GTA Online launch – as it happened

Well, US gaming blog Kotaku has made it into the game. Writer Stephen Totilo got warped into a drug mission with two other players and one fast car:

I think the guy in the backseat wasn't into this, so as we slowed to make a turn, he jumped out of the back and tumbled into the middle of an intersection. Our driver was having none of it. He backed up over the other player. Horrible. Wonderful. So very GTA.

This from reader MrJimtastic:

Well, I managed to get past the opening scene in online gameplay... After trying all morning, having my character file corrupted 5 or 6 times and having the server time-out on me too many times to count. Unfortunately, some douche booted me as soon as I got out of Lamar's car.

The GTA Online launch issue page is back up and running. You can also head over to the GTA Online support page to report bugs or issues.

Game site CVG has a news story on the saved game issues:

a small percentage of users are also claiming that not only do they fail to connect, they also end up with corrupt or damaged save files that affect their story mode progress.

Here's Simon Barratt of UK studio Four Door Lemon on the the problems Rockstar is facing:

It seems they’ve been trying to scale their hardware quickly to cope with the expected requirements based on their incredible sales. Even if they were using an existing server infrastructure provider such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure – which is unlikely and their wording suggests not – they would probably need to be adding to their cloud server farms to support the numbers they’re expecting.
 
Launch is of course the trickiest time when the concurrent user numbers are much higher than they are ever likely to be again. Their planning and stress testing so far will be based on the high end of their normal daily expectation plus an extra amount to cope with the launch stress.
 
From what I understand of the online gameplay, each persistent world should be fairly self-contained so once people are logged in and they have entered the correct world the number of interconnected servers involved should be pretty low, the issue will be how many world instances each server can run and how many servers they have – it could purely be a maths problem.

"I, for one, sympathise with Rockstar," says HalifaxEichel in the comments section. "They could not have foreseen hundreds of thousands of US Government employees getting the day off . . ."

There, we got politics into the live blog – it's not completely frivolous*

*Okay, it is completely frivolous.

Guardian games reader Maiquitol says in the comments section, "At least one person I know has got online. Word is that, when it works, it is 'a right laugh'" So jealous.

The latest from @RockstarGames on the issues...

Here's the verdict on the beta from GTA V O'clock, starring Guardian contributor Dan Dawkins...

Looks like racing is causing some problems for players able to access the game. One user, Dave Cook, has just tweeted, "Can't get past one GTA Online mission as folk keep getting into cars before they're allowed and failing it. No way to tell them."

Just created a new character, but on trying to access the game, the data got corrupted. "Overwrite Y/N?" asks the game.

Uh oh, the Rockstar help site has seemingly gone down now. That's not a good sign is it?

I'm on my fifth go at getting in, but it's just crashed. Haven't even made it to character customisation yet, so my plan to create a GTA equivalent of Courtney Love circa 1992 will have to wait... or will it? You can get into the character customisation menu by clicking the Start button while in single player and selecting 'Online'. Even if the server is offline it'll let you start the character creation process.

Here's more from games coder Byron Atkinson Jones on what's going wrong today, and why – even if you get through to GTA Online – your experience may be mixed today. Essentially, there's no way for Rockstar to account for every piece of hardware attempting to access its servers:

What the player is using to communicate with the server always plays a huge part since it dictates response speeds. If you couple this with the network the client is on and the number of hops the packets of data need to get to go from client to server and from server to client then there's a lot to go wrong. When designing games based on a server architecture, we usually use what's known as connectionless communication protocol where the client and server essentially talk to each other and hope that the packets they send reach their destination. This is in part to deal with the unpredictable nature of client status and how hard it is for the client to actually connect with the server in a reliable way.

Eurogamer has a story on the in-game payment cards, which let players purchase GTA currency for real cash. The cheapest is the Red Shark cash card: £1,99 for $100,000 in-game currency. The most expensive is the Great White cash card: £13.49 for $1,250,000. In-game cash can, of course, be earned through pulling heists, winning races and other activities.

Here's experienced video game developer Byron Atkinson Jones of Xiotex Studios, on the problems of launching online games:

The biggest issue is the handling of large amount of simultaneous clients all trying to log in and all trying to run on the server. The usual way of dealing with this is to run a cluster where there isn't just a single machine but quite a few machines. The issue with this then becomes one of replicating the state of the online world amongst all of this different servers. When you launch a game it's not an easy task to work out how large the cluster needs to be. One solution is a scalable system that brings servers online based on demand which is how services like Amazon elastic cloud work - you can literally bring new servers into life if the usage count of your servers spikes. Given a large persistent world [like GTA Online] this is not a trivial action since it probably requires large amounts of data to be replicated so on launch day they would want to predict a typical use case that copes with a large initial flood of users.

Rockstar has set up a dedicated GTA Online launch status page, which is cataloging the latest problems encountered by players. Here's what they're currently reporting:

• Occasional "Rockstar Cloud Servers Unavailable" error message
• Freezing sometimes while loading into first race in GTAO with "waiting for other players" on the screen
• Intermittent "Failed to Host a GTA Online Session" error messages
• Race Corona (start area, marker) occasionally not showing up for first race
• Errors saying "Timed out when matchmaking for a compatible GTA Online Session to join"
• General issues with the Social Club site and Social Club features (slow loading, failed logins, emails not arriving, etc).

While we're compiling all the current information, here are Keza and Alex from IGN talking about their experiences with the beta...

Well, we've popped the game in, downloaded the small update, said "yeah sure" to the Rockstar online Ts&Cs, and now we're faced with what may become a familiar message: "The Rockstar cloud severs are unavailable right now. Please try again later."

Some of the problems already being reported by players, beyond not being able to get online are:

• corruption to single-player save data after downloading the GTA Online update

• Inability access races

More on those later...

Grand Theft Auto V has been out for two weeks, selling 15m copies and earning rave reviews – now, the game's ambitious multiplayer mode has been unlocked by publisher Rockstar. But as we explained earlier it's likely that many gamers will have trouble accessing the servers today. Preparing a global online infrastructure for a mass onslaught of millions of gamers is no easy task, and Rockstar itself has warned of potential problems.

We'll be tracking the situation here, as well as making our own attempts to get online. If you've tried and failed – or even better – succeeded, let us know in the comments section!