The incident is reminiscent of games from the mid-90s where the game engine would quit (or crash) before all information was saved. This is not something that you would expect from a current game, but we think we might see some of the why in the information that RockStar is pushing to gamers. They have a new potential work around if you run into missing progress or a completely missing character when opening GTA Online.

“If you have previously created a character but see an empty character selection screen when entering GTA Online, please back out to GTA V Story Mode and try re-entering GTA Online through the pause menu (repeat or wait until Rockstar cloud servers are back up). Do not create a new character in the empty slot where your character should be,”

If this happens you can reach the game world, but not your character information. It would be the equivalent of deleting or blocking your save game files on your local PC. If you simply open the game you overwrite those files (by creating a new one) and your information is potentially lost. Fortunately the fact that the GTA Online servers are not really talking has prevented players from accidentally saving “temp characters” over their original ones if they are playing and they lose connection to the GTA Online game servers.

The $64 question is why are servers or storage inside GTA Online’s network not talking to each other. That is something that RockStar is going to have to fix (and soon). There are already many, many complaints about this particular issue (and others) and gamers are not known for their patience.  If RockStar cannot provide a solid fix for their own network issues they will begin to lose players and the number of new players will slow or stop as word gets out about their problems.

Will you put up with the GTA Online issues much longer? Tell us on our Forum