(Update) Rockstar pays modder $10,000 for fixing GTA Online’s loading woes

Busted

[Update: Rockstar has applied a new update to the PC edition of GTA Online which – according to reports from PC Gamer – has seriously reduced load times across the board by minutes. Fine work, t0st, the GTA community owes you a debt of gratitude.]

Rockstar has offered thanks and compensation to a player/modder who discovered a way to severely reduce the load times of the PC edition of the publisher’s bullet-riddled MMO GTA Online.

Back in February, a tinkerer going by the moniker “t0st” discovered a discrepancy in GTA Online‘s source code which could be manipulated to improve the epic title’s load times, up to as much as 70% in some cases. As reported by Digital Foundry, t0st’s discovery instructs GTA Online to bypass billions of unnecessary coding checks, allowing players to get into the murky online world and start robbing cars and popping domes faster than ever before.

Earlier this week, almost a month to the day that t0st made the game-changing discovery, Rockstar responded to the fan fix in a statement released to PC Gamer. “After a thorough investigation, we can confirm that player t0st did, in fact, reveal an aspect of the game code related to load times for the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved,” said GTA‘s head honchos. “As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update.”

Rockstar offered its thanks to t0st for their hard work, with the modder noting that they had received $10,000 from the publisher via its “Bug Bounty” program, which rewards players for their feedback on serious tech and program issues within the GTA Online universe. While the program is generally only focused on security issues, Rockstar told t0st it was making an exception for this particular discovery.

GTA Online is the jewel in Rockstar’s revenue crown. Since its launch way back in 2013, the highly hazardous MMO sees hundreds of thousands of players on a monthly basis, bolstering Rockstar’s coffers with expansions and microtransactions, while contributing to Grand Theft Auto V‘s reign as one of the single best-selling video games of all-time.