I cannot fathom the designer who made the matchmaking systems. For the most parts, it's focused on the 16 players in one instance of the world, plus one's friends list. It never ever sends out more than 16 invites at a time, and it sends it to same people over and over again, doesn't time-out requests, and doesn't expand the search properly.

You'd imagine, if you hit Quick Job, regardless of what it is, you'd be entering a full lobby everytime. I mean the servers are packed to the gills with players. To the point of collapse. Whoever wrote GTA Online's matchmaking algorithms screwed up royally. I think I managed to fill-up a four player lobby once. 8 players is the most I ever got for a 16 players lobby. Standard is 2-3 players, and horrendous waits.

Outside of the current matchmaking algorithms being the result of managing the player masses and reducing server strain, and matchmaking was actually meant to be much more efficient at populating lobbies, I cannot express the magnitude of fail on display. Other than that, I'm hooked. Almost ready to get my luxury condo, so I'm ready to go on some heists, as soon as they come out.

P.S. Beat a round of Survivor (Horde Mode) for a 20k payout. It's 10 waves, and very doable, if your group figures out a good spot to hole-up in. So get in on those Survivor jobs!

I think GTA Online has other such issues to complain about before we move onto its poor matchmaking system. For starters you should consider yourself lucky that you've been able to keep your character long enough to afford a flat.

Do you log-out correctly? Because if you don't, it doesn't save your character. Happend to me the first time, but I learned my lesson. Use the quit option in the Online section of 'Pause' screen, or use the character select wheel to switch to story mode. There's a tooltip to that end during loading screens. It works for me.

The job thing isn't working right now, at least for me. No matter what job I try to join I get Failed to download the job, try again later.

Is is just me or does anyone else find the whole "automatically sends out invites to your friends" thing pretty creepy? I don't want to be that guy who spams people with invites - and besides, what if i don't want to play with any of my friends? I feel like it's, for lack of a better term, speaking for me and it feels weird.

Yeah, but it hasn't stopped me losing characters in the past; often related to their cloud servers fucking up. Also, I currently can't even play the damn thing; I think my character still exists at least, but whenever I try to head into a world, it just hangs there until it eventually times out sending me back to the main game.

Yeah - that service collapsed like an hour ago. I can't even get in anymore. That's Saturday for you. Guess now's the peakiest peak time for online gaming.

I like the idea of it sending out invites to people on my list of internet people rather than ending up with complete randoms all the time.
Wanna know what really brings out the worst in people in violent video games?
It's not the game itself, it's the people you "meet" online. .. Especially randoms.

Waste of damn oxygen that's for sure.

I'm pretty sure the automatic part is what three0nefive was talking about, not the idea of sending out invites to friends.

I know that, and I then replied that I'd rather automatically spam people, already on my list for the sole purpose of playing games together, than end up with all randoms.

Yeah it's pretty terrible and 8-16 players seems like a dream. Once, I was in a lobby with 5-6 people that lasted a bunch of rounds and it was fantastic, even if it takes too long between every round. 90% of the time is spent waiting in ridiculous load screens while wrestling with technical issues and leaving lobbies because they only have 2 players in them.

Hey Rockstar, I don't give a dick about your stupid free roam open world. Just put me on a lobby and let me race without the infinite load screens. That would be nice, man.

@zeforgotten: I think the good portion of automatically inviting friends is that if everyone is auto-inviting everyone else, it's just a fact of life rather than one or two people annoying you by behaving outside the norm. It becomes more "Friend X is doing this and I can join if I want" and less "Friend X is demanding I drop what I'm doing to do what they're doing" which always makes me uncomfortable to send people invites, which results in me and my friends playing together less, which is a negative outcome.

Is it just me, or is matchmaking finally getting a little better? I've been in a couple of full lobbies today, albeit most of them were filled up due to crews.

I think as more people are finally able to connect to the servers, and each other, it's definitely improved. Personally I've been waiting for invites to pop up on my phone rather than trying to host games myself, and they've been coming in thick and fast.

Totally agree. I think it's a strange system for inviting people all together. I'm constantly getting blasted with invites for races and such from people I can't even remember friending. I assume I'm doing the same to them which has led me to never hitting the auto invite and just trying to pull from instance or people in my live party.

I wish it would let me log into GTA:Online, I can't even complain about it yet because it still wont let me.

I can get into free roam super easy. However I try once or twice every day but I've not once been able to get into a job or mission. Always says timed out.

I really want to trick out my off-road truck. But to do that I have to win a bunch of off-road races. And I CANNOT, for the life of me, get anyone to accept invites to an off-road race. I played for maybe four hours last night. And I had to spend most of that time playing deathmatch because it was the only way to connect to people, earn RP, and make money. So how am I supposed to build the car that I want if I can't find anyone to join me in the races that I need to win to unlock the parts?

I enjoy GTA Online even with all the bugs. Reached rank 28 last night and am enjoying my Terribly expensive Apartment with its white walled garage full of lavished cars and trucks and bikes. Buddy though is pissed as his char got deleted. At least he got to and is Still world 2nd in arm wrestling.

I don't know if it's just Free Aim lobbies, but damn it's impossible to get a decent room going. Is everybody been moved to the Dunce pool or what?

Its just Free Aim. I had the same issue, switched to aim assisted and bam full rooms everytime almost instantly. Sucks cus i'd prefer free aim but i hate waiting so meh...

I had an inkling about that. What a shame really. Regardless of that though, there should be more than enough players even in Free Aim. And jeez, if anything ever made me wish there was no lock on and aim assist settings in GTA V, then it's this.

I have to agree, the matchmaking code it a bit poor.

Also, survivor can be great and a nice payout but too often with randoms it's a poor experience. Make some teams up out of crew mates I say.

Matchmaking is noticeably better with aim assist settings. God I hate this world. Not that it matter for racing, which is my favorite activity really - aside from the emergent open world shenanigans.

Went on a killing/bounty hunting spree with the Scout Chopper and rockets. Pretty fucking rewarding wrangling that thing and landing a shot. Still - I'd rather have proper chopper controls.

Jeez. I really don't get what's so fucking hard to pool players first, and then fill up lobbies prorperly, instead of creating a million and one empty lobbies. Fuck!

exactly! i signed up on here just to say fuck rockstars multiplayer, they have some of the worst match making ever. there worse then a dating site. i agree with everything wrote on here. i just sit in empty lobbys. and all there replies on the forums are check your nat settings, so i know when they say that that means they aint gonna fix it anytime soon. funny how my nat settings dont seem to be wrong with other games

I use aim-assist, the only reasonable choice for this game (I mean only a complete masochist would use the unwieldy, stiff and completely unusable free-aim mode), and I still have huge issues filling up lobbies or even joining Crew Members. How insane is it that the Giant Bomb crew is 300 members big and yet in the middle of the day it won't be able to find any compatible games with crew members in them?

Oh and only crazy people use free aim, as all it does is take away your time, after you fail to shoot the laser sniper AI that are headshotting you almost from beyond the draw distance.

I can only repeat myself, but you are and remain dead wrong about Free Aim. Its depth is not only worthwhile, it's well executed and well thought out - outside of shooting from inside vehicles, that is.

Other than that, how do you matchmake millions of players worldwide and end up with more empty or half-empty lobbies than otherwise?

BY DOING IT WRONG!

I was just playing some single player, because the online is having some weird relapse into server dysfunctionality, and I almost threw up in my mouth a little when I realized the game had switched over to free-aim because of some mission I was doing with a couple of dilusional bad-gunplay enthusiasts online that had (most probably by accident or wilful ignorance) chosen that unfortunate "option."

There's no accounting for taste. A game that plays itself is definitely not my direction. Just know, it can be mastered, and it feels good once you do.

My take on free-aim in GTA is the same as it is for people that only play games on the hardest difficulty. If having the game stack the odds highly against you feels good then that is of course a personal preference, but in favor of actually having fun, it's not one that I can share or understand.

I don't get it. I hit *Join Race*, and it searches for a lobby for like 5 seconds - then it makes a lobby just for me. How retarded is that? Just pool me for a 30 seconds wait or whatever, until you find something suitable. If I hit a *Join Race*, I never ever want to end up alone in a lobby.

Seriously, how lousy is the matchmaking? There's probably few games with as numerous an active userbase as GTA Online has right now, and each and every one of those is better at bringing people together to have some fun!

Good fucking god!