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GTA Online update coming today to fix broken crimulator

You may have a better chance of playing GTA Online tonight -- Rockstar says it aims to have an update ready today that fixes many of the most common problems.

Nick Hide Managing copy editor
Nick manages CNET's advice copy desk from Springfield, Virginia. He's worked at CNET since 2005.
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Nick Hide
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You may have a better chance of playing GTA Online tonight, after its developer Rockstar announced it aims to have an update ready today that fixes many of the most common problems frustrated players have reported.

"We're currently working on a title update for both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 to address commonly reported issues with GTA Online," the game-maker posted late last night. "We hope to have it out for download as soon as tomorrow."

The massively successful GTA V, which made $900m the day it went on sale, introduced its online multiplayer mode earlier this week, with a warning that there might be glitches as millions of players rushed to connect.

"Thank you everyone for continuing to bear with us... we're aware that a variety of technical difficulties have made it difficult to get access and that the experience has been a bit less than smooth for many of you who jumped in straight away," Rockstar said.

"For PlayStation 3 users, a PlayStation Network server issue was detected that was limiting the amount of possible concurrent users. This was preventing most players from accessing GTA Online altogether and as of this morning, that problem was resolved," the developer promised.

A regularly updated status page has a long list of known issues, with players complaining of servers being unavailable, sessions timing out, missions failing to load properly and becoming stuck in loading screens. Yesterday it advised players to delete the update that adds GTA Online, and reinstall it.

"All of these initial technical issues will be ironed out as soon as we can," the New York-based company says. "Please know that the entire team here at Rockstar and all of our relevant partners are and will continue to be working around the clock to get the experience to be as smooth as possible, as soon as possible.

The developer will be desperate to get most of the problems fixed ahead of the weekend, when millions of players will certainly test the system to its limit. One benefit of that may be that connections are spread more evenly across the day, as opposed to all hitting the servers at once when they get home from school or work.

Perhaps even more frustratingly, online footage of multiplayer play looks brilliant fun, with loads of co-operative missions, deathmatches and races to play through. Your character can level up and get access to new kit, cars and virtual real estate to buy with in-game currency, which you'll be able to buy with real money once Rockstar steadies its ship. The outages have affected other online services such as the game's stock market, BAWSAQ (arf), and Instagram-like photo-sharing service Snapmatic.

Have you managed to play GTA Online at all? What's it like? Make the rest of us connection-starved unfortunates jealous with your tales of untrammelled chaos and criminal activity in the comments below, or on our straightlaced Facebook page.