Red Dead Online has been something of a roller coaster in recent months: after the community protested the lack of updates by wearing clown costumes, Rockstar pushed a major update to introduce legendary animals and the naturalist role, and players appeared to be relatively satisfied. The celebrations didn’t last long, however, as a subsequent bug fix update brought a range of issues so severe that Rockstar had to roll back the entire patch.
The latest chapter in the Red Dead Online saga is a particularly strange one, as many players have experienced significantly reduced lobby sizes in recent days – and some believe the game has improved as a result.
On a normal day, you might expect to encounter lobbies of around 20 players on Free Roam, but this week players have found themselves placed in lobbies with around two to seven people. This seems to have occurred across all platforms, although the change to smaller lobbies hasn’t always been consistent, and some players have been able to access full lobbies at varying times over the past few days.
While the jury’s out whether the smaller lobbies are an intentional change or a bug, the whole thing has gone down surprisingly well with the community, and many have argued that it seems to have solved the game’s long-standing problems. Most notably, the issues with low animal spawns have disappeared, while lobbies are now more populated with NPCs and random events. In some cases, the sudden appearance of all this content has been slightly overwhelming for players.