Gamers band together to influence GTA V's stock market

[Justin Kahn]

Rockstar's latest iteration on the popular Grand Theft Auto franchise is an all encompassing experience, allowing players to go on heists, race fancy cars, steal military fighter jets and play the in-game stock market. Of all those things, you might not have thought the stock market would be all that popular among players, but it is. Many have suggested that in-game currency can be hard to come by in the single player story mode, and with the exorbitant prices of some of the businesses, GTA's stock market is really the only way to get rich quick.

Players can buy and sell on two different markets, the BAWSAQ and the LCN, where prices can be influenced by in-game events. There are also dynamic events in the game that can influence the stock prices, and now players over at the GTA Market subreddit are testing out a theory based on working together to manipulate the BAWSAQ in their favor.

The plan was to use a simple "pump and dump" scam, where players would band together to buy mass quantities of a certain stock all at the same time, and then immediately sell them to drastically drive the price down. The players would then re-purchase that same stock at the highly reduced rate, and then wait for the markets to level out for a hefty profit. To good to be true right? Right.

Unfortunately it didn't really work according to plan, and now there's a bunch of Reddit users loading up a previous save file from before they lost their life's fortune in a stock market scam. The stock price was not effected by all the users' actions, the dynamic features that influence the market are most likely not driven by every GTA player in story mode the way they had intended, and thus the test was a failure. But what about GTA Online?

That's next, the users will test their theories out in GTA's recently launched Online mode. The service has been plagued with expected server issues so far, but Rockstar has promised it is working on smoothing out the situation.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/54206-gamers-band-together-to-influence-gta-vs-stock-market.html

 

[RzmmDX]

If only real life was like this.

Oh wait, it is.

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

Bah. I'd much rather chop someones head off for a quick cash injection rather than play the stock market.

 

[Trillionsin]

BAWSDAQ? is a typo, right? It's BAWSAQ... it's right there in the screen shot of the article...

 

[Trillionsin]

Bah. I'd much rather chop someones head off for a quick cash injection rather than play the stock market.

You cannot buy the gold course any day soon that way... 150,000,000 for it.... got to work the stock market to gain this kind of cash. I havent been using the stock market, and I'm maybe half way through the game, somewhat poorly playing through it.... max a single character has had was about $500,000 it seems like. (yes, I think I've really screwed up some missions)

I'm going to do another play through the game, and see how much I can get using the stock market using some tips from the internet (the real internet)

 

[Jad Chaar]

And this is why I love GTA.

 

[soldier1969]

Rockstar needs to be influenced into making the PC version...

 

[cmbjive]

Get rich quick schemes always blow up.

 

[psycros]

So they thought they could "band together" to influence their SINGLE PLAYER campaigns? Start passing out the Darwin awards.

 

[St1ckM4n]

So they thought they could "band together" to influence their SINGLE PLAYER campaigns? Start passing out the Darwin awards.

One market is only affected by your campaign, but the BAWSAQ was apparently affected by global people. Hence why everyone is confused and irate that it doesn't behave as expected.

Before you say that the percentage of stock owners doing this 'influencing' isn't big enough, it really is ..

 

[Adhmuz]

Did anyone really thing the GTA stock market in this game was ever going to be influence by the "global" gaming community? That would make the market fluctuate so drastically and randomly it would be completely useless. And if it was limited to Online mode (Max 16 players) its not enough to swing the market in such a way to get massive net gains. So far the only way I've found to get massive amounts of money in single player is, unfortunately to say, by cheating. At first I was hesitant, but now it just makes more sense, it remove some of the purpose to some of the missions, but a lot don't actually reward you with any cash anyway. With "unlimited" funds you can just have any weapon, any car tuned up, and continue on your rampage of destruction.

Forgot to add, the only way I was able to abuse the stock market was when the game purposefully pointed it out, IE after killing certain CEOs stock prices will rise for one company and plummet for another. Switch between all three characters dumping all funds into said stock, complete the mission and voila a 30-60% gain. But this only occurs a couple times, not enough to get the kind of money required to buy some of the properties in game.

 

[St1ckM4n]

I know of people with $2bil on each char. They pretty much just did the above.

 

[davislane1]

It seems to me that BAWSAQ stocks are only driven by player interactions with the game world itself (buying weapons, ammo, etc.), not the supply/demand of shares in the market. If any of these would-be manipulators had taken the time to test the strategy, they'd have realized the BAWSAQ doesn't function at all like a real market.

 

[Adhmuz]

I know of people with $2bil on each char. They pretty much just did the above.

You mean used a hex editor + save decrypter and gave themselves $1 Billion and then doubled their money on the stock market. I'd find it hard to believe someone actually sat there dumping money in the stock market, get a 20% gain and rinse repeat all the way to $2 Billion, especially you say it's on all characters and I know of a method of giving exactly $1 Billion to all characters.

 

[davislane1]

You mean used a hex editor + save decrypter and gave themselves $1 Billion and then doubled their money on the stock market. I'd find it hard to believe someone actually sat there dumping money in the stock market, get a 20% gain and rinse repeat all the way to $2 Billion, especially you say it's on all characters and I know of a method of giving exactly $1 Billion to all characters.

If you put the final heist cash into applicable stocks before completing the assassination missions, rolled that into the "special tip" stock, and then put all of that into HAL when it was trading below $1.50, you could have easily made several billion dollars. No cheating necessary.

 

[avoidz]

"Effected"... Affected?