Well, that was fast! After yesterday's announcement, Rockstar Games has already rolled out the latest Grand Theft Auto Online patch that is officially introducing the fan-made loading time fix. News of huge improvements wrought by the patch have already been making the rounds.
The title update was rolled out earlier today worldwide, with "General network connectivity improvements" across all platforms besides the loading time fix itself. When we originally reported on the then-unofficial fix created by GitHub user tostercx, their data indicated the method would result in a 70% improvement.
Obviously one would have to account for the user's hardware and internet speeds, meaning variance was inevitable, but many players have already flooded the GTA Online Subreddit and other social platforms with reports of varying degrees of improvement. Similarly, many gaming outlets have reported on their own findings - while your mileage may vary, one thing is universal: the patch really did cut down loading times immensely.
Just skimming the main discussion thread on r/gtaonline yields some surprising numbers. Someone's loading time went from a whopping 5-8 minutes down to just 35 seconds. A less drastic, but still significant improvement reduced a 7 minute load time to 1 minute and 57 seconds. Other sources report smaller improvements, but it is important to note that in these cases the initial loading time was already relatively short; like a 3 minute and 15 second load time reduced to just 2 minutes.
Some people who have been playing the game with the absolute minimum resources, just making the cut for Online in terms of hardware and connection speeds were dealing with 15 minute loading times and more, with the new update cutting these down to just a couple of minutes.
When Rockstar announced that tostercx's fix is going official yesterday, the developers also thanked them for their efforts. We hoped that this major discovery would be rewarded in a more tangible way too, and Rockstar pulled through - tostercx, known in GTA Online as t0st, was awarded $10,000 Bug Bounty money. Though usually reserved for privacy and security related fixes, the magnitude of this fix warranted a special exception.
Unfortunately, it's not all roses - while the fix did wonders for the PC version of GTA Online, the multiplayer mode has been suffering from issues ever since the launch of the patch, causing connection issues and apparently breaking the common method for getting into a solo public lobby.
We'll keep you updated on the state of GTA Online on Xbox.
