GTA Online experiencing random character wipes, here’s how to avoid it
Ever since launching last week, GTA Online has experienced a host of issues. Rockstar expected as much, even publicly announcing that players should bear with GTAO, as the developer has never had to deal with an influx of online players as big as the GTA V install base.
It’s been about a week since launch, and the problems with GTA Online keep on coming. Now, it appears that characters are randomly being wiped from the game.
First, players couldn’t get into the online portion of GTA V. That, however, tends to be the case on a big online title’s launch day; every MMO player in existence knows you should avoid launch day if you have the patience.
About three days after launch, players were able to get into the game, but it generally involved brute force — retrying the login attempt over and over until it worked. Once logged in, players experienced heavy lag, freezing, and even strange graphical bugs, such as the game failing to load character limbs. Now, IGN reports that the worst type of issue to hit an online game is happening in GTAO — unintentional character wipes.
Along with the character wipes, a host of other wipes are plaguing the game — from rank and items, to in-game money and even apartments. Rockstar has officially recognized the issue, and has stated it’s looking to correct the matter, and if it can restore the lost progress.
Until then, Rockstar has offered some advice to help avoid progress loss. First, make sure that when you exit GTA Online, you do so by entering the pause menu and returning to single player mode. If you try to connect to the game’s servers and receive a message saying that the Cloud Servers are unavailable, do not hit the Retry option. In fact, Rockstar suggests you don’t force your way into the game on a temporary character if you receive the message. Instead, check back every so often, and log in once the Cloud Servers are back online.
So, if you’re experiencing issues with GTAO, it’s probably best you stick to the single player until the flood of multiplayer issues slows to at least a trickle.
