I’ve mentioned this one before, but Daily Objectives are about the best way to make easy legit money in GTA Online. The catch? You must play the game every single day to get the big bonuses.
Chaotic’s math is a little off, but it isn’t his fault. It isn’t obvious until you start tracking the actual amounts awarded. You do get a $100000 pay out after 7 consecutive days, and $500000 after 28, but it is not in addition to the regular $25000 Daily Objective pay — it replaces it on those days. Still, an extra $75000, and after a month, $475000, is pretty good for doing pretty easy stuff — a lot of it the kinds of things you’d do anyway when playing GTA.
http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/Daily_Objectives
Though Sports are listed as possible objectives, I didn’t see them in our last month of objectives. That doesn’t mean they won’t show up, but perhaps the odds have been dropped to get them.
Add in selling two cars (at the start and end of the hour it could take to do the Daily Objectives) will give you $18000 if you use the best common street cars, easily and quickly located for sale (and stored until needed). The jobs themselves offer another $20000 or so, easily, and can be more depending on circumstances.
25000 + 18000 + 20000 = $63000 per hour, every day. But the consecutive bonuses give you an extra 75000+75000+75000+475000, or 700000 after 28 days. Or another $25000 per day, for a nice low total of $88000. Grab a bit more action during your hour of play, or one of the better paying jobs or custom cars, and you will do even better. You can come close to $100K per hour, just by completing your daily objectives, every single day.
So basically, if you can play for less than an hour every day, you can reliably collect about GTA$ 3 million, which is quite enough to pay for the good stuff which keeps coming out in the game.
Stuff keeps happening in GTA Online. Rockstar makes new DLC content available on a regular basis. One catch: a lot of the cool stuff costs GTA$. In order to get it, you must have (or make) money.
It is rather easy to make money in GTA, but it can be hard to make a lot of it fast. Barring just finding a pile lying around somewhere — as can happen with mods, despite Rockstar making attempts to curb this, and to ban players when caught with impossible bank accounts — you do have to work some to get money. How much?
About $100K per hour is possible, but it can take some effort to sustain that income. Doing so in easy ways is possible, and I’ll address that more later, but the Daily Objectives remain a reliable way to get consistent income without any special effort (other than never missing daily play). Depending on your available time to play, you can make 2 to 3 million a month easily. Much more, obviously, is possible if you are a very active player.
Or you could buy Shark Cards. The best deal (and most expensive) Megalodon costs about $12.50 per GTA$ 1 Million, or maybe about $35 for the equivalent of a month’s playing payoffs. I personally can’t see spending more than the cost of the game for in-game resources which, if you actually play the game much, will get for free. Especially since there is little point in having game resources for a game you don’t play a lot.
So what do we end up spending money on in this game anyway?
How much money do you actually need? A bit over $10 million, and I’ll go into that more.
First, weapons. But none of them cost all that much, compared to your income.
Second, properties. Even the current most expensive one still costs less than many cars. You can buy five of them now — a nice upgrade from the three that we started with on PC. There isn’t really a need to have the most expensive ones in order to be useful, and once you’ve bought them, it isn’t like you need to constantly buy more new ones.
The Luxury Yacht falls in between here. It is very expensive, acts like an odd sort of property combined with a Pegasus-type vehicle access, but no garage so you can’t keep cars in it. The GTA$ 6 to 10 Million make it its own class for property purchases, but it works in other ways much like a property.
Third, clothes and other general expenses. I like having them, and they do cost a bit of money, but are a drop in the bucket compared to everything else.
Fourth, and this is the big one: Cars. Yes, in a game called Grand Theft Auto, we actually spend most of our money buying and customizing cars. Sure, we can steal some off the streets and keep them, but the best ones can only be paid for. Actually, I’ll extend this to vehicles, because the Pegasus vehicles, which can’t be kept in your garage, are also fine things to spend a lot of money on.
The expansion to five garages gives us the option to store up to 50 of our own personal cars. Can you really need that many?
Need? Not really. Need implies that you have them for useful purposes in the game. For active player missions, what do you need?
One or two mission cars, depending on what you have unlocked. Two of the best come from the Heists — the Kuruma (Armored) and Insurgent SUV. The new (in Executivies…) Shafter V12 (Armored) is a cheaper alternative for a fast, tough mission vehicle.
A helicopter. The Buzzard is the most flexible, and a solid first purchase when you hit rank 42 and can get it. While you can steal aircraft when you want one, it can be hard to get an armed one quickly when it is needed.
Cruising and race vehicles. While it is likely that these categories will overlap, a cruising car is fast and gets you (and friends) around the map best. Racing cars fill out your custom cars for the races you run. The more kinds of races you regularly play, the more cars you can need.
One of the secrets about speed in GTA is that the game’s internal web sites and other info LIE about them. LegendaryAutoSports is completely untrustworthy in this — the speeds can be higher or lower than the real values, with no obvious way to figure out which it is. But even SouthernSanAndreas isn’t quite real in speed values. It does use the game engine’s Max Speed attribute value for its speeds, but that number isn’t the only thing which determines a vehicles actual top speed. In practice, the only way to reliably measure a car’s top speed in GTA is by driving it in the game itself.
Why is this? It’s complicated. but in short, the game models vehicle mass, engine power, air friction, and critically important for speed, engine power applied to the wheels via traction. So change the car traction (as in with a spoiler or vehicle damage, or rain), and you also change the acceleration and top speed. Add in stuff like boost start and slipstreaming, as well as curb bumps (go over a bump, speed goes up), and we need to start setting rules for how we measure the actual vehicle speeds. Motorcycles add another wrinkle — leaning back and forward, especially popping a wheelie, speeds up the bike, and the ability to sustain these isn’t easily determined from the base stats.
Broughy1322 has done a magnificent job of testing and recording vehicle speeds and performance. An important thing to keep in mind for car speed is that there are three different measures of speed which are relevant for racing.
First, straight line maximum road speed. This is how fast you can get the car or bike to move driving on a flat road (like the freeways) if not slowed down by traffic or turns, and without concern for how long it takes to reach that speed. This is useful for long distance drives, such as cruising around the map and long point to point races. It is often irrelevant to most races, and even for driving around in the city, since you lose speed when you brake or turn. The Adder is still the fastest Supercar in the game here — with an actual top speed of 126 mph. The Z-Type is faster, and the new Schafter V12 is as well, surprisingly. Perhaps less surprising is that the fastest cars in most classes come fairly close to this speed. I call this concept “speed scaling,” and I’ll address that more later.
Second, the straight line acceleration speed (and time). Call this the drag racing speed. Tested easily on tracks about 1000 meters long (.62 miles), which is a good distance to evaluate acceleration. Or 400 meters (.248 miles), or 402 meters, for the classic quarter mile dragstrip. You have to use the exact same start method to compare speeds (there are several ways to try to boost speed at the start — the obvious timed boost which is one). It is a fair way to evaluate how fast you can get started in a race, or in a chase in free mode, but won’t tell you which car is faster in the long run or through turns.
For motorcyles, for both of these speeds it is fair to use wheelies to get the maximum speed possible. In actual driving, it can be hard to keep that up, so comparing speeds without leaning or wheelies is also useful.
Third, time to complete a lap in a race course. Broughy1322 uses the Cutting Coroners track as as test, and it is a fairly good one to use with a good mix of sharp and 90 degree corners and straight parts. He runs the race following exactly the same path as well, so the difference in time is only due to the cars, not the driver. A good driver should be able to beat his “testing lines” time by “cutting corners” and pushing the cars to their limits, rather than following a fixed path which all cars can complete. But such times would evaluate more than just the car’s inherent speed — which is why you can’t use world record lap times as reliable comparisons of speed in the game.
For racing, it can be tricky to pick the best car for the track you are playing. In most classes, there are several cars which are fairly close in performance, with one being better on average. As a result, it is tempting and can be beneficial to have more than one kind of car for each class, so you have choices to use for different situations. Specificially, it is worthwhile to have the fastest top speed car for long distance speed runs, but for most races, the best lap time car is likely to be more useful. Especially for a first purchase.
A funny thing, though, when car shopping for racing, is how little your choice of car affects the race outcome in most lobbies. In practice, it is driving skill, and for custom cars, the level of performance upgrades (especially Turbo), which matters most. Two equally matched drivers will definitely find the small differences between the top cars to strongly affect their racing. For most of us, any of the top five (or even ten) fastest cars will do the job just fine.
Still, if you get into racing, the temptation to keep a stable of cars to round out your choices is pretty strong. And for the Sports and Super cars, the coolness factor is also in play. In real life, you’d be happy to have any of them, and they are all fun to drive around.
How much can you spend on racing cars? A lot, but you don’t really need all that much to have one good one for each of the classes. Where you will really end up spending a lot of money is on cars or vehicles for show.
One big catch for me are the seasonal specials. Do I need them? Probably not, I don’t think any are really good race cars so far. The new DLCs do add some good ones, but you can get buy without them. Still, there is the combination of cool looks and “available for a limited time only” to make me want them. Summer got me the Sovereign motorcycle (not too expensive) and the Liberator (pricey, Pegasus vehicle, but fun to drive). Halloween’s two cars are fun — but more money again.
The Lowriders DLC cars are all about $1 Million each, upgraded — a figure which will pop up on a lot of the newer fancy cars. Executives… adds another set of new, expensive cars — but the Shafter V12 (armored) and Baller LE — (armored or not) actually score a position in racing, cruising, and missions. And now Valentine’s Day gives us the Roosevelt (not seen on PC before), with a new upgraded version. I couldn’t resist it, even though I surely could be saving up money for something else useful. Plus we got the Benny’s upgraded Sultan and Banshee versions, which are also (again) about a million each. The Banshee is, at least for now, very fast in a straight line (fastest car in the game), even if it isn’t much better in a race. They both look amazing, with all the racing and other custom modifications they have.
So, a few million dropped on cars, simply to have them before they disappear again. Or just to have them because they are cool. It is amazingly easy to burn through all the money I make getting these things. A little for ammo and medical costs, and it is pretty easy to never build up much in my bank.
I’m trying to keep it above $1 Million now, though. That is the threshold for becoming a VIP. That is not only a cool status to have, but a good way to make extra money in free mode. You get to start VIP jobs, which let you do fun stuff in free mode and get paid. It can be hard to do some of these in a public game, but they work in Friend, Crew, and Invite games as well. Best with a crew of bodyguards, so you can all make money. This and the new free mode events can do a lot to make wandering around in free mode profitable.
OK, I’m back to making money fast. VIP stuff is a nice way to do it, and fairly easy for the money. Same for Daily Objectives, most are easy. Selling cars (every 48 real minutes), don’t forget that for easy money. Contact Missions are pretty good pay for the time spent (they all pay about the same, and pay based on time spent on the missions). Heists aren’t bad, but require a good crew which doesn’t die (and thus blow the missions) — or otherwise mess up. Harder with random people, unlike most of the contact missions, which you can finish solo even if you can’t start them that way (though many can be soloed just fine).
Then there are Races, Deathmatches, and other jobs, all of which do pay pretty much OK for the time spent. Some are better than others, but all make you money.
Or in other words, play the game and you’ll get rich. Some ways are easier and faster than others, but all tend to make over $1000 per real minute, and few do much better than double that, so on average, it doesn’t matter as much what you do, only that you do things that pay money for doing them.
