I bought a headset, and am glad I did! It makes doing the missions a lot more fun. I enjoyed gang-bangin’ with born too late (btl on the PS3 side) yesterday. Drivin’ and shootin’ and raisin’ hell!
The missions get harder as you level, unsurprisingly. I’m convinced some of them are all but impossible if none of the crew have headsets to communicate with each other what’s happening.
Great! I think we might not have lost that “blow up the police cars” mission 85 times in a row if we could have talked. 
Very likely! I did complete that mission right after you left. But yeah, communication needed.
Sorry 'bout that.
Absolutely agreed over here - I’ve got a headset and it makes a huge difference. Once you get to level 20+ things get a lot more challenging in terms of teamwork. I feel like if I had a good team we could really take on some of these missions in an extremely cool fashion without just frontally assaulting them…
I guess I am the only one.
Speaking of communication… judging from a visit to the GTA forums I’m hardly the first person to say this, but Rockstar *definitely *needs to do something to make it easier to mute specific players (particularly in game lobbies and on missions, where as far as I can tell it’s not even possible). The designers were obviously not scholars of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, and I’ve already had more than I can stand of dipshit teenagers who won’t shut up, morons showing off their singing/rapping “skills,” asshats who blast their own radios into the mic, heavy breathers and other death penalty candidates.
Nifty trick on that if you have help - have your second person plant themselves at the second blow up location, as that one is really tough to hit as a drive-by. In fact, if you had two people, and one did location #1 and #3 and the other did #2 and #4, I think that would work really well.
Also, I kept the car after that mission, but it no longer had the armor (dang it!)
Vinyl Turnip - you can make it so the voice chat won’t come through your speakers at least. I just found that yesterday; I can turn my headset on when I have intelligent people to talk to… 
I installed it - 400+ MB! - and uninstalled it within a couple of weeks. It seems utterly pointless, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.
Well Chop is now able to do 3 tricks in the main game because of it. But I barely deal with him at all so who cares? And I guess you can customize your cars using the app but I’m not really into the racing so that doesn’t much matter to me.
I teamed up with a pal later and that’s actually exactly how we ended up doing it.
Re: the ifruit app.
I mainly downloaded it so that I could customize my license plate in the game, but as that doesn’t seem to carry over into the multiplayer I see exactly zero reason to use the silly thing.
There’s an option in the Interaction Menu (select button on PS3) that changes who can hear your mic - Everyone, Crew, Friends, Crew + Friends, or nobody. If you choose Crew or Friends, it also seems to silence everyone who isn’t either a friend or crew.
I was under the impression that this only affected the chat settings while in free roam— I see people online complaining that they still hear random people screaming while in game lobbies and on missions, regardless of what settings they use.
And while this would be an improvement (if it works), I’d prefer not to have to mute everyone by default, but would just like a quick way to plonk the bad apples. I know there’s a way to mute individual players from the Online menu, but I’m not sure whether that mutes them permanently, or whether it just works while in free roam and not during missions-- and you can’t get to that menu while you’re in a lobby or on a mission.
So, what I learned tonight is that I need to spend some money on some better weapons and grind up to get some of those. Woefully underpowered when on with Zaparthes.
Also, I need a headset. This game is going to be shitloads easier when we can actually have a dialogue, rather than second guessing what is going on.
Fun though. I think being on the uk time zone isn’t going to help me personally, but now I have finished the story mode, should be good to get involved more online.
Played an awesome mission with a friend last night. I’ll put it in spoilers just in case, though I don’t think it’s particularly necessary.
It’s the one where Lester asks you to steal a plane and deliver it to the Sandy Shores airfield. You have to take out a bunch of dudes on a beach and jack the plane. My buddy and I hopped in, but then Lester told us that the airfield had lots of bad guys, so my friend parachuted in and started fighting them while I circled the airfield. I got bored so I started buzzing the fight. Some dudes in SUVs came out and started shooting rockets at the plane every time I passed overhead, so I flew extremely low over them. The bad guy tracked the plane with his rocket but since I was so low, it hit one of the cars he was standing next to and blew himself and his buddies up.
The missions definitely get more interesting. I can’t wait to see what the heists look like.
I also cracked 200 grand last night. Can’t decide if I should buy the cheapest premium apartment or keep saving for one of the ones right in the center of the city for more convenient spawning purposes.
On a sidenote, I found a spot in the Boneyard survival mission that allows it to be beaten with just two players. There’s a trailer with a narrow space between it and a wall. Each player takes one side and then all it takes is a little patience while they all come to you.
Oh! Another thing: somebody with arteestic skills should make a crew emblem for us using the editor on the Web site. I think you eventually unlock the ability to plaster the emblem on your clothing and personal vehicles.
Was fun gang-bangin’ with you! But yes, communication is key and becomes more so as the missions appear. Sorry I wasn’t able to stick around to finish the mission we started! It’s a tricky one, what with the hidden ambushes and dudes with assault weapons spawning in behind us…
Since you can only have one apartment or garage at once, you get a trade-in amount back from your old place when you buy a new one. The trade in seemed to be about 75%. So you could buy one of the “cheap” 10-car apartments for now and trade up when you get fabulously well-heeled.
I did a little poking around on the internet and the trade-in value seems to be anywhere from 33% to 75% depending on factors that I’m unsure of. It looks like the more expensive the property, the less trade-in value you get.
I think I’ll just wait for the first chunk of stimulus money to drop and then buy the most expensive apartment.
Played an extremely nuts mission the other night - can’t recall the name of it. Set up is that three teams of players (in this particular case it was 3 separate players, 1 per team) start in Sandy Shores, with the goal of getting some drugs from an island off shore. I started off with a jet ski and had to jet ski to the coast to get to the island, where a bunch of enemies needed to be off’d before getting the goods. Then, they needed to be transported back to Sandy Shores - problem was that as you cross back over the water, you’re a sitting duck, and the other players take turns killing you and sinking the drugs to the bottom of the sea.
Eventually I decided to camp out with a sniper rifle and wait for someone to bring the drugs all the way to shore, and then let him take a nap on the sand. And THEN, you;re still not done, because you have to run down the river valley back to Sandy Shores, being chased by both the drug runners and the other teams. It was a total mess, and loads of fun. With some team work though, I could see it being loads of fun, with lots of potential to solve the problems of transportation with creative solutions…
I had ridiculously infantile fun tonight playing dodgems/bumper cars with some people in a car park. Craziness.