They stand for everything that is right and wrong with GTA Online - the new yachts. No other player hangout is so full of cool features, so visually impressive or so fun to use. I couldn't wait to get my hands on one of these babies! You get to choose a paintjob, put some fancy lighting and a flag on there, give it a name and before you know it, you're aboard the Feckish Lobster, Germany.
Lobsters need love, too, you know
This thing comes with everything - suites with kingsize beds and bathrooms, free rocket launchers and other assorted weaponry, free respawning helicopter plus second helipad, a dinghy, a speedboat and four jetskis. There's also a bar and a hot tub, all fully interactive for you and whatever friends and crew you choose to invite. Random strangers may theoretically come for a visit, as well, which can be prohibited via the boat's togglable defense system. Sip drinks in your pool while the automatic anti air cannons keep those pesky invaders out.
Reeeally don't wanna stand up right now.
Wench! Canst thou quench mine thirst? Is... is that how people talk on RP servers?
All the fancy-shmancy extras aren't just limited to the yacht itself, either. Check out the helicopter you get with the Aquaruis yacht!
It's the overpriced carbon model, which costs 3 million ingame cash when ordered separately
Your passengers get champagne and free interwebz.
So do you needany of this stuff? I guess not. You don't need a speedboat, a chopper, your own bar floating on the ocean or the most epic hangout in any GTA game, ever. You can rent a tiny garage, cram a shitty compact car you found behind the strip club in there and play your missions that way. Heck, not even that is necessary - there are enough cars driving around in any mission, just go grab one as you see fit. The vast majority of them don't require boats or planes or helicopters. If they do, you'll get free ones for the duration of the mission. Not necessarily the colour or model you want, but they get the job done. Yachts are incredibly fun to use, to show off and to enjoy with friends, but they're luxury items. Heck, they're the very definition of luxury, no?
And how the fuck did I ever manage without one?
Here's the catch. The new yachts are so awesome and so ridiculously expensive, most average players will never get to own one. The smallest one starts at 6 million GTA Cash, the biggest one with all bells and whistles attached goes all the way up to 10,000,000. Ten. Fucking. Million.
Sure, you can make all that and then some, if you're one of the select few players with exactly three skilled friends, who will complete the required heist challenges with you. I've completed all the heists with my friends, some of them several times, but most of us have jobs, families, relationships and simply not enough time to go after all the hard modes, elite challenges, all the difficult stuff that grants extra cash. Most of the time it's fucking hard to even arrange for one or two days a week, where the four of us get to play together for two or three uninterrupted hours.
Of course you could always try random lobbies, play with random people and attempt to communicate with the ever-increasing Russian and Chinese community via voice chat, as there are no region or language settings for GTA Online's matchmaking. Good luck with that!
I only play with people I know and love. Which limits my pool of heist partners to about one person.
If you're not one of the lucky folks with reliable, talented heist partners, the only other viable way to farm some amount of cash is by playing missions. Depending on how long it takes you to complete a mission, they may net you anything from 7 to 20 grand. Complete something really, seriously fast and you get a tiny reward. If it takes you more than ten minutes to complete a mission, you'll receive more cash in the end. It doesn't even matter whether you're being stupid and getting lost or whether the mission itself is just more complex and time-consuming. The game doesn't care. The more time you spend, the more money you'll get, up to a limit somewhere around 21,000. That's it. If you try to grind them out at a decent speed, it's more realistic to expect around 15k per average mission completed.
So if you were hoping to buy an Aquarius yacht with all extras for 10 million GTA Cash, you'd have to play roughly 667 missions. And that's assuming you murder every opponent with your bare hands. Ammo, grenades, rockets and armor cost extra. Expecting to play at least 700 missions is probably more realistic here. And since every single mission is a rehash of the exact same "kill something and/or transport an item/vehicle/person somewhere", things may get a tiiiiny bit monotonous after a while.
And for Christmas you get to beat people up in SNOW!
Of course such odd design decisions don't happen by accident. They need to motivate people to give into microtransactions somehow, right? Well, about that...
Only 99,99 for 8 million in pretend money? Better buy two of them!
8,000,000 GTA Cash will set you back 100 Bucks. Which still isn't enough for the biggest yacht if you want all the extras. Think closer to 120 Dollars. In "microtransactions", for a game which costs around 60 Dollars. There's nothing micro about these payments, baby.
And again, yes, sure, I get it - you don't fucking need one of those things to play the game. But hey, remember when GTA was about enjoying all the damn vehicles, planes, tanks, dicking around with all the cool shit the game had to offer? Instead of putting everything behind a massive grind-/paywall? Oh right, that's when the game was still singleplayer only.
Turns out most people don't want to play GTA to grind levels or work towards some stupid car, tank, boat or yacht. And grinding missions is exactly that - it's work. Once you're required to play several hundred of them, it's way past the point of being a fucking chore. So when GTA announced multiplayer with regular free DLC packs, this is really not the thing I had hoped for.
Make an educated guess how hated these people still are in today's GTA lobbies:
In case you can't see or figure out what's going on in the above video, it shows a player using a cheat menu to drop tons of cash on random people. There are no dedicated servers on GTA, it's all Peer2Peer, so cheating via .dll injectors is relatively easy. And lots of people don't want any of that "free money", not just, because it's against the rules, but because you can absolutely get banned for having cash dropped on you.
Yeah, imagine that. Some asshat drops a ton of money on your character and you get banned and flagged as a cheater as a result. Except when you join public lobbies now that the yachts are here, you'll see people asking for cheaters to drop the money on them. They're aware of the risk, they just don't give a fuck, because they'd rather get flagged and maybe have their game account taken down for a while than spend the rest of their lives grinding out 700 missions. And suddenly cheaters are considered good guys by a big part of the community, who provide the players with money, because Rockstar are ripping everybody off. You may wanna rebalance those mission rewards or look into the prices for Shark Cards, Rockstar.
