If missing vehicles weren’t much of a problem in the single player campaign, you’re not going to be pleased knowing that you could lose your character when playing GTA Online. And that’s not all – Players have taken to Rockstark’s support forum to report that rank, items, apartments and money earned in-game mysteriously go missing.
So what is the cause of the disappearing act? Well, the main culprits here are the Rockstar Cloud Services. According to the developer, the when their servers are down or unavailable, gamers will still be able to play online, albeit only with a temporary character. During such events, old characters will not be accessible and you won’t be able to save new ones.
To put it in another way, your characters should be fine during an outage provided you’ve saved them, but they won’t appear during this time. You’ll need to go back into Story Mode and then jump to GTA Online when the servers are up to get your content back. And what you create during downtime will not get stored as it is temporary data. In this case, you’ll have carry out the same steps mentioned above.
Rockstar also notes that players should not hit the ‘Retry’ button when prompted to do so during the outage as it may cause loss of data. GTA V made quite a splash when it was launched a few weeks back. The game managed to achieve 1 billion sales in just a matter of 3 days. But in spite of its wide popularity, there have been occasional issues with the game.
The developer notes that a title update will be issued to fix the problem ‘as soon as possible.’
Update: Rockstar is now rolling out an update for the PS3 which resolves loss of gameplay progress, while a fix for vehicles not being saved due to a cloud failure is in the works. The new release also tags along various technical fixes, tweaks and enhancements. The Xbox 360 update is slated to arrive tomorrow.