Rockstar adding more servers to avoid issues during the launch of GTA Online

Rockstar has some understandable and justifiable concerns to tackle with the upcoming launch of Grand Theft Auto Online, and the company seems to be on the right track to at least containing these concerns, if not fixing them entirely. The company has revealed in a blog post that since Grand Theft Auto 5 became much more successful than Rockstar thought it would, the studio is attempting to add more servers for GTA Online to avoid the same pitfalls Diablo 3 and SimCity suffered.

“One thing we are already aware of, and are trying to alleviate as fast as we can, is the unanticipated additional pressure on the servers due to a significantly higher number of players than we were anticipating at this point,” said Rockstar. “We are working around the clock to buy and add more servers.”

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Hopefully, Error 37 won’t repeat itself

Despite the higher number of servers, however, the game won’t exactly have an easy start. Considering the fact that the game made more than $1 billion in the first few days of its release, gamers logging in to GTA Online will undoubtedly overload the servers. However, these problems should get smoothened out as time goes on.

“This increased scale is only going to make the first few days even more temperamental than such things usually are,” the blog post states. “This is part of the problem some of you have been experiencing with the iFruit App and some Social Club services - we apologise in advance for this and thank you for your patience in this area.”

Since no open-world game is without bugs, and this is doubly-so for a multiplayer open-world game, Rockstar expects technical issues with the game in the first few days, such as glitches and crashes. “There will be the typical growing pains for an online game, including but not limited to crashes, glitches, crazy bugs, gameplay modes and mechanics that need re-balancing and other surprises,” Rockstar said. “Even in GTA5 Story Mode, some of you may have seen a few odd and even amusing little glitches out there last week. This sort of thing is inevitable in a massive open-world game and there’ll surely be lots more unexpected oddities like this in the Online world next week.”

Grand Theft Auto Online will start on October 1 and will be free for everyone who owns a copy of GTA 5, which is available on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 for Rs 2,999. Check out our review of the single player Grand Theft Auto 5.