I'll admit that my first experience with Grand Theft Auto Online wasn't the best. Neither was the second or third, for that matter but that's beside the point. My short time in the online Los Santos was not what you would call "enjoyable," a far cry from the scenic island experienced in the game's glorious campaign mode.
In my experience, the online arm of Rockstar's critically hotly selling title suffers. Not from the recent bevy of glitches, errors, losses of cash, and such mind you, but from the same sort of problems as most online games, which is generally the reason why I tend to avoid them like the plague: the people who play them. The screaming into mics, senseless killing, sore losers, no sense of camaraderie...you know, the usual.
In Grand Theft Auto V, you're the only one who tends to be acting like an all out lunatic, driving into one way traffic, mindless manslaughter, carjacking, and starting shenanigans with the boys in blue just for kicks. But in GTA Online, it's everyone. Cosmically speaking, it's a nice sort of lesson, perhaps karma, for all the hell you've raised throughout the course of the game. As one Redditor so simply and succinctly put it, in GTA Online, "Everyone is Trevor."
It's one player's short but simple experience at dealings with the throngs on players who caused him undue grief before finding the seemingly one decent person on a particular server. The two undertake a breathtaking helicopter journey together to the top of the Maize Bank Tower, and while his newfound friend peers off the edge, the author sends him to the same fate that he himself fell victim to at the hands of so many other Trevors before: face down on the cold Los Santos streets.
TipsAtWork writes, "It's sunset, and it's beautiful. He's enjoying the view. It's serene. Before I know it, I have my pistol out and pointed at the back of his head. I ask myself 'am I really different than all the other animals playing online here?'"
No Tips, no you are not.
Even if Rockstar manages to fix the various issues plaguing the game, Tips explains fairly well just why I don't play much GTA Online these days, and don't plan on returning.
Guess I'll go collect some spaceship parts or somethin'...