Enjoying how Rockstar has decided to push this envelope. Sure you can’t cash out winnings but you sure as hell can throw real money into the system to then gamble with their company script to try to win digital trinkets.
So it’s worse than a real casino. Every person who plays instantly loses 100% of their money with no chance to get back even one cent. Even winning the ultra jackpot earns you nothing.
I sort of agree its worse, I only meant that in a, well technically this precludes it from gaming regulation. I am fully on-board with seeing this as combining both the worst aspects of casino gaming and the worst aspects of lootboxes.
Hm. Bit of a ropey argument, GTA Online has always had the ability to purchase currency for real money since the beginning, and the fact that you can now spend that in a virtual casino doesn’t change much, you’re just now ditching your fake cash into an activity for which you get no real world rewards, as opposed to a nightclub, business, or virtual property from which you get no real world rewards. Half the activities in the game are basically a gamble, the fact that they’re skinning it as a casino doesn’t make much of a difference. Gambling has a different connotation, sure, but I kinda struggle to see how this is any different from complaining that spending money on money to buy a property in the game doesn’t get you any actual real estate. Especially considering that the currency in the game is relatively trivial to acquire, and regularly given out for free - they literally give you hundreds of thousands, even millions, on a pretty regular basis just for logging in, providing little to no incentive to actually buy currency to dump into the casino. Even very casual players like Victor and I generally have millions on tap at any particular point.
It changes one thing. You’re getting less fake bang for your real/fake buck due to the virtual casino effectively being a variable pricing mechanism for the fake stuff.
I get what you’re getting at, but it doesn’t really bear out with the gameplay. The Missions and heists were already that. For example, you get better payouts by doing different things on heists(one of the bigger moneymaking activities), being more or less successful(which is often down to random chance, albeit better hidden random chance than “Play this game of chance!”), or by how well you do in missions(which can be heavily RNG, thanks to the AI being programmed to behave, for lack of a better term, consistently inconsistent.) Same thing with many of the other big earners, like import/export(basically, targeted car theft), which is entirely RNG based on what car you end up targeting and if you can complete sets for cash bonuses. Plus, there’s also pretty big stable earners already, like various businesses, which amount to minimal input timers for increasing your cash - maybe, one mission every few hours, and you can make more than enough cash to make all but the highest value shark cards relatively obsolete.
This isn’t to say it’s entirely luck based, of course - if you get a good pull on the RNG for, say, an import/export mission, and get exactly the expensive car you were looking for, you still have to have the skill to get it back with minimal damage to get the best payout, but there’s still a large element of luck involved, just not nearly as nakedly as with something labeled (literally) in big flashing lights as a Casino.
I guess the one positive is that there is the possibility of prices of fake goods in fake dollars potentially decreasing if you hit the fake jackpot. You could theoretically spend one real dollar and end up fake rich.
You’re right, but that just means that whatever update they introduce in 6 months, everything is just gonna cost more. Rockstar’s development philosophy has more inflation than a hot air balloon fleet flying over a very specific fetish convention.
Still, I am looking forward to playing the new missions. For all the game’s faults, Rockstar still has a way with gloriously fun and chaotic mission design. I know this type of GTA is not really your jam, but I still love me a little action-movie styled/inspired utter mayhem.
Not the worst I’ve seen, but far from cheap.
I wonder how long in hours it’d take to get all that without paying (if that’s even possible).
Unsure. Depends on your method of making money. For many players, that’s not a huge grind, since they already have that money in the bank. But if you don’t have it, if you’re doing import/Export, or criminal enterprise, maybe three weeks to a month of casual-but-regular play. For the dedicated, two weeks - at least, presuming you do ONLY those things, which doesn’t make sense, since they’re built to be background activities - you play them, then do something else in game, then come back. If you’re grinding heists instead, Doomsday heists have solo-able setups, and pay out 800k to 1.8 mil each, plus what you get for the setup missions, so call it about 2, 2.5 mil per run, making it relatively achievable within a week, if you’ve got a crew to heist with.
If play smart, and you have a crew you can get together to play with you for a few days, and do multiple activities at once(ie, heist while timers tick up, assist each other with import/export, criminal enterprise and nightclubs, etc) you could do it relatively easily within a week without even going that hard.
But still, 60-and-change mil makes this actually one of the cheaper update totals for GTA online. Others have been in the hundred+ million range.
Though the big mistake here is assuming anyone buys everything, other than maniac youtubers who already have hundreds of millions, because they play GTA like it’s their job(because it is.) Most people would buy some clothes, some decorations, maybe a vehicle or two, people buying EVERYTHING is extremely rare, especially considering that you don’t have infinite space for a lot of stuff in the game - for example, there’s a hard upper limit on how many cars you can have, and many decorations are mutually exclusive.
Oh, and a friend of mine also passed on something else(I haven’t had the chance to play personally yet) - Apparently, it’s impossible to just dump all your money into the casino. You have to convert your money to chips, and there’s a hard limit on how much you can convert both at once, and per day(I didn’t ask if they’re the same limit). So that’s better than nothing, I guess. (Edit - he further contributes, the payouts in the casino are surprisingly generous - He pulled 3 mil from a lucky win earlier today, and according to him, is yet to actually lose any significant amount of money in a casino play session.)
A month of casual but regular play I’ll call 1 hour a day = 31 hours
2 weeks of dedicated play I’ll call that maybe about the same (2 hours a day) = 28 hours
Heisting with friends for a week in a dedicated way I’ll call about eh, maybe 21 hours
So grand total if you wanna achieve this arbitrary total this article has picked. You gotta be willing to put in somewhere between a half and three quarters of a real life work week.
Reasonably accurate rough guide, yeah. Presuming, of course, you’re starting from zero funds or close to, and you’re one of those maniacs who want to buy EVERYTHING like the article suggests, but what’s the fun of assuming playtime from people who have the cash to splash and just want to buy one or two cars?
No point at all, this was just to give me an idea what I’d have to do to earn the equivalent of $800 in gta5 online. And by I’d I really mean me, so starting from nothing. In the end it was an purely academic exercise, as few online games hold my attention for long.
Still it’s cool to see it in real world terms.
I been saying it for a long time. Why is there such strict regulation on a casino where you have an extremely low, but non-zero, chance of winning real money, while a casino where you know up front you are going to lose every penny is completely unregulated and accessible even to children?
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Fantasy sports I think is what is mostly to blame. Had that not been invented, and gambling with it legalized, gambling may have mostly died out with the boomer generation, at least in the US. Esports gambling I think doesn’t come into existence without the fantasy sports gambling that came before it.
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Straight from the horse’s mouth.
Diablo is intentionally a slot machine, on purpose.
Insert pikachu.jpg.
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I haven’t watched this yet, but it is at the top of my watch later queue.
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