Passive mode costs $100. Given we should be flush with $500k, I think a few days of everyone just going passive to enter and exit your apartment would instigate boredom and nip that in the bud. Can definitely be a useful tool elsewhere too - like dealing with the dicks who camp outside the garages to try and gun people down.
That is a solution , I agree. Though I’ve resisted passive mode so far, in the same way as I stick to ‘free-aim’ and the ridiculous ‘imperceptible-dot’ aiming reticule.
I still won’t go to my house much I don’t think, headshots or not. There doesn’t seem much point beyond intoxicating oneself and watching TV, which I can do in higher definition IRL.
And since you can’t use guns/explosives in your safehouse, I can’t even make it resemble Dana’s devastated post-Zool apartment from Ghostbusters, more’s the pity.
Don’t spend the money on passive mode; use Friends-only or Crew-only mode. On the 360, I nearly always use Crew-only mode and, thus far, have never even seen another actual player. Presumably the PS3 is a bit more active, but I wouldn’t expect to get slaughtered by a crew member.
I too won the $500K lottery, but frankly I’m pretty happy with the apt+6 I have in the middle of town (it’s the one “located steps from a skate park”, costs about $130K). It is really well-situated on the map, easy to get in/out of, and Gallavante Ballers regularly appear within a block or two (resell value $9K, I think). And a 6-car garage seems plenty big enough.
What a bizarre sense of humor you have! 
I’m in several crews, but so far have been having trouble getting any of the other ones to help out with missions - I’m going to set the SDMB crew as my active crew for a while and see if I can get some missions accomplished with some active players with mics.
@Knorf: to be honest, I’m not that much of a “car guy” within the game. Early on I got one of the Schuysters and it works very well for me. Other than that one car, I only use the garage to store Ballers and Ubermachs until my 48 minutes is up. At that point I have my mechanic deliver one and take it to the nearest LSC to sell.
Woohoo – payday! Got my half-mil this morning. Now…I’ll…not really do much with it, since I don’t get an opportunity to play that often.
(If anyone likes, feel free to add me to your PS3 friends list though – the handle is the same as here)
Ok, why is it nobody ever told me about the Vehicle Deathmatch with Laser jets? Holy crap that is fun!
I just played one on one with some random guy, there were 16 seconds left in the 10 minute mission, I had 3 kills on him to his 0, and had him dead in my sights with a missile inbound for my fourth kill when the game and console completely locked up, probably due to my mad pilot skills just being too much for the game to handle! And I was on a “Power Play” or some such at the time, presumably because I got two kills in pretty rapid succession, even though I was backing off and letting him get airborne and situated after each kill.
What sucks is that I bet I didn’t get any credit or cash for any of that, and I probably even got dinged further towards being a Bad Sport for leaving the game early, even though I left it in the locked-up state for around 20 minutes. Man, I wish I could have gotten a screen grab of the image that was locked-up on the screen though, because it was a thing of beauty how dead to rights I had him lined up for my fourth kill with 16 seconds on the clock. He was banking hard trying to lose my missile, but I was practically tailgating him, about to loose some more fiery death right up his keister.
We have GOT TO get one of those dogfights going with as many players as possible… I imagine it would be fun as hell with multiple threats and targets!
That is fun, but funner than that is ‘Top Fun’ (and Top Fun II) in my opinion, where one team in Lazer jets chases the other in cars/aerobatic planes. Nothing has simulated the cheap thrill of a cheesy action film than swerving about the road at top speed while missiles explode feet away. Tip: if you’ve got the ‘driving like a crazy bustard’ role, avoid the long straight roads.
FYI, Vespucci Beach Party, the first of their ‘event weekends’ started last night.
This also coincides with their free to everyone DLC Beach Bum Pack.
Anybody going to be playing this weekend, or are you all Call of Dutying? Most, if not all of the missions on their playlist need at least 4 players.
I’ve had one good Beach tounament with random pleasant people (did make me feel guilty in the mandatory deathmatches), and reckon it’s okay; could do with a heist in there. It would be funner with SDMB types in conversation, possibly.
Got some seriously good gaming in today with BTL and Zaparthes today; I’ve been getting good races and such with Voltaire as well over the past week or two. The Beach Party thing seemed to be a bust. I wasn’t able to get in at all, although I was able to get in some of the new missions.
I claimed a bounty on someone in December, which turned out to be 2.2 billion in game dollars. Annoying really as this was presumably someone’s ill-glitched gains, and has stolen much of the game’s impetus from me.
You can give other Avatars cash I gather, so please just ask if you want a car/biplane/tank etc [deadfred77, PS3]
Is anyone still playing this online? if so, can someone tell me what the hell I’m doing wrong?
It looks like amazing fun, but it seems unless you’re a twelve year old kid with aspergers and 473 online friends, you can’t really do much.
If I wander around open world, the first other player I run into invariably shoots me on sight. Gee whiz, what fun. So I generally try to just go for the activities - mostly races. But getting into an honest-to-buddha “multiplayer” race is practically impossible for me. Here are the three scenarios I’ve run into trying to play online over the last week:
1 - I quick join - jobs: race - any race will do. I get put into a race queue with one other person and we have a two player race. No fun.
2 - I try to host a race and I sit there for a half-an-hour on Auto-Invite and I get two people to join. Usually one of them drops out as soon as the race starts. No fun.
3 - I get an invite to a race, but when I try to join it says the lobby is full and it kicks me back out to open world. But truth be told, I could wander around open world for hours, getting ganked by grade-schoolers left and right and see only a handful of invites.
Seriously, what’s a brother to do? I’ve had the game since it came out, but just recently started playing online of the last month or two. I barely need one hand to count the number of races I’ve competed in with more than three players involved. And I’ve never been in a race that was completely full.
Why am I such a GTA pariah?
I still play pretty regularly, mostly for the racing and for the raining death on bounties and people in tanks with the jet. 
I’m usually solo, playing with and against randoms, as I don’t have many friends and no crew. (Speaking of which, I used to be in the SDMB crew, but a while back I noticed I wasn’t, anymore. Not sure what happened there. Does the SDMB crew still exist? Did I get kicked out?) I get invites to crews regularly, but I haven’t accepted any because I don’t see the point of aligning myself with a bunch of random people, since I don’t often do the team-oriented jobs, anyway.
But getting to your point, even without friends/crew, I don’t have a problem finding groups of randoms to race. I used to though, very much so, when my PS3 was on my network as “NAT Type 3”, which I suspect is your problem. Pretty sure the Xbox has the same potential problem, though it’s probably called something else like “Closed NAT” or some such.
On PS3, go to the Network Settings and look at the connection info. You want a NAT type 2 (or rarely, even a 1), but a NAT type 3 is going to make many online/multiplayer games a miserable, lonely experience.
You’ll find many guides and such online to help you get a “good” NAT type. There are lots of potential issues that could cause problems, but a likely reason is that your console is being “Double NAT’ed” if its connection to the internet is going through two different devices, such as your ISP’s modem and then your own wireless access point. You can make that work with the correct settings, but if you want to test/just do it the easiest way, connect your console directly to your ISP’s device to eliminate any potential double-NAT’ing issues.
If my suspicion is correct, and you do have NAT type issues, and are still having trouble fixing it, you should probably start a new thread in GQ with all the details of your network setup. It shouldn’t be hard to get squared away.
I’ve been playing some the last few days. voltaire, I noticed that my SDMB crew affiliation had gone away during one session. I tried setting it through the game settings and got a ‘You already belong to this crew!’ error message. Then I tried going through the social club website. Eventually I exited and restarted the game and it was restored.
I’ve seen you on, voltaire, and I thought I saw the ‘SDMB’ by your handle, but I’m not sure.
Jack, what’s your handle? Are you part of the crew? If not, we should get you an invite.
I’m on as JQBatty2 (pretty sure that’s it - there may be some underscores in there). I was using an different logon for a while, but I needed to use an updated one if I wanted to get the extras from belonging to the Social Club.
I joined some random crew when I first set up - LSB (Los Santos Ballers).
Jack, I (ps3 handle btl) sent a friend request to that ps3 user last night, but I wasn’t sure if that is your ps3 handle, or just your social club handle. I did a search on the social club and found your account for JQBatty and also sent you a crew invite, but wasn’t able to find the JQBatty2 account. If you want to use the ‘2’ account instead, you can do a crew search for ‘straight dope’ and you can invite yourself - it’s an open crew, so anyone can apply to join.
Not related to GTA Online at all, but for those of you that played through the story mode, did anyone get 100%?
I’ve played through a few times and gotten the various endings, and the closest I’ve come is the low eighties. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to find the spaceship parts and submarine parts again, not to mention a lot of the other stuff I’m apparently missing. So if you’ve done it, can you tell me, was it really worth it? Bragging rights aren’t what I’m after so that’s no incentive to keep plugging away for that last twenty percent.
Are people using the SDMB crew? Would somebody like me to make them the big boss?