Red Dead Online‘s Halloween celebration is in full swing, which means the limited-time Dead of Night event is here for PvP players to enjoy. And Rockstar is incentivizing people to play the game mode by offering triple XP and triple gold payouts this week.
The triple XP isn’t a big deal, as PvP doesn’t give you a lot of XP anyway, and if you’re above rank 100 in the game, there’s no real benefit to continued XP earning (besides the fact that you get a treasure map every five ranks, but even that’s not much of a reward, since by rank 100, you’ve likely figured out how to earn gold and RDO$ much faster than what you’d get from searching for lost treasure).
The gold, however, is huge. I actually think there’s a glitch here, because when I was playing Dead of Night last week, I would earn 0.08 Gold if I lost a match and 0.16 if I won. Dead of Night is currently paying out 0.48 per match whether you win or lose. That makes it the fastest way to earn gold in the game right now. (Here’s a list of every other way of making gold in Red Dead Online, if you want to do a comparison.)
Of course, with this much gold at stake, people are AFK farming this game mode so they can passively earn gold while doing other things. For those unfamiliar, AFK farming is when you load up a multiplayer mode, then just leave the game running while your character stands around idly doing nothing. You can go make some soup or run to the hardware store, and you’ll still be earning rewards in the game. With 0.48 gold per match, players are raking in a fortune without actually playing the game.
This is certainly not the first game where this has been a problem. I remember when it plagued Star Wars Battlefront 2 back in the day.
Still, you would think Rockstar would have handled this by now. Red Dead Online certainly isn’t new, and while normally PvP doesn’t pay out huge amounts of gold, you could still have your character lazing about in matches while you’re sleeping and still come out with a decent gold payout. And this really is dampening the enjoyment of Red Dead Online‘s seasonal content. Aside from Dead of Night, the game’s Halloween content really just consists of the Halloween Pass, which is over in the blink of an eye if you decide to purchase it (I think I cleared all 20 ranks in three or four hours).
I hope this gets sorted soon, as Dead of Night is actually kind of fun, and it sucks to see it brought down by unscrupulous AFK farmers. Then again, Rockstar isn’t known for being quick to fix anything when it comes to Red Dead Online, so that hope very well might be in vain.
I guess I would be more upset about this if gold wasn’t a micro-transaction. But since it takes real currency to buy gold (which is outrageously expensive), and during normal play in RDR2 it takes F O R E V E R to accumulate gold, I really don’t care if people AFK farm this mode to get some gold bars.