Robert C

I passed all the level checks last time I played through, and I never did any MP. I don't remember the numbers, but I think my strength was around 7K.

You have to do multiplayer to get readiness above 50%. Don't think it has any impact on how easy/difficult the fight is, but strength and readiness combine to have some impact on some small aspects of the ending you get. It used to be next to impossible to get some ending details without doing MP. They've lowered the threshold now, so as long as your military strength is high it may not affect you at all.

I'm actually a hang back person in most DMs. I've been able to find spots in a few that allow me to hang back and still rack up kills. Paradise Alley and The Getaway are probably the most obvious two. I'm getting better at run and gun, but I've run blindly into a hail of bullets hundreds of times, so I get a little jumpy doing it. I managed to Mary Lou a Mary Lou last night. Still got killed, but at least I got him too. I've done that Shotgun Wedding one several times, but only one time with locked weapons. I was so awful that I eventually went for a swim to build up my lung capacity. If I'm gonna use a shotgun, it's gonna be the assault version.

We probably won't race custom supers if CSC and Hoven Maven are online. They probably don't have the cash to own those types of cars yet. Prob good to have one anyway. I think i am $40k away from buying the torismo R. I bought one when they came out, and I think that might be my favorite car. I have most of the supers - Adder, Entity, etc from the free money times, but I end up using the Turismo. Not quite as fast as the Adder or Entity, but I prefer the handling of the Turismo.

I'm not advocating anybody play the way I do now, especially somebody that hasn't played much and experienced what the game has to offer. My personal theory is this - it's a video game, and its supposed to be fun. My only criteria on what to play is what will make the game more fun for me right now. For the moment, races and missions with randoms aren't doing that, but that only applies to me. In a few weeks, maybe I'll be back on them. They're a hell of a lot of fun with crew though. melraz and I were hoping you'd join for the late shift when we saw you on briefly. Spent the entire night in freemode on the same server. Herby joined in for a few hours and helped out too. Glad you told him about Tuesdays. Hope he can join in with the big crowd next week. There was a never ending stream of new people coming into the server, so we were very rarely at a loss for targets. Most of them were pretty easy, but one of the last dudes was a tough nut to crack. He was up more than 2 to 1 on me, and about even with melraz. Expensive night to be sure. I blew up about 5 supercars, and probably 3 or 4 other personal vehicles, and used up all my stickys 3 times. probably ended the night about 100k down. very much worth it though. managed a pure luck long range sniper kill on a motorcycle traveling a high speed perpendicular to the path of the shot. favorite kill was a double on 2 guys together trying to sneak around a corner at me. Even Mary Lou can't dodge sticky bombs bitches. I pulled off a hilarious tank kill, of sorts. Swapped to passive as soon as I saw the tank, and hopped onto a little porch with a steel railing. The fool in the tank parked right in front of me, and kept shooting over and over while I gave him the double bird. Dumbass blew up his own tank. At one point we were fighting some dude by an ammunation that happened to sit right next to a gas station. There was a huge pile of cars in the middle of the road - random NPC cars, cops, plus a fire engine and an ambulance. The guy took me out, and I spawned about a block and a half away, just in time to see either melraz or Herby blow up the entire scrum in one go. That might've been the biggest explosion I've seen in this game so far. A burning car got launched all the way over to where I was and flattened me.

Captures seem to be a viable option at this point, since they have got the increased money & RP. I've done several deathmatches now where after the match everybody opts for a capture next. Never saw that before the update

I've just done so many races and missions with randoms that I've got tired of it. I've done more than 800 races total, and at this point I don't really feel like doing them unless there's at least some crew involved. At least with crew I'll get to laugh when I inevitably get spun, or crash into 13 trees in a lap. I'd much rather just shoot folks at this point. I'm practicing my Mary Lou act. I still stink at it, but I'm at least able to pull it off about a quarter of the time now. Generally - JT, Mark and myself will do random shit that we don't like doing to earn progress towards the various awards. This is usually centered on throwing races, deathmatches, etc... to each other. Hence the jobber name. We will also do legit stuff to depending on how many people are on - we just establish the ground rules before each task I may be on for a bit tonight. I have someplace to be every Thursday evening at 7 central, so that makes it hard to join y'all. That'll get moved later as it starts to get hotter than hell here, so I may be able to be on later in a month or so.

Cheating. Lots and lots of cheating. I've seen a few level 1000's around. One of the upcoming updates from Rockstar is supposed to cut those folks' levels back down to size, though I have no idea how they'll actually manage it.

I finally got tired of doing missions with random people because of shit like that. I don't mind scrapping with randoms at all, so I'm perfectly happy to do DMs with them or fight it out in freemode. The endless pit maneuvers in races and sundry bullshit it missions has pretty much put me off those, unless I'm with crew. At least in DM or freemode I know everybody wants to shoot me in the face, so I can see the threat coming.

That was me. It what had to be a first - I died via decapitation on the top of the fucking roof I've had that happen to me at least once too, maybe the first time I did that race. Hit an unoccupied bike in the middle of the track and whacked my head on one of those girders above. LS Forum is always great because it's always absolute chaos. I went off the track 4-5 times, was off the bike at least half a dozen, and died at least 20. Sill came in second.

Can't believe y'all don't like my new look. That new race we did with the jump at the end had a great finish, with 3 of us going over the jump at the same time in a dead heat for second. I'd have loved to have been able to see the chaos of that from outside. That may have been the same race where I took the wrong turn on an off ramp, and half the field followed me. Late shift made a bunch of new friends last night. We wound up in that big hotel near the golf course, completely surrounded. Everybody wanted a piece of us, and some of then were capable of taking it. They were coming from everywhere, which made for a great firefight. People coming from all directions, plus snipers above, made it pretty much impossible to just hunker down. Some level 5 guy was in the middle of it. Didn't work out too well for him, I'm thinking. Last fight was funny. There were about 4 or 5 guys way down the road from us, so far you could only see cars, not pedestrians. I saw one car acting funny and decided to take a sniper shot at it on a whim. One shot, and the damn thing blows up, taking several other cars with it. Turns out I blew up a personal vehicle, my 4th or 5th of the night. That seemed to irritate its erstwhile occupant, Havok something, so we got into a pretty good back and forth fight. I think he was up about 10-8 when Still Bird, a guy we'd been fighting earlier, shows up in a damn tank shows up and takes me out. The Havok guy and I both go passive, and then he sends me a text apologizing for going passive because of the tank.

Ft Zancudo? That'll just get melraz excited. He'll have an excuse to blow shit up with a buzzard. I should be online pretty early for me.

There are a number of missions that used to show that I had not completed them, even though I had. I'm just going off memory, but it sounds like those missions match the ones that they removed. The change may have something to do with that. JT - I'm down for Docks to Stocks tonight if you're on, provided I don't have to open a safe.

Next time I'll use a Sanchez like I always do. As soon as I started to spin I figured I'd wind up blocking everybody, which is exactly what happened. Alternatively, I could learn how to drive. That would help too.

Couldn't agree more. I don't mind losing, getting killed, etc with y'all because I'm laughing my ass of 90% of the time anyway. I did a couple captures with random folks in the last day or two - first since we did that bus one with a big bunch of crew 2 weeks back. I had fun in them, but I would never set out to intentionally join a capture. I really don't think we need a capture creator though. My problem with capture missions is that they usually don't have enough people in them, especially the ones that have 4 teams. Enabling a creator for them will just exacerbate that problem. I honestly think the DM creator is causing some of the same issues there as well.

You really didn't miss anything. Last night had me wishing they'd allow you to set some parameters for random DM selection. If I could have set it to Rockstar created only last night, I damn sure would've. One match was so bad I bailed and took off, very slowly of course, in a dump truck. I took it off that jump into the ocean we were using last week. Wasn't nearly as spectacular as taking a fully loaded logging truck off, but it was still better than that stupid match.

I just join random DMs. I wind up quitting before the match starts about 80% of the time because people seem to have this fascination with doing terrible matches. Prison Thugz has been replaced with a hundred other random crappy melee DMs. Or by matches like the one I did last night that started me at the top of a skyscraper. I had to parachute down to get into the action, and then there were tanks at ground level. Every single person that voted crapped on that one, other than the guy that made it. I usually only do random DMs at times where there's not many folks from the crew online, because I end up quitting out so often after seeing the match description. If you happen to be on when I'm doing a DM, the invites go out automatically even though I never host. stout has wisely ignored hundreds of them. Did a couple matches back to back last night against guys that were definitely not fooling around. 5 dudes from the same crew. I wound up 4/11 in the second match, and felt fortunate to do that well. I took my own advice and hunkered down a couple times just to try to get my bearings. And that was on a map I where I normally do well.

Looking at that list, I'm happiest that they fixed the invisibility cloak deal. I did a Lodge DM where one of the opponents was doing that. All you could see was his head, neck and arms. It was a pain in the ass, but it didn't make the poor guy immune to buckshot. Auto-target is my friend. Skull tat is 500 headshots. I'm pretty much only doing DMs any time I'm not playing with crew, so I'm closing in on a lot of combat/weapons unlocks. I'm pretty close to LSPD tint on the AP pistol and assault shotgun. I'm also going to be pedantic and put LSPD tint on my special carbine only after I get 600 kills with that. I'm really close to that one.

That first DM we did was on a map I almost always do well on so that helped. Plus I managed to headshot just about everybody I shot, so they went down quickly. I was a menace on that offroad race, just due to pure incompetence. The strategy was basically to avoid me till you could find a safe place to pass, then just trust your luck. JT got by me first, and then I managed to singlehandedly block everybody else for about 5 seconds by spinning out on a tight corner. I got a boatload of headshots from being forced to use crappy weapons in close quarters last night, and ended up unlocking the skull tat. My character is now even uglier than before. And I managed my first Mary Lou kill last night. So I've now Mary Lou-ed one person, and in return have had it done to me about 500 times. Also got screwed in a DM last night where we had more kills than the other team but still lost. We were tied with about 3 seconds left, when I spotted an enemy and shot him. He died almost exactly as time expired, and I got credit for the kill. Match ended up at 29 kills for us, 28 for them, but they got the win. Only thing I can think of is that I managed to commit suicide earlier in the match by shooting a propane tank while standing to close. Maybe that had something to do with it.

Boneyard is pretty easy to solo, as long as you play it really, really conservatively. The only real danger is guys flanking you to the outside. As long as you prevent that, it's really hard for them go get you. melraz and I did another one with just 2 of us - I think it was Railyard or something like that. Those are the only 2 I've done with less than a full crew. I normally don't mind people getting killed a lot on my team, because it still happens to me with alarming regularity. There's an exception to every rule though. I did a 15 minute no limit match yesterday with randoms in the cemetery. I got on one good streak and ended up about 25 to 10, and several other teammates had really good kill totals, but we got beat by about 25 kills. I was pretty puzzled by that till I looked at out bottom two guys at the end. One was 9 kills / 32 deaths. The other was 9/36. I can't imagine getting my head kicked in that badly without going to hide in a corner and lick my wounds.

Those two back to deathmatches pretty much came down to 2 things. I've played those two enough times to have them figured out pretty well, and know where to go. I haven't mastered free roaming combat well enough, so it all comes down to positioning for me a lot of times. The other thing is that you had a bunch of witless idiots on your team, especially for the Getaway match. I was set up at the end of a narrow alleyway that provides no cover for anybody coming through. I must've kill 9 or 10 people in there in about 2 minutes. After a while I stopped even bothering to aim and just fired blindly down the alleyway. I'm still trying to figure out the thought process. Who looks at a space like that, with a couple of dead bodies already in it, and bloodstains where others had been and thinks that looks "Hmm. That looks safe. I'll run right down that directly towards that spot that provides perfect cover for a hidden opponent."?

The spawns in that deathmatch with the transformers are really awful if you happen to spawn outside. Every time that happened to me I would get killed again before I got to cover. I have no idea how deathmatch winners get chosen if there is a tie. I did one the other day that was the most boring one ever. I was never able to find a member of the other team until the 30 second warning, and by then he was too far off to reach. It started 3 on 3, and ended up 1 on 1 after 4 guys quit. There were no kills, and I don't think anybody even fired a shot in anger. It ended up giving me the win. I can think of the possible reasons: 1 - random chance 2 - I was a higher level than the guy that lost 3 - I did kill a few random civilians after I got really, really bored The weirdest one I've seen was one with a 40 kill limit. It was neck and neck. At the end of the match, the other team had 40 kills, and my team had 41. They got the win. The only thing I could think of there was that our last 2 kills came in the last second or 2 after they got to 40, but before the match really ended.

Multiple garages on the way too. Now I can buy even more supercars I don't need. At least I'll finally have room for a motorcycle/muscle car/sports classic/etc. Maybe. The mental state thing should be fun. Gotta agree with RUkered. I'm guessing the night shift brotherhood's dots will be glowing like we've been vacationing in Chernobyl. Really they ought to have melraz's "Oh Hell Yeah!" broadcast to everybody on the server when he joins.

The guy we took out at the LSC must've come out and wondered what the hell he had wandered into. Six heavily armed lunatics were waiting for him. His car got pretty shot to shit, but I put the fire out with the firetruck, and I think somebody was able to drive it off. I got a shot of y'all doing the last ambulance jump into the ocean, but I didn't zoom in enough to get a really good picture. I was afraid I'd miss it if I zoomed too much. I had fun taking an 18 wheeler off the same jump, especially since the radio started playing Convoy as soon as I jacked the truck.

Last night was good stuff in a "I wonder if I can pull this off?" way. Highlights were surviving the crash of an airborne dump truck and managing to parachute into said dump truck while Herby was driving it down the road. No gaming for me till Sunday or Monday, so that'll have to suffice for a bit.