I played 430 heists on GTA online with random players
TL;DR: I did 430 heists with randoms. 339 of the attempts, or 79 %, were successful and generated a total of 11,764,240 in GTA$, or $27,359 per attempt.
TL;DR2: When playing with randoms: During setups, set difficulty level to normal. During finales, set difficulty level to hard and cut to at least 20 %.
Rules
I joined randomly "On call" on the in-game phone. However, if a setup was successful and the leader invited me to the next heist, I was a nice guy and accepted.
If two or more on my friends list participated the results were not included in this investigation.
The heist actually had to start in order to qualify as a proper attempt, i.e. we had to spawn outside the leader’s apartment. If a player left during outfit choosing or left because they were dissatisfied with the cut size or the leader gave up waiting for players, it didn’t count as an attempt.
If someone was cheating, for example using invulnerability, exploding bullets, teleporting or instantly losing wanted levels, the results were not included in this investigation. (I did however happily accept the payout in a greedy, unscrupulous way.)
Distribution
The heists are not evenly distributed even when joining a random heist “on call”. It’s more likely to end up in one of the earlier heists like “Fleeca Job” (26 %) and “Prison Break” (32 %). Unsurprisingly, this is the order in which leaders play the heist so is more likely that these heists have a slot available.
The heists “Humane Raid” (17 %) and “Pacific Standard” (20 %) are quite popular and pay well, especially the Pacific Standard. Both heists are entertaining and fun to play. The Humane Lab heist also unlocks the Insurgent and the Hydra, the two most popular griefing vehicles in free roam.
Due to its unpopularity, it's least likely to end up in “Series A” (5 %). This heist has a relatively low payout and the setup basically consists of driving a slow vehicle under time pressure while NPC’s tries to kill you. In fact this heist was so uncommon that I’m unable to get some meaningful information from the finale and three of the setups.
If you have an active heist on the board in your heist room you will end up in that heist when joining “on-call”. When I started this investigation I had Prison Break as an active heist and I always ended up in Prison Break setups and finales when joining randomly. After finishing Prison Break, I was in between heists and I ended up other heist as well.
Difficulty
When measuring difficulty quantitatively I’ve decided to look at two ratios: success ratio (SR) and ‘restarts per attempt’ ratio (RPA). SR is simply the number of successful attempts divided by the number of attempts. This number will be between 0 and 1 where the higher number means that the heist was more likely to succeed. RPA is the total number of quick restarts divided by total number of attempts. This number will be in the range from 0 and up, 0 meaning that no quick restarts had to be made.
A higher RPA suggest that the heist was demanding in the sense that a lot of quick restarts had to be made. This number can be greater than 1 since it’s possible to have many restarts on an attempt. An optimal easy heist would have SR close to 1 and RPA close to 0 and a hypothetical extremely difficult heist would have SR close to 0 and RPA very high.
Explanation: FJ = Fleeca Job, SO = Scope Out, K = Kuruma. PB = Prison Break, P = Plane, B = Bus, S = Station, WW = Wet Work. HR = Humane Raid, KC = Key Codes, I = Insurgents, V = Valkyrie, DE = Deliver EMP. SA = Series A, C = Coke, TT = Trash Truck. PS = Pacific Standard, V = Vans. S = Signal, H = Hack, C = Convoy, B = Bikes. Series A, Bikers, Weed and Steal Meth were played so few times that I couldn't get any meaningful results from them so they were omitted.
With a RPA of 2.08 Humane Raid, Deliver EMP stands out. This setup is very different from other setups since the players have to sneak up, unnoticed, on guards and take them out. If a guard is alerted the setup fails. With a SR of 0.5 Series A, Trash Truck also differs from the others. It’s a quite shooting intense setup where the players can’t hide in Kurumas and also are unable to use heavy combat gear.
The SR’s for finales compared with the setups within the same heist varies somehow. Prison Break and Pacific Standard finales are the most demanding finales. Prison Break finale has the lowest SR whereas Pacific Standard finale has the highest RPA of all finales. On the other hand, a restart on Prison Break finale is more tedious than a restart on Pacific Standard finale since you have to redo the entire rescue operation in the prison. I would say that the Prison Break finale is the hardest of all finales.
It’s clear that the Fleeca Job is without doubt the easiest of all the heists. On the Kuruma setup I only experienced one single restart and that was when the rank 12 leader threw a grenade at the enemies that eventually led to the Kuruma catching fire and exploded. In fact, the Fleeca Job is so easy that I have removed the results from that heist in this investigation to get a better view on the other heists. It’s the analysis of randoms on the 4 man heists that are interesting. On the two man Fleeca Job I was the random.
Difficulty set by the leader on setups
The difficulty level set by the heist leader does affect the end result. SR = 0.88 for easy, SR = 0.80 for normal and SR = 0.79 for hard. The SR’s for normal and hard are quite close so this suggests that the leader could set all heist setups on hard to increase payout, but if we consider RPA = 0.38 for easy, RPA = 0.59 for normal and RPA = 0.90 for hard, it suggests that it’s better to keep the difficulty level on normal to save time.
Money wise this makes sense because time wasted on restarting a setup on hard over and over again could be better used to do other things, for example, contact missions.The leaders set difficulty level to easy on only 9 occasions of which Humane Lab Key Codes (3 times) stand out. This is a very shooting intense setup where players are unable to hide in Kurumas so the leaders probably set the level to easy just to pass the setup. Worth to notice is that the leaders didn’t enable the option “Player Saved Outfit” during any of these 9 setups. Even a moderately skilled player can survive Humane Lab Key Codes on normal equipped with heavy combat gear.
Difficulty set by the leader on finales
No leader set the difficulty level to easy on any of the finales I participated in. The SR’s for finales, 0.61 for normal and 0.64 for hard, are also quite similar for both levels with even a slightly higher SR for hard mode. The RPA’s, 0.93 for normal and 1.08 for hard, are also quite similar for them both with unsurprisingly, a slightly higher RPA for hard mode.
The data suggests that it doesn’t really matter if the difficulty level on finales is on normal or hard. The likelihood of success is roughly the same on both levels.
Effect of the cut size on finales
The SR’s for finales with respect to cut size are interesting. It shows that the higher the cut the higher the SR. The RPA also decreases with increasing cut, further suggesting that increasing the cut also increases the chance of success without having to do quick restarts.
Perhaps that randoms deliberately, or unconsciously, under-perform during finales when the cut is at a mere 15 %? There is also the trolling aspect of it all. The “lulziness” of refusing someone 55 % is greater than getting 15 % for yourself. The “lulziness” becomes smaller at 40 % and 20 % respectively. At 25 % there is no “lulziness” for failing since all participants will be refused the same amount.
So it’s fairly obvious, don't be a cheapskate. 40-20-20-20 is the way to go. If you don't want to give randoms 20 % randoms won't give you 55 %, it's simple as that.
Payout
It's is no doubt that the Pacific Standard heist is the big money maker. The 5 setups give $26130 each on hard level and on the finale on hard there is a potential $1,250,000 to be split among 4 players.
Series A even has a lower money per attempt than the Fleeca Job. No wonder that so few people are playing it.
Reasons for fails
A player leaving for no apparent reason, 39 times, and player leaving after one or multiple failures, also 39 times, were the two most common reason for a heist to fail. The latter means that the player left on the screen where we have the option to quick restart a heist. The other the two most common reason is the big gray area where I really don’t know the actual reason for them to disconnect. This could be a technical problem, power outage, mom telling them to “do your homework” etc.
Final comments
The overall success ratio of 0.79 surprised me a lot. I was expecting something around 0.25 based on previous experiences. The human mind plays tricks with you, we tend to remember the time when that guy that ran into the rotor of helicopter on the beach in Prison Break or the guy that constantly drowned because he didn't put on the re-breather on Humane Labs raid. But we tend to forget the times everything went flawlessly. The success ratio also differs significantly from the other study by datnade on Reddit. I can't give any explanation to the different results we got. Perhaps players have learned how to do heists?
Misc observations
Longest success streak: 31 successful attempts in a row
Longest fail streak: 6 failures in a row
Highest number of restarts in a row: 11 restarts on Humane Labs, Deliver EMP (this setup did eventually fail).
Lowest payout: $2190 on Fleeca Job, Scope Out on Easy
Highest payout: $309430 on Pacific Standard, Hard, 25 % cut.
On only 5 occasions did someone use a microphone in a constructive way, four times in English and one time in, what I think was Russian. In 3 out of the 4 times when someone was speaking English they spoke in American English.
On Prison Break Finale, leaders with low RP often put the player with highest RP as pilot, which is quite funny because the role of pilot is the easiest.
Leaders are in general unaware of the “Player saved outfit” option.
On Pacific Standard Finale, the Kuruma method has become the standard method. On only one occasion did we use bikes (and that one failed).
I did not use a microphone during any of the heists.
