What should have been a festive week for Grand Theft Auto Online turned out to be one of the most demoralizing for the community. Rockstar decided to make it harder for players to legitimately earn money by lowering earnings from the Cayo Perico Heist.
Grand Theft Auto Online turns ten this weekend and many players were expecting Rockstar to celebrate the milestone. Instead, the weekly update gutted the earnings from the most popular activity in the game. The value of the primary targets in Cayo Perico were adjusted by as much as 30%.
The secondary loot values were also lowered by as much as 10% with the cash in El Rubio’s safe has been decreased by 60%. Rockstar also increased the setup cost of the heist to 100,000 from its original 25,000. A detailed chart of what has changed was shared by popular GTA insider Tez2 on X.
Cayo Perico Heist nerfs
Rockstar appears to be promoting co-op play as you now have better chances of finding better secondary target loot within sites that require two players.#GTAOnline pic.twitter.com/XQb2a2kgg6
— Tez2 (@TezFunz2) September 28, 2023
On top of the said changes, the studio also lowered the chance for coke to spawn on all locations by 30%. The illegal substance is by far the best secondary loot in terms of how much a player can carry. Rockstar did increase the RNG chance of coke in sites that require two players to access by 20% and lowered the chances that the location will spawn cash by half.
According to Rockstar, the nerf on Cayo Perico has been done “to provide players with greater incentives to experience the full range of content available in GTA Online.” The studio has said that it will continue to make payout balances across activities.
Many in the GTA Online community feel that the “balances” punish legitimate players more than those running mods on PC. Cayo Perico is the only heist in the game that can be run solo and can be completed in less than an hour. General sentiment within the gaming community is that the Rockstar killed off the heist.
This is not the first time that Cayo Perico has been nerfed to reduce the overall payout of the heist. Earlier this year, Rockstar tweaked the heist so that all the guards on the island could spot dead bodies and trigger the alarm, negating the elite challenge bonus. The studio previously added a 144-minute cooldown timer on the activity for solo players while completing the heist with a team would have a cooldown of 48 minutes. Rockstar also removed the panther statue which had the highest payout.
Rockstar wants players to do other activities in the game instead of just grinding heists and running a few businesses. However, the most recent activity added to the game, Assault on Cayo Perico, doesn’t really payout as much and is riddled with players running god-mode mods. The recent Mercenaries update also isn’t a popular activity as it has a high startup cost of several millions with mediocre payouts.
It doesn’t help that GTA+ members are getting priority treatment these days. The subscription service on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S gets weekly rewards and monthly cash bonuses. Players on PC and older consoles feel that it may be a deliberate cash grab from Rockstar as GTA Online ends its life cycle when the next game launches.
In our recent gaming session, players are now opting to run the Dr. Dre Leaks missions that payout over a million in an hour. The activity doesn’t have a setup cost and can also be run solo. We hope that the activity will not be the next one to be nerfed.
If Rockstar really wants players to experience every activity within GTA Online, it would be best if the studio increased payouts on older content instead of nerfing popular money-grinding methods. Improving the payout for the VIP missions and reworking the MC business sell missions should entice players to play these activities more.
