After Seven Years, GTA Online Loading Times Have Finally Been Fixed

As someone who’s owned Grand Theft Auto V since its launch date, I’m well aware of the infamous joke that is the GTA Online loading times. Sometimes, it feels as though you could go out, get a bite to eat, come back, and the game would still be trying to put you into an online session. Even then, a lot of the time you were placed in with a hacker who wanted nothing more than to ruin your day. While the hacking issue obviously runs rampant to this day, at least one of those issues will finally be tackled. Thanks to the help of a community modder, GTA Online is having its load times reduced drastically.

For those unfamiliar with the story, community modder T0ST recently discovered a fatal error in GTA Online’s code that’s been causing loading woes for all these years. This error found that when the game scanned a file containing all of the game’s items (to check for discrepancies), an issue in the code caused it to scan the file around 1,984,531,500 times. This caused a severe CPU bottleneck, thus leading to the game taking incredibly long times to load. As such, he edited some of the code and managed to fix the issue somewhat quickly.

Thanks to his fix, Rockstar Games was able to push a patch out today for the game which corrected this error and has seen the loading times for GTA Online cut down by about 70%. T0ST also scored himself $10,000 for squashing this now infamous bug. Honestly, this alone may give me a reason to finally return to the game. While I do have some content I haven’t dabbled in yet, being able to load into the game with much less issue actually makes things infinitely better (especially when kicked out of GTA Online).

Will you be hopping back into GTA Online with this new update? Have you been dealing with the problem these past seven years as well? Let me know in the comments below.

Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online are available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.