Grand Theft Auto 5 fan fixes slow loading times for GTA Online

It’s been one of the most popular pieces of media for close to a decade, but a fan has solved one of its big problems so well, its owners paid.

A code savvy fan of the seminal video game Grand Theft Auto V has come up with a fix for one of its most frustrating flaws, and they did such a good job the game developers want to roll out their fix for everyone.

Github user tostercx, who also goes by t0st, claimed earlier this month that they’d found a way to reduce loading times for GTA Online – the game’s multiplayer mode – by up to 70 per cent.

It sounded too good to be true, but the game’s developer and publisher Rockstar has announced t0st’s fix will be coming to all players in a forthcoming update.

“After a thorough investigation, we can confirm that player t0st did, in fact, reveal an aspect of the game code related to load times for the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved,” Rockstar said in a statement seen by PC Gamer.

“As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update.”

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GTA V has remained popular despite releasing almost eight years ago.

GTA Online has remained popular for its sandbox environment that allows you to do pretty much whatever you like.

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The company also confirmed it had made an exception and awarded t0st $US10,000 ($A12,910) for their trouble through the company’s “bug bounty” program, which typically pays people who discover security or privacy issues, but in this case paid for a long overdue fix to the game that has remained popular even as it nears its eighth birthday.

Grand Theft Auto V is one of the most valuable pieces of media of all time.

Part of this is due to its status as the most recent instalment in a long-running and beloved franchise that made it hotly awaited before its release and hugely popular after – but another key to the longevity of GTA V is its multiplayer component, GTA Online, which functions similar to a massively multiplayer role playing game (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft or other popular titles from the past (though usually with less players in each lobby).

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The game was the first in the franchise to allow you to switch between three different central characters.

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After the game first launched on PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2013 it was ported to PS4 and Xbox One, then PC – and now GTA Online is being ported to the new PS5 and Xbox Series X|S console.

When the game finally found its way onto high powered gaming PCs in 2015, players could use more advanced technology that wasn’t then available on gaming consoles like solid state drives that allow for faster loading times, but one persistent annoyance remained for years: The loading times for GTA Online were simply too long – noticeably longer than for the story mode of the game.

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A frame grab of players robbing a service station in GTA Online.

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After claiming they were able to load the story mode in a little over a minute, but getting online took close to six minutes, t0st did some investigating and discovered an issue with the way the game loaded data for GTA Online.

They blamed a file around 10MB in size they theorised contained information about all the in-game items you can buy in GTA Online for the delay, saying that when they applied the fix it changed their load times from six minutes to less than two.

Fans reacted with joy to the news on the Steam community hub for the game.

“This could definitely be the best thing to happen to GTA V since the game got released for PC,” one gamer said.

Rockstar is yet to give a release time for the update that will add the fix.