Online video games suck. Haven't found one I liked yet.

What is the glitch? Is it still selling a car and backing out to dupe it?

If you mean the single player one? Who cares. Nobody gets hurt by it.

You still need to level up to buy anything worth while, so it doesn't bother me.

How about an example? I'm pretty sure all the known money glitches were patched out.

The glitch! Tell us the glitch!

Honestly if I knew I could get away with it I'd do it in a heartbeat. Gaining money in that game isn't fun at all, and even when you get it half the shit is still locked behind ranks. I'd rather have just one treadmill to grind and stop worrying about losing money any time my friends and I do something adventurous or inventive; you know, all that terrible, terrible non-Rockstar approved fun.

Of course no guarantees they won't take some action against you for using the above glitch, including taking away money, putting you in the "bad sport" pool, or suspending/banning from Xbox live. AFAIK none of that has happened yet, and it seems unlikely that any serious xbox-account punishment will happen since you're not modifying the hardware or the game, and just exploiting the game giving you money before saving the sale of the car to the server.

I could understand people quitting the game a long time ago without the glitch. I have some real problems with their core design philosophy of punishing players for screwing around by making it so cost prohibitive to die or lose a car. It seems totally understandable to use the glitch to buy a nice car and keep enough in the bank to not worry if you die a couple dozen times; you'd probably have a lot more fun with the game.

For me the hustle to the top IS a large part of my motivation. So cheating I feel only cheats yourself out of a good time.

I think that Rockstar made a pretty big mistake for putting that in the game. But it's not the job of the player to discern the will of the designer. There is only the game, and the rules of the game are rock solid. It sounds like this is the best way to make money, and if you want to make money, you should use this method. If other players call you a cheater, ignore them. They are wrong.

On the other hand, if Rockstar takes any action against these players (which they shouldn't), then they are participating in the worst kind of games as service bullshit and will reveal that they only care about making money and not making great games. (Not saying that isn't true though.) Blizzard is famous for punishing players for exploring and pushing the limits of their games. This teaches players that they shouldn't experiment and try and push the limits, and instead should do what they are told. I think this is wrong.

I understand that if you care about a game like GTA online or WOW, you don't want to see it wrecked by an exploit. You are right to feel this way. But it is 100% the fault of game makers for introducing these exploits. Not the players.

Well, I suppose that's a really monotonous way of getting around the game conveniently deleting most of the funds in your bank account every time you log out.

@koolaid: You have zero clue what your talking about. They didn't "introduce" any explioit it somehow slipped through the cracks during QA and is obviously not an intended mechanic or design decision. It IS cheating no matter how you want to justify it to yourself.

Fuck microtransactions

@demoskinos:

I do in fact have many clues to walk I'm talking about. I'm sure it is very very likely this was not an intended mechanic. But as @catsakimbo points out, you do not modify any of the game code or hardware to get free money. This means it is not cheating.

A game is nothing more then a collection of rules. In "real life" games like football, we have referees to enforce these rules. But we don't need refs in a video game, because you not permitted to cheat in the first place. You can only take actions that are made possible by the game in the first place. Press "a" to jump is an example of a rule. A game like GTA most likely has millions of such rules in the form of code. This determines how fast each car goes, how much damage each gun does. There is even a rule that says if you sell your car in MP and switch back to SP real fast, you keep the car and the money!

Is that a good rule? No. But it is a rule, and it is not cheating to follow the rules. If it was against the rules, then you wouldn't be able to do it. This is different from modifying the code to change the rules, which IS cheating.

I'm not saying Rockstar is bad at making games, but GTA is super complex and there are bound to be mistakes. But again, it is not the job of the player to figure out what the designer intended. There is only the rules. You can of course choose not to do the car trick because you don't find it fun. That's fine. I'm playing pokemon and I choose not to have my friend give me max level pokemon off the back. But that's within the rules to do so.

From the little I've played it seems like money is only half the equation. The availability of the guns and armor are tied to your level so even if you had a boatload of cash you'd still need to level up in order to even purchase most of them. Yeah, you can probably just go ahead and buy the largest garage and crib right from start and upgrade a bunch of cars but that's really only a portion of the online experience.

@koolaid: Not adhering to rules is like if the game said drive from A to B and you drove over mountains instead of using the road. Doing some convoluted character swapping between single and multiplayer in order to circumvent a hard coded rule about only being able to sell a car every 45 minutes goes well beyond "not following established game laws."

Even though I said that, I would not agree with it being 100% Rockstar's fault. You can argue semantics about the word cheating, but this glitch is exploiting a bug to gain an unintended advantage in an online game with a terms of service agreement that probably explicitly states that such a thing is prohibited, and they're able to deny you service as they see fit. I say probably because I haven't actually read GTA:O's TOS, but if it's anything like MMO TOS's, which I have read, they have language that refers to situations exactly like this.

In the end, Rockstar has to balance the benefit of having the exploiters continue to play/promote/engage with the game, with the economic imbalance that they create, and possible lost revenue from those players not using their microtransactions (though it seems unlikely that anyone willing to go through the trouble would never purchase those microtransactions anyway). From similar situations in MMO's, I've seen companies that would rather keep their customers and patch it to keep the exploit from continuing to happen, admitting some fault of their own that they allowed the glitch to happen.

Sorry if I'm looking at this too seriously, but I used to be a GM for an MMO who somewhat dealt with exploits, and I actually think these situations are pretty fascinating. There's a lot of push/pull going on between consumers and companies, and companies have to be really careful about how they react, by not letting these exploits get out of control, and not causing a backlash from players punished for something they argue is the fault of the designers.

It's lame and boring.

I also find it HILARIOUS people are trying to defend it and say its not cheating. Semantics! Exploiting, cheating. Same damn thing in my book!

I'm not going to whine about it or complain on the offical forums asking for people to be banned or any o that nonsense. It doesn't really effect me. So another tool gets a gaudy ass super car wooopdeedoo. It's only annoying when some douchebag brings out a tank and essentially ruins a freeroam lobby.

If you want to do it, go ahead I won't stop you. But bending over backwards in some crazy way to justify it just comes off as sad and weird. But thats just my opinion.

Sounds like the entire multiplayer component has been fucked since jump street. From both an infrastructural and design standpoint. So, if people want to cheat, let the whole damn thing burn. Besides, most people got characters lost, money taken, and ranks reset when it was still a mess (is it still a mess?), so it's not like the whole thing is being measured in any sense of fairness anyway.

It's mainly a co-op game so it doesn't matter. Yeah, there's deathmatch stuff, but playing that when there's auto-aim seems silly, so my friends and I do jobs, races, free-roam, etc.

It's pretty funny. I actually think it's game design 101 why it's not cheating. I think the people bending over backwards are the ones who are trying to call it cheating. But that's just my opinion.

I agree I am pretty sad and weird though.

Eh I'd try it out but I also sort of don't care that much about GTA online anymore, that part of the game just isn't that much fun after a while, it really seems like Rockstar could only come up with about 50 levels of what I would consider meaningful progression in GTA online.

So whenever I see people who are level 316 and have millions in the bank all I can think is great? what now? You're still stuck in a tedious game with not much to do, besides probably destroy other people's cars and never play again with anyone else because you got called a bad sport.

Well I don't know what you mean by glitch. I did do something where you could restart a mission as many times as you want so I did the Violent Duct mission which gave me $9000 like 1000 times. That isn't a glitch though. But holy hell, I made a shit ton of money from doing that mission a lot. But I'm broke again and it's been patched so now I have to find a way to get $1,000,000 fast so I can buy the Adder (car).

As far as I know it's been mostly fine once the first week was done. It was bad one Saturday afternoon since then. I've lost maybe 20K in total and maybe enough RP for 1 level, but I can earn that in 3 races. It's had 4 patches so far I think and has been pretty stable.

@mosespippy: Good to know. Maybe one day I'll go back and check it out. For some reason the back end of that game left a bad taste in my mouth (a poor first experience with the online didn't help much either), and I haven't been too interested in going back. But, I think, partially, I've just become disenchanted with open worlds. No longer am I able to go explore and be content to have fun just being there. Once a story is wrapped up, I'm pretty much done with a game. I can't really think of the last game I stuck with well after I was done with the story. And that revelation kind of bums me out.

@hatking: It's not just you; games have changed. If you look at GTA IV & V you can see the direction that they are going in. They are very structured. You will never see a mission like Vice City's where you cross the entire downtown district jumping ramps from roof to roof. That kind of playground world is gone. The dicking around fun doesn't exist in the new structure. With GTAV selling 29 million copies I'm sure many games will mirror it's design.

Personally the last time I spent a long time in a world once I was done the story was Dark Souls. I knew my build wasn't great for PvP. I knew that I could play the game in an entirely different way. I had never used magic before. I know you can beat the game at level 1. I know you can beat the game in under an hour. Every boss encounter or player encounter could be an epic experience. Getting the next high from a PvP victory is great. I always wanted more.

I didn't know there was one. I think those who cheat are dirty bastards!

So I did this a little bit last night to get the rest of the money I needed to buy a Entity XF and it worked as described. All the insanity you could imagine that comes from an infinite money glitch was in full swing in the public servers though. At one point I was driving into the alley by Los Santos customs and there was a tank sitting there waiting for unsuspecting cheaters, another time there were a group of people waiting to gun people down around every mod shop. I don't think I'm going to do it anymore though, I'm satisfied with my new car and quite honestly quitting and driving into the shop repeatedly still felt like a waste of GTA online time.

Whole online seems grindy, so I would welcome a method that would be make it a little easier. The glitch at the moment is more boring than doing missions/races, so it is not for me, but I am ok with people using it.

Doesn't bother me at all. The main people it could potentially hurt are: 1) The player who does it and misses out on the fun of earning that money the legit way (before R* gets around to adding heist missions with probably larger payouts). or 2) Rockstar, as they intend to sell in game cash for real money via PSN...which is kind of just as shitty to me anyway, so whatever.

You need to grind out a lot of levels/race wins/kills anyway to get many of the unlocks outside of buying a car or apartment/garage (or a garage full of cars). So there's still quite a bit of work to be put into progression.

And as it is now, the game is a bit of a grind if you are trying to earn money a legit way. The missions repeat a lot, they paid out very little before their repeat payout got halved, and now they pay even less. I know the thing these days is this perpetual dick-measuring unlock race to the biggest and best shit in the game, but I've never cared much for that. If someone wants to cut down on the time investment and just enjoy the game playing it how they see fit, so be it.

Sorry Guys! I didn't know people actually responded to this!

As of the 1.05 Patch earlier this week the glitch still works. So far, no action has been taken against players for exploiting it (As far as I can Tell).

Yes, it is the Los Santos Customs glitch. You change your last spawn location to "last location" sell a car, hit start and quickly switch to Swap characters. The glitch seems to pay out a million or so every half hour going at an average speed. You also have to make sure the car you're selling has been modded fully, my Baller SUV sells for 63,000 and change.

I started the poll to get the temperature from the duder community. Personally, I was originally grinding short races with friends for quick cash (about 3 grand every 5 minutes) so when this came up I jumped at it. My crew and I really just want the joy of running missions. We have no desire to do the PVP modes, and with the level locking most items it seemed the money wasn't that big of a deal.