red dead online

Rockstar making Red Dead Online Standalone, and Changing Daily Challenges

I know I know, another Red Dead Online post, but it’s my favorite game, and not much else is going on other than political stuff and Coronavirus.

Rockstar has announced some changes in the past week or two, which could be bad, or good, and i’m not overly optimistic of them, due to Rockstar’s past.

The first change Rockstar announced is that Red Dead Online is going to become a standalone game, which will become available December 1st (tomorrow) for the very low introductory price of $4.99, until February 15th, 2021, then it’ll be priced at $20 thereafter, an obvious change to increase the player base in RDO. You can read more about the announcement on the Official Red Dead Online Newswire.

This is worrisome to me, because my main problem with this game, especially on PC, are the cheaters/modders/hackers, which Rockstar apparently doesn’t care about. The modders/cheaters have been horrible on Grand Theft Auto: Online, which is why I quit playing it years ago, and still today Rockstar hasn’t implemented any proper anti-cheat. The low price of $5 seems like it’d be worth it for some to risk cheating and getting banned (if they ever even do get banned in the first place). So that’s scary.

To be optimistic, we’d have to assume this change means Rockstar is going to finally put some attention into the game, and perhaps finally implement a proper anti-cheat, or even allow us to have private/solo sessions as we can in GTA:O, which might happen, if you remember a month or two ago, we had small/private like sessions which lasted for a couple of months.

Loading Screen Announcement
Loading Screen Announcement Regarding Changes to Daily Challenges

The other change Rockstar announced involves Daily Challenges. Currently, you get more gold based on the time of your daily challenge streak, for example: starters you’ll earn .20 gold per daily challenge completed, after 7 days you’ll get .3, .4 after 14 days, and .50 after 21 days, which will continue until you miss a day, so if you complete 14 challenges a day, that’s 7 gold earned in just that one day, which can add up pretty quickly. The new change will end the streak at day 28, and reset back to 0, so you’ll be earning .20 gold again.

It’s obvious why Rockstar is making this change, right now the ingame economy is wrecked, I am already up to 299 gold, which 100 of it was made just in the past month or so, there are some die hard players who have thousands of gold, which is a problem for Rockstar because gold is the premium currency and is how Rockstar intends to make money off Red Dead Online. All the premium items and content such as roles cost gold, which Rockstar wants to sell to you for real cash, so players easily making hundreds of gold bars off of simple daily tasks is an issue for Rockstar.

Rockstar is wanting to make money off all the new players who are going to be joining the game after the $5 standalone change, which does make sense.

The problem is, most of us players who have been playing constantly for the last year (or two for those on console), have only been logging in every day to do the dailies. Whenever I got home from work, I told everyone that I had to do my chores real quick, which were a few dailies on Red Dead Online. I think my biggest streak was almost 200 days, but then I got drunk and forgot to do one, so it reset back to 0. Second time I had a huge streak going, it was ruined by Daylight Savings Time. I used to have until 1am to get a daily done, but Daylight Savings Time moved that time to 12am, so I missed it. Due to lack of any new in game content, doing dailies became the game to us, and our streak was our high score. Many RDO veterans are upset, and Rockstar is risking losing these players.

10 Daily Challenges done! 5 gold!

So the change sucks for us who do dailies, but maybe it’ll be better for the whole game from here on out. GTA:O gets a lot of new content because it makes money for Rockstar via Sharkcards (It’s premium currency). It’s obvious that Rockstar is wanting to start making money from Red Dead Online, and to do that they’d have to add a lot of content.

Rockstar selling gold on their website

Once again, all the content in the world won’t matter, if we can’t play it due to cheaters/hackers/modders because of a lack of a proper anti cheat, or private/solo lobbies.

I do like and feel relief from the idea of not caring to have to log in to do a daily, or else lose my daily streak! FREEDOM!

These changes take effect tomorrow, December 1st.

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