GTA Online, the matchmaking bits of it, is one of the worst paced pieces of online gaming to date.

I know if they wanted to facilitate a better pace, and an easier time for players to matchmake with others sharing similar interests, everybody would spend a whole lot more time playing the game, and earning cash - instead of sitting idly in a lobby, waiting on somebody to join, or searching for a lobby with matching rules, or waiting on some dumbass to finally vote - and so forth.

Now that they've further nerfed money earning opportunities (races pay out waaay less), all of this is rather conspicuous - when a simple thing like a custom matchmaking filter could alleviate most of this bullshit, as would shorter timers between rounds. Might it be to elicit more microtransactions?

I hate to see so much potential squandered, and instead of getting better, things get only worse. Patch 1.06 made the game a lot buggier for me. Shame.

This is the biggest fucking bummer of the whole damn thing. My friend and I recently stole a couple of P-99s from Zancudo and just flew around in freeroam hunting bounties with them, and it was a goddamn blast. The "Top Fun" mission is the same basic idea, but A) no one ever votes for or joins the game and B) even when you have a group of 4-6 willing participants, you're looking at a 3-8 minute mission with a minimum of 3-4 minutes of downtime between scoreboard and voting and more voting and game setup and inviting and joining and setting radio stations and loading and buying armor and more loading and team selection and taunt selection and betting - and that 3-4 minutes is assuming everyone is on the ball and hitting every prompt immediately. Even dumb things like having you vote to Like or Dislike the same activity multiple times is ridiculous; why don't they just store your previous vote, that way it's one less person to wait for on that specific screen. Or, why can't I make a playlist of just Top Fun variants (of which there are 3 or 4 in game already) and have it cycle between those, rather than giving me a bunch of race or survival or deathmatch variants every voting round. Hell, we played basic Top Fun probably six or seven times in a row, and not once did it give us a variant of it, nor any other sort of dogfight or other similar gametype, despite every player liking and bookmarking Top Fun every single time we played it.

And I realize I'm obsessing over that one gametype, but at every corner GTAO feels like it's trying to make me hate it, and the one thing I'm able to latch on to is that the idea of jets versus motorcycles is the kind of crazy that I can't get elsewhere. if I wanted to race, I'd play Need for Speed. If I wanted a shooter, I'd play COD or Gears. Top Fun is only really possible in GTA, and rather than playing to those kinds of strengths, Rockstar seems to be intent on having me worry about money and impounded cars and how many garages I own rather than the part where GTA is crazy and awesome.

I absolutely agree with you. It's way too hard to play what you want, when you want it, and find people who share the same gameplay interests as you on the fly - all matchmaking like. The question remains, is Rockstar just genuinely shit at pacing their online experiences and matchmaking - or are all these shortcomings intentional - to elicit more microtransactions by limiting the amount of cash earned per time unit spent?

You know what I think it is? I think Rockstar no longer gives a fuck about their customer base. They've made and continue to make their money. They're laughing all the way to the bank at people's expense. Like the case with EA, I am also done playing anything that has a Rockstar logo on it.