the basic income conversation if they go ahead with it.

This is a truely interesting paste. Thanks for sharing. GTA is meant to replicate the real word (to a certain extent).

So, when you try to replicate his argument to the real word, you you get the point. This guy has just given some real reason why people shouldn't hope to be magically rich in real life. Why try to win at Euromillion ? By translating to the real world, it would give : "Giving [me] $500,000 will shit on that whole process. Completing a [job] and getting $10,000 wont feel like such an achievement when [I]'ve already got half a million sitting in the bank. I really feel that suddenly getting wealthier would make the game less enjoyable"...

""Look for the bare necessities The simple bare necessities"" - Balu - The Jungle Book - 1967

A sense of achievement comes from two different places when comparing GTA to real life. 10k in real life doesn't feel like an accomplishment to people simply because they don't have 500k in the bank, it's also/mostly because it's usually hard to earn and takes a significant investment of time and effort.

Also, there are no real consequences in GTA for running out of money, like there are in real life. People want to win lotteries for the security (which ironically they so often piss away if they do win), something that people don't need in a video game.

I admire your composure in replying to that post.

I think the author misses the point here. The cost of purchases in GTA Online adds up so quickly that $500,000 isn't actually that much in the greater scheme of things. It might get you an apartment or a cheap car, but once it's been spent, you need to earn more. Some of the cars in the game are over $500k as well. Seems like complaining for the sake of complaining without any real facts to back things up here.

Rockstar are doing it right in my opinion. It costs them nothing to give users fake $500,000 and it keeps the users happy and in the game, which means more users online which means the higher the chance of Rockstar making real money off of your presence.

It will get you the apartment of your choice. The most expensive is something like $422,000. Or any car under the top tier. My fear is it will get those who already have a decent bank account closer to the tank, fighter jet, or attack copter. Too many of those in the game at once could cause problems but it's only a matter of time before that happens anyway...

I was hoping Rockstar would do the opposite and wipe all of the servers once they were stable.

While some players would be upset I think the majority of players would like to see the ones that got out in front by unfairly exploiting missions be pulled "back in the race".

In fact I'd like to see them wipe the servers every 3 months or so and declare "winners" (player with the most $, clans with the most $, player with the most kills, etc). Theres nothing more exciting than opening day so why not try to have one every 3 months?

Because people have wildly ideas of fun than you do.

While many hardcore gamers might like the idea of complete wipe every three months (and is has been successfully done before, see ladder in Diablo 2), the hard truth they need to face is that 'hardcore' crowd is not a majority of the market, and hasn't been for a long, long time.

People like to think that average gamer is 20-something college guy, right? That's cute image, but completely wrong. Average gamer 30 years old. People who buy most games are 35. 45 percent of gamers are woman. There are more woman >18 playing games, than boys <17. [1]

Frankly, even though I'm only 20 years old, I'm increasingly identifying with casual market than with hardcore-tru-gamerzzzz.

I find it hard these days to spend >10 hours on a single game.

I think most games have really ridiculously tuned difficulty curves with crazy spikes in places where it makes absolutely no sense.

I can think of three, maybe four games that I spent over 15 hours in last few years. That would be Diablo III, GTA V, Cookie Clicker (does that count?) and Super Hexagon.

And frankly, if Rockstar wiped Online servers after I (and many, many, many) more people put ~20 hours into it, as much as I love that game, I would quit and never look back. I just don't have patience to grind all day long anymore.

You also have to remember that you can purchase in-game-currency with micro transactions - paying fifteen bucks for GTA$ and then seeing it vanish next day because ladder season ended would be... frustrating, to say the least.

/I'm sorry if my rant is a little bit incoherent, but video-games and hardcore gamers demanding developers to cater to them are my pet-peeves./

[1]: http://www.theesa.com/facts/

I agree, but a quick point about those statistics I see trotted out repeatedly: they include casual games. The people playing Bejeweled clones or hidden image games are not the same people playing Grand Theft Auto.

Not but there are many people who take a laid back approach to the game, not unlike how one could play a game or two of bejeweled then get on with their day.

There's no way they are going to back off on this because they have been advertising it in the game via the MOTD status messages. If they suddenly decided not to do it, the backlash from entitled online gamers would be legendary.

Having said that, Rockstar giving everyone $500k GTA$ is pretty much a non-event in the face of the fact that they will be selling GTA$ for real money. The $500k of GTA$ money they are giving away will be purchasable for 10 bucks in as many $500k increments as you wish to buy. And while in the case of buying the money outright you can more easily choose to not participate, the fact that tons of other people will participate (I've seen people waste ridiculous amounts of money on COD Black Ops 2 "camos" for example, things that don't even give them an in-game advantage the way money does in GTA V Online) will already make the overall game economy incredibly loopy.

If you really don't want the free money, when it appears in your bank account just use it to put super high bounties on random people. You'll burn through the money nearly instantly with nothing personal to show for it and cause epic havoc on the server you're on at the same time, which is very much in the spirit of GTA.

Totally agree with your point about selling GTA$

One small correction - the max bounty you can place is $10k and the max you can gift is $5k

Online in this game is the biggest "beta" I've seen in recent memory.

There are a lot of basic mechanics to what a Rockstar MMO would have, but none of them are implemented to the point that I think people are expecting.

Rockstar hasn't mentioned anything about developing the in-game economy any further than it already has. The game is more online deathmatch and less MMO...welcome to the world of console gaming, I guess.

Enjoy getting run over by folks who flag passive after you kill them for the time being, but don't expect the fully-realized world in the trailers.

In short, if you don't want to spend your 500k, then...don't?

Completely off topic, but when I visit that page on an iOS device, once the advert loads it then automatically opens the iTunes store for "Game of War - Fire Age"?

Annoying. I've not seen that before.

Sounds like a good argument against the iOS user agent.

This reminds me when I was playing Oblivion on Xbox 360 and there was a bug to get a ton of money from a specific NPC. It completely ruined the game for me by removing all motivations and rewards to participate in the economy through looting, stealing, and selling.

Dear Rockstar,

Please do some additional programming and infrastructure work so I don't have to exercise a few seconds of self control.

-Somebody who already bought and is enjoying your game.

Given the choice, i am pretty sure 99% will just take the money. We are talking about mostly teenage guys here and most dont have your noble ambitions.

Has GTA changed this much that money became a real thing? Real as in used to buy gear, finite amount and has an economy? What happened to memorizing game pad combinations whenever you needed some quick cash for your escapades?

It's GTA online, which is sort of like an MMO

A metaphor for life, it seems.

And this is why basic income is such a bad idea.

Or just don't be so obsessive with computer games and don't care so much what is happening in some virtual world. That'd be my advise.

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