i wanted to throw this out there because someone mentioned server instability, etc. that those of us in SCREAM and GT Saturdays noticed over teh weekened some drastic changes to room quality (positive ones) and a few of us were theorizing that it is actually part of what is going on in GTA. On Friday and Saturday, it was horrible. Ther was a network-wide disco for everyone in GT5 around 11:45 Friday night. Saturday was plagued with problems too. The friday thing was probably intentional, to kick everyone off and change stuff. Then magically, on Sun morning everything was "better than it has been since before the PSN hack a year ago." That is a quote from Dan_Zitions over at the PSN forum, who is extremely attentive to detail and has great analysis on most things.
1. GT Academy may have secretly contained some patches for GT5. I noticed that music plays in some menus it didn't play in before and that when one song ends the next one is blended with it seemlessly. That could be new or it could be something I never noticed before.
2. Track details have been slimmed down behind the scenes for online lobbies. This lessens the load on your PS3 to display details while it is also trying to send and receive info from other players. These things are usually done without an update, as you play the game online.
3. Server loads seem to have been changed to provide separate servers for GTA vs GT5. The heavy load of over a million people doing GTA could have been (seemed to be) affecting the gameplay on GT5's online servers.
As a result of these things, we saw much more smooth lobbies on Sunday with very few hickups, no disconnections, etc. The prevailing theory is that there was a 2nd server reset *unannounced* on sunday night which cleaned things up and fixed whatever was broken after the Friday night reset.
That is not to say the (over 12 racers lag/framerate bug) has been fixed. Though, there is a chance it is lessened due to #2 specifically.
