I've worked as a programmer, believe me it's very gratifying to see the result of systems and applications working, the big problem is when something happens and we can't detect it because when testing, the steps followed are so aligned that hardly an error appears.
This is usually why in this segment, whether for software or games, development has a demand from Alpha and Beta users, to ensure that any and all issues are identified and resolved before the system or game is distributed to the end user.
That's exactly what happened, but it wasn't an Alpha or Beta user who identified the flaw, as an online game some assume GTA Online would offload at least some of the workload to remote servers. Even though it still needed to do some sort of player-side interaction, powerful gaming PCs should sort this out, only unfortunately, the experience of the online version of Grand Theft Auto was just the opposite, but luckily, the fix was relatively simple. .
You have no idea how many times in a programmer's lifetime we hear that, "the fix should be relatively simple", it is, but the quest to discover the problem is far from simple. In the case of the game, programmer by the name of t0st figured out what was causing GTA Online to have such a long loading time, even on robust platforms.
Apparently, the game was using only a single thread of execution on the CPU, something that went unnoticed, after all, as we currently have processors with multiple cores and threads, so why not use more than one core for such an operation?! This was apparently the only bottleneck that caused the game to load slowly, even though the rest of the game performed as expected.
The good news is that GTA Online developer Rockstar confirmed that this was indeed the case and that a solution was on the way to address this. While it may be an oversimplification of the amount of work required to implement the fix and ensure it doesn't have any adverse side effects, at least it now gives players hope that it won't take months to resolve this issue.
And luckily for user t0st who identified the issue, Rockstar has confirmed that a bounty worth $10.000 will be paid to the programmer, a prize that is normally reserved for security or privacy bugs only.
