[GTAO] Have OP Weapons & Vehicles Ruined GTAO or Made It Better?

[fw3]

It's a simple question, you'd think... but is it?

Sure, in older versions of the game, there were plenty of weapons that were OP (over-powered), like the Flamethrower, Rocket Launcher, and even the melee Chainsaw, but nothing like what GTAO has made available.

We all thought the Rhino Tank and Lazer Jet were the true scourge of GTAO, but with the Deluxo, Oppressor, and all the other weaponized vehicles available, it's next to impossible to do routine, mundane tasks in a full lobby without being scoped, exploded, obliterated, or set on fire.

Truly, the safest place to hang out is either in Passive Mode or on a Yacht with Defenses turned on, but then, you can't really do much.

But, has this made the game BETTER, in that it's evened the playing field between griefers, high ranks, and regular players?

Or has it made it WORSE and much too volatile a playground for anyone to really do anything worthwhile without confrontation?

And with all these OP weapons and vehicles, the inclination to blow up each other's vehicles is as enticing as free samples at the local food court.
Except, that despite giving players these ridiculous & unbelievable weapons and vehicles, we are still subject to penalization and BAD SPORT for using them.

It makes little sense, in my opinion.

But, do these vehicles need a good nerfing? Do the lesser weapons & vehicles need a good buffing? Who knows.

Curious to what you all might think or have idea about. Cheers!

TL;DR Have the over-powered weapons and vehicles ruined GTAO or made it better? What do you think?


Rockstar releases the Decapitating Donut, a new weaponized vehicle that players can both fly and use to decapitate unsuspecting criminal adversaries.

[Black-Dragon96]

A bit of both to be honest.

Stuff like the khanjali, the hunter or the akula are fine because while they have their powers, they still have some drawbackd or are only good at one thing.

A hunter can't kill you when you hide inside a parking garage, he khanjali is slow so you can outrun it with a car, the akula got no active defenses and is not that agile.

They improved the game imo since they are a good counter against higly armored vehicles and jets.

 

 

Stuff like the opressor, the deluxo or the explosive sniperhowever kinda ruined it. The got little to no drawbacks, insane offensive abilities and perform well at nearly every task. I mean the deluxo can drive, fly and "swim". There is no save place to hide from a deluxo.

[Lonely-Martin]

Voted: Made it better. Not without it's drawbacks though, lol. But definitely better, IMHO.

 

For me, I feel freemode was and always will be a mixed bag at best, we've had jets and tanks kick our arses all the time really, lol. These toys are adding to this part of the game no end, but equally add to my game too. (Passive PvE player). The problem for me was they made crews/lone players/passive minded folk all share sessions along with the more combative player. It gets mentioned a lot (often by me, lol), but I do feel the 'public only' restriction was the catalyst for how much more looked down on these OP toys/methods can be.

 

Take out the bollocks though, I love to mess about in much of this stuff, and my 12 year old just loves that stuff too. It's great fun, genuinely is. The Explosive rounds on my shotgun are just freakin' awesome! But they take the headlines for all the, almost instant, negative impacts they can have. Stuff like BS points and insurance too, it's all good fighting this stuff, but why it has to have a further negative impact to do so, is beyond me. (Aside the obvious card sales, lol - That potential $11m+ paywall for some was strong stuff indeed).

 

Should be free to blow anything up that has rockets/armour and designed to kill players this strongly. Combine them with passive abuses or under map-like glitches though, they really are just a nightmare sometimes. We had jetpacks and Hunters in San Andreas and the like too, so them being so out of place isn't what I feel. It's that we're online around easy targets all the time, it's like a moth to a flame.

 

Give us our choices back, and stop raiding my bank/giving BS points, all is good with this stuff IMO.

Edited May 10, 2018 by KWF1981

[Nutduster]

"Ruined" is a strong word but I think it's mostly been a change for the worse. Any PvP you get into in any public session will within minutes turn into a Deluxo/Oppressor/explosive sniper/Akula/jet-fest. And doing regular GTA stuff - driving around in a lowrider, robbing stores, running your businesses - is an invitation for the horde of OP-vehicle-exploiting players to massacre you.

 

The one good thing about it, IMO, is that all this new stuff balances against each other reasonably well. When the game first launched, tanks were close to unstoppable, and after the tank nerf and the addition of the Hydra, jets were the new preferred tool to own the entire lobby. This has improved now from the standpoint that no one vehicle or weapon dominates over all the others; there is always a counter. But if you're not wanting to get into a neverending spamming of those vehicles at all, it's just annoying.

 

My two cents: most of this stuff never should have been added; the jet should have been nerfed long ago by removing its explosive MGs; and homing missiles of all kinds never should have been made to lock onto land vehicles driven by players. That would have been my dream version of GTA Online. I play and mostly enjoy the version we got instead, but I think it's really a nightmare sometimes. If you're not in the mood to just go around wrecking people and trolling, this game is really not much fun anymore.

Edited May 10, 2018 by Nutduster

[R3CON]

I think it's made GTA online far worse than it would've been otherwise. These days it seems if you're not in passive or in some vehicle that can take multiple explosions, you're a sitting duck. Not that freeroam was the epitome of world peace before. But it's a little bit harder to get that kill in a world without personal fighter jets, the Batmobile, rocket bikes, parachuting KiTT cars and the Delorean.

 

These vehicles were justified as counters to existing problems and then became just as easily abused as what was going on before. It's an endless cycle of more and more PvP-focused, military-inspired content. It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle too. Current ideas of more down to earth, humble DLCs are often brushed aside after teaming up with the Russians to battle SkyNet-style supercomputers bent on world domination.

 

Things are far too extreme these days and I wish there was more of an everyman, "this-is-plausible" feel. There's a way to make an exhilarating game without losing perspective or going after the biggest and wildest weaponsry. The older GTAs had extreme elements in moderation or as part of single player (i.e. private) gameplay. GTA Online just seems like they've lost the plot and are throwing literally everything at the wall.

 

Sure I've had some fun moments with the new content, but I had fun before all this too. Every kill in the Akula or the Oppressor or the Khanjali just isn't as special as if I made an awesome move on foot or in a regular car off the street. Conflict is too random, easy and flippant nowadays and it's taken a bit of the challenge/immersion away.

Edited May 10, 2018 by R3CON

[FlacidJack]

I always kinda feared what the game would become once they added heavy military assets but atleast those vehicles have a bit of balance, like being big targets if the weapons are OP.

I never expected the Oppressor or Deluxo though, they're like the added military vehicles but much smaller, faster and more agile plus they have nutty weapons that sometimes outmatch the big military vehicles. That's when any balance we did have went bye bye imo.

 

My biggest issue with the Deluxo and Oppressor is they make the game feel silly / childish. Just seeing those icons on the map make me want to find new pople to play with, especially these days with the 2x missions payout, the Deluxos beat everyone to the objective then fail by blowing everything up.

Makes me wish the host could choose what vehicles to restrict.

[budcat]

They're stupid, end of.

 

So sick of GTAO shaving sh*t on my sandwich and calling it truffles.

 

GTAO is a bipolar ex-gf. For a while I rode the euphoric highs and dealt with the hysteric lows but I'm done. I just hope RDR2 is more like GTA4. A sophisticated, perhaps even contentious personality, unique, with a full flavor and well-balanced, self aware panache. Not just one more crazy bitch.

 

Let Just Cause be Just Cause. You're GTA. Stay in your lane, R*.

[Sanches]

I never would mind a vehicle with a HMG on top unless it requires a second player to use it. But nothing explosive and 1 man piloting.
But when Rockstar presents us something fast, armored and with powerful guns, im washing my hands. It could work for a SP, but not for MP. First of all, online should be balanced.

[fw3]

Should we blame the over powered weapons and vehicles for the pandemonium going on in GTAO, or should that blame be assigned to the people using them?

Edited May 10, 2018 by fw3

[slowburn29]

Saints row was a childish cartoon version of GTA. Feels now like GTA is taking that direction

 

Its like when a band hits that 3rd or 4th album and starts sounding like the bands trying to sound like them

[Sanches]

Of course i blame Rockstar. Because i can't really blame people playing their content.
Even tho it's summoning a butthurt when you get Deluxo'd.

[Yellow Dog with Cone]

Should we blame the over powered weapons and vehicles for the pandemonium going on in GTAO, or should that blame be assigned to the people using them?

Both.

 

I mean, it's obvious that most players will flock to the OP flavoe of the week to get easy kills, that happens in every game, tier whores, tryhards, you call it.

 

But R* is the real culprit here for refusing to actually balance the game and instead only adding more fuel to the fire, trying to counter OP with even more OP is a bad way to balance a game, same as making OP things expensive in a game with a broken economy.

 

On topic: IMO, yes, they have ruined the overall experience by making it feel samey and boring. Because of everyone using OP weapons/vehicles and broken mechanics, the gameplay itself becomes stagnant.

 

I mean, when was the last time you got killed in a drive-by? When was the last time you got griefed by a Lazer's rockets? Where's the APCs? The Rhinos? The Bombushkas and Volatols? Where's the rest of the cars aside from whatever car is at the top of Broughy's lap time lists? Hell even the Oppresor and the Jets are getting phased out in favor of the Deluxo.

 

Being a tryhard has become the new meta and a boring one too.

[ThaBirdCoot]

Voted neither, there are times I really wish some of this stuff never saw the day but you learn to live with it, and is extra content so... I shouldn't complain about that, and I guess there are positives to some of the toys. It all comes down to one's playstyle. Now I don't use the flying bike, Akula or Deluxo ect. because it doesn't interest me but I think a lot of folks had their rightful hand of fun with that and I can see why. It is obviously a concern whenever these accesoires are used to grief and willingly annoy people for the sake of only doing that but go find a video game, or should I say online experience where everything plays fair clean with no exploits or silly overpowered mechanism to put to your advantage these days.

[R3CON]

Should we blame the over powered weapons and vehicles for the pandemonium going on in GTAO, or should that blame be assigned to the people using them?

The "guns don't kill people, people kill people" debate is long and cyclical. We'll be multiple pages in before there's some form of consensus on this.

 

As it relates to GTA, I think the OP weapons and vehicles are to blame though. Freeroam was just as chaotic and violent before but it was much harder to cause that choas when you had to drive all the way to Zancudo first. You couldn't just up call Pegasus to have a jet delivered to the nearest helicopter spawn. That significantly changed the nature of jet combat. The Lazer is always moving unlike the Hydra and it's VTOL capabilities. The old jet would need more time to loop around which might give the player on the ground more of a chance.

 

Think about the instant spawn aspect of the Oppressor for MC businesses. Its just so quick and simple to call them over and over again. Or for helicopters, the Akula's off the radar feature has ruined any sense of situational awareness. Even if you're watching the map and looking around you never know who's lurking around the corner. Adding advanced "better than the homing launcher" missles to the Deluxo or the Ruiner 2000 was more than players bargained for when they asked to see film classics in game. It's one thing to add a hover car and it's another thing to weaponize it.

 

Think about the abuses of Ghost Organization, Explosive Rounds and the thermal scope. People were plenty aggressive before all of this. There were always players who would exploit the game however possible to get "up on" the other player. But these additions by Rockstar have caused so many unintended consequences. It's taken conflict to a level far beyond the skirmishes of the past. In some thermal snipe situations, for example, you can even shoot people through walls!

 

This is to say nothing of the weaponized vehicles I didn't name or the aspect of freeroam businesses - the real casualty of all this. Maybe locking freeroam work to public lobbies wouldn't be so terrible if we didn't have countless different ways to end your shipment in seconds. Conflict took more strategy, timing and precision in the old days. The new additions have only made such encounters more efficient and as a result it's hard to do pretty much anything outside of perpetual battle.

 

Outrunning a random throwing stickies from a Zentorno is a quite a bit different from outrunning a Vigilante or an APC.

Edited May 10, 2018 by R3CON

[Commander S]

R* constantly adding gimmicky, gun-toting sci-fi vehicles, devoid of context, and with the end result of making public Freemode more hostile than ever, shows just how little the current team cares about game balance, setting/tone, immersion, or any of the sort of things a lot of long-time players of the series want from a GTA game.

Used to be that one of the things that set R* titles apart from the various GTA imitators was the meticulous craftsmanship - granted, with R*'s budgets, you'd expect higher production values anyway, but still, all the small details and lengths gone to making Los Santos feel like a perfect replica of real-life L.A. in miniature... You just don't get that from other developers - Ubisoft gets the closest with things like Watch Dogs 2, but still not close enough...

 

 

Context and verisimilitude used to be key - now? "Here's a flying Delorean - don't ask stupid questions about why modern-day L.A. suddenly has stuff like that". It's like R* looked at all the GTA IV Batmobile and Iron Man mods over the years, and figured they might as well do the same: just shove random wacky toys into the mix, devoid of context, and with little or no thought as to how they might affect the balance of multiplayer GTA. Either that, or they have, and they figure it all an easy sell to appeal to the 'shoot on sight' crowd - which means they don't care about the experience of anyone else playing the game. Neither's a particularly good look, IMO.

[Nutduster]

Should we blame the over powered weapons and vehicles for the pandemonium going on in GTAO, or should that blame be assigned to the people using them?

 

You'll never change the bad habits of millions of players, but the developers could change everything about our experience in an afternoon of coding. So: I think the blame really lies with both, but complaining about the players is an unproductive waste of time, whereas complaining about Rockstar (and trying to get them to improve this game, or at least the next one) has at least a slim chance of accomplishing something.

[uptownrockstar]

^Free aim lobbies are much more lax. Although I did have someone chasing me in a jet lastnite while I tried to source a car. I'm sure that was just a missunderstanding. It's like a totally different game. I actually had a shoot out with someone the other day with no rockets involved. Good times

Edited May 10, 2018 by uptownrockstar

[Chang]

Free Aim assisted in free Aim sessions, has Downgraded the gtao experience from an 8 to a 6.

 

I Chang

[Big Molio]

For me, usually an advocate of making the best of what we have, things went completely pear-shaped as soon as the Deluxo turned up.

 

It's a f*cking grade 1 nuisance that vehicle, far more than the Oppressor ever was.

[Bloodytears1666]

I can answer only personally, I don't own many of them, but glad to learn, try, experience new tactics against them. Worth to mention I'm not into business. Exclusively those things are indeed ruined GTA, but improved Online, if you know what I mean.

[FukNRekd]

Better because I suck at PvP and the OP stuff gives me balance.

 

Hell, who am I kidding, I've got a 3.1 K/D since Ive got my Akula, Hunter, Deluxo, minigun and explosive sniper.

 

Before getting those I couldn't go out in public without crapping myself. Now I'm not afraid of anything except 1v1 on the beach. So I moved to Lombark to overcome that LOL.

Edited May 10, 2018 by FukNRekd

[fw3]

Better because I suck at PvP and the OP stuff gives me balance.

 

Hell, who am I kidding, I've got a 3.1 K/D since Ive got my Akula, Hunter, Deluxo, minigun and explosive sniper.

 

Before getting those I couldn't go out in public without crapping myself. Now I'm not afraid of anything except 1v1 on the beach. So I moved to Lombark to overcome that LOL.

Please, even with the high powered war machines, my K/D is only 1.72 because I never pay attention when people are after me.

 

I'm that guy you see on the notifications, over and over:

 

Player X killed fw3

Player Y sniped fw3

Player Z obliterated fw3

fw3 died

 

Truth hurts, sometimes. <sigh>

[DangerZ0neX]

Might as well rephrase this thread into: Does chugging bleach kill you or cleanse you?

[tjakal]

Both, because I feel a game like GTA should be more down to earth and about small arms combat and street crime. BUT gunplay was never any good in GTA since we run around with 9999 bullets and tons of explosives and all our weapons are these 'Quake 1996' hitscan laser tag rifles with a very non-physical artificial recoil and cyclic rates. Ideally GTA should have had limited load-outs and proper bullet physics to create involved CQB engagements IMO, but as gunplay is implemented I've had so much more fun fighting from the new vehicles since the driving/helicoptering in this game is a good gameplay experience compared to the wiggle side to side marksman rifling that was the main PvP prior to the militarization DLC's.

Edited May 11, 2018 by tjakal

[fw3]

Might as well rephrase this thread into: Does chugging bleach kill you or cleanse you?

Oh, it burns... but SO good!