Yeah, dunno cause my character's stats are still appearing. It even apparently saved the two missions I was able to do because its showing 60k in my bank and I went to sleep last night with only 54k in the bank. Hopefully they are still there cause shit I know I'd be gutted if I lost this character now that I'm starting to make some progress.

Pretty sure that puts you at a huge disadvantage because people just lock on and instantly kill you.

@sooty: So there's no lobby option for lock-on settings? Step back from Max Payne 3, if so...

You get matched up with people who use the same aim setting as you. If you say get invited to a friend's game and accept and he uses a different aim-mode the game will prompt you saying that you are changing aiming modes before allowing you to join.

Now that is good to know. Thank you.

Yes Just change to free aim in the single player and those settings will carry over to online.

Free roam is always free aim. Activities can be set to lock-on/auto aim, but in general everything's free aim, and it never mixes.

@demoskinos:

I thought free roam is always free aim. No lock-on/auto aim settings supported. At least that's what I've gathered from a launch report video somewhere - I think Gametrailers it was.

I've never encounter lock-on in free-roam except for when I'm the passenger and aiming at other cars it seems to lock-on to the driver which is a bit weird.

Despite playing quite a bit yesterday and having a lot of fun, it's broken again for me today. I lost my character again even though I did everything I could to log off and get the game to cloud save last night. My bank balance is right, yet I have no characters to choose from and as far as I can tell the game isn't even trying to load data from the cloud any more. Now I'm back to playing the game of booting up the PS3 once in awhile to see if I have a character or just re-roll so I can have half a chance against people who are still playing. At some point soon, I'm going to have to quit since I'm up against people who are level 40 because they haven't had their character erased.

Whether it's "free" or not, the lack of communication and lack of something as simple as a server status page definitely puts Rockstar up there as the worst MMO game developer I know of (feel free to correct me, I'd love to hear stories of a worse launch). It's a shame because from what I've seen there is more content and more fun to be had in GTA Online than I played in the story. I think they got too ambitious with the online and not just with the cloud saves. Now in typical Rockstar fashion they refuse to make any sweeping changes to make the experience better while responding to millions of players with vague PR bullshit to explain WTF is wrong with their game. Rockstar may have a great pedigree as far as open world games, but for me they have sunk to a new low in multiplayer.

I finally got to play today after trying to connect for days and having no luck. Seems pretty cool so far, except for people constantly perving on me because I made a female character. Is there a way to mute people in this thing?

Played for a couple of hours before the servers went down. And with all the reports about people losing their characters I might hold off for a while before jumping back in. Rockstar really needs to figure this thing out because if they don't come November I don't think anyone will stick around.

Also, here's a tip: If you get stuck trying to load a mission (if it says "launching mission" in the corner with the loading icon but just loads endlessly) you can bring up the xmb on ps3 and log out of psn which will automatically kick you to single player. It sucks but it's better than having to quit the game completely.

I've only just started. Played maybe an hour yesterday and another hour today. I got kicked for literally no reason today. I did one mission, we were successful, we all chose to go back to free roam. I tried to go to a new mission and on loading I had an error and was kicked back to the regular game. Got back in, decided to make sure I was properly gunned up at Ammu-nation, and then maybe 10 minutes later after driving to the atm, then to get guns, it came up with a message that said I got kicked. Seriously, wtf? Were people just mad that I wasn't going into sessions/jobs or something? Did they think I quit a job when I actually just lost connection to GTA online previously? This system is a bit messed up to me since I have no idea what the issue was. Eh, at that point I quit for the night.

It's been really fun so far, besides what happened today. I also was almost kicked yesterday too and I had just gotten out of the tutorial! I don't know if people just didn't want a rank 2 person in the instance or if they tried to kick me because they didn't like my avatar or something. I would hate to think that was the case, but we literally hadn't done even one job at that point, so why try to get rid of someone you have never played with or seen? I think I need to spend some time just with friends to get used to the game and rank up if people are so quick to boot people.

getting a lot of empty lobbies. having no luck doing anything with more than 1 or 2 other people...

Just lost my characters for the 3rd time in 2 days. Low levels only, but holy shit am I sick of the first 4 tutorial missions.

Like everyone else I'm sick of the tutorial missions! My big beef though is the two most recent characters I've made can't be invited into games as it says I've not finished the tutorials!!!!

Game seems amazing honestly, I've already had some pretty tense moments and I'm just barely out of the tutorials, only rank 5. My only complaint so far is it seems to struggle with matchmaking, or perhaps players are struggling to be convinced to leave free roam.

So ya...Might be done with this. All my money is gone....over 12k just gone. Kinda super mad about this.

That is now over 20k I have lost because of this. Really has killed the mood for me. I doubt they will return the money to me....

This has even killed the mood for single player.

No money now because some idiots kept killing me over and over. So my entire online experience is fucked.

Well, my character managed to bounce back up to level 8 from level 5, though I only got about a grand back when I lost about 23k.

Froze on me during the second to last store I had yet to rob, so I just shut off the 360. Social club says I have my rank and money, but I won't find out for real until tomorrow.

At least helicopters seem to spawn for me now. That's all I really wanted.

@capum15: Re: helicopters, I'm so torn between movie quotes right now.... very disconcerting.

I still cant even get on. 4th time I had to make a character and cant even get the first mission to start. This is fucking terrible.