Running heists with randoms in GTA Online seems to be something like the communal nightmare of the entire community. Everywhere you go, you'll hear people complain about how incompetent the random players are and how they never succeed a heist when not playing with a regular team.
We've put together something of a "heisting with randoms survival guide", but most of it is pretty much common knowledge that players seemingly toss out the window the moment they start heisting. To investigate this trend, a dedicated GTA Online player decided to run a ton of heists with randoms and to record the results.
Out of a total 430 (!) heists, over three quarters were successful. 339, meaning 79% of the heists, resulted in a successfully completed finale and a proper payout. The total amount of cash that came in from these heists was GTA $ 11,764,240 (which is actually a bit frightening, seeing as a top-end yacht costs 10 mil...).
The user, named Kanjitard, set up a few ground rules before getting started. He would join random heists via the smartphone in-game, but would accept re-invites from previous heist leaders, provided he did not "know them" by any other means. He did not count heists where more than one of his friends was present, nor did he count attempts where players left before the actual missions began, or someone was cheating.
Since he was joining random heists, Kanjitard wasn't put into each heist an equal number of times. It seems that Prison Break and the Fleeca Job are the most frequent ones, even though Pacific Standard is the best-paying heist.
Kanjitard has put together an extremely comprehensive overview of the study's results, including all kinds of fancy graphs detailing stuff like success ratios for set up jobs on various difficulties, how many times each was restarted, and how the two relates. Interestingly enough, not once during the 430 heists did Kanjitard ever encounter a heist finale set to easy.
Another interesting correlation that came up is that the higher the cut the members get, the higher the success ratios are during the heists. This probably has something to do with motivation, as if the reward is larger, the players will do more to succeed and get that enticing reward.
The reasons for the failures are also pretty enlightening. Funnily enough, the rarest cause was a player leaving but explaining in chat why they have to leave and the most frequent was players leaving for no reason or without explanation.
What are your experiences with running heists in GTA Online with randoms?
