GTA Online Becoming A Chore? Go Ascetic.

GTA Online is a game that is often praised for the massive amount of items, vehicles, customization options, several apartment types and styles, weapons and all kinds of other things you can buy in game. On the flipside, GTA Online is a game that is often criticized for the cost of items, vehicles, customization options, several apartment types and styles, weapons and all kinds of other things you can buy in game. Tough, right?

Earning large amounts of cash relatively quickly in GTA Online is notoriously hard. Many techniques have been discovered, optimized, perfected and shared over the years which allegedly increases the efficiency of your money acquisition. These techniques include grinding the Pacific Standard Heist with the assistance of the kuruma glitch, or repeating the same two VIP jobs in rotation because that minimises downtime due to cooldown.

If you really want to make cash quickly and efficiently, it will come down to math and repeating missions. You'll be checking your performance based on how much cash an activity provides or how much you earn in an hour. Your perceived "enjoyment" of the game will warp to become dependant on money. Your GTA Online sessions will become necessary to secure a steady income.

Do this for long enough and GTA Online will become a chore. A day job. Something that you feel like you have to do instead of playing for fun. This will wear away your enjoyment of the game and eventually make you dread your second job that you need to perform on the couch with a controller in your hands.

So what to do when this happens? What action should you take when you realize that you're no longer having fun with the game because you became so fixated on money?

Well, there really are two things you should do. Something you shouldn't do, however, is quitting the game. GTA Online is an ever expanding and well crafted online experience which gains new content boosts every now and then.

Rekindling the fun in GTA Online at this point is simple: stop caring about money. That's it. You don't need the biggest yacht (granted, you don't need the biggest yacht anyway since the middle one is the best overall), you don't need the most expensive apartment. You don't need to own the X80, especially not alongside a host of other expensive cars that you'll never drive (unless collecting cars is your thing. In that case, we feel your pain).

You definitely don't need that gold-plated Luxor which basically doesn't do anything. You don't need every fully customized Lowrider. If you start caring about how much you enjoy a given job without looking at how much you earned once it's over, if you hop into a few Adversary Modes, if you have fun with the wacky stunt races, GTA Online will regain its fun factor.

And really, it is a bad thing to waste. GTA Online is chock full of entertaining content which isn't there to facilitate the game being a chore — it's there for you to enjoy. If you look at the current landscape in terms of high-population online games supported by AAA developers, you'll see that this game firmly sits in the upper echelons.

Alternatively, if the whole "stop caring about money" thing doesn't work out for you, there is always another alternative. Rockstar is offering its players the chance to decide what's worth more to them: time or money? If people choose time, then they can save precious hours by purchasing Shark Cards, which net players in-game currency in exchange for real money.

Have you ever felt that your GTA Online sessions are more like chores?