GTA Online: if the rewards are right, we don't always need new DLC

This week's Friends in High Places event is simple and lucrative. Every reason to return to Los Santos.

Everyone wants more money. Everyone wants to level-up quicker. That's the whole point. Of life and video games.

GTA's current live event - Friends in High Places - plays along to that. Every day, select missions for one specific character pay out twice the cash and RP.

These jobs are all simple enough and you've no-doubt done them before. But with the added cash incentive they're fun again; you're playing with a full roster of four players stealing meth from The Lost or rescuing girls for Madrazo. Lobbies fill instantly and you're playing with strangers, all well-equipped and sporting the necessary skills. There's no Heists newbies here and it's not mission failed when one of you corks it. Everyone is focused on the prize: big money.

"Even with GTA Online's notoriously flaky servers, you can cram four missions into an hour. You're on your way to earning yacht money."

You'd be mad to turn down that kind of cash. Jobs for Trevor yesterday were coughing up $30,000 - $50,000 a pop. Even with GTA Online's notoriously flaky servers, you can cram four of those missions into an hour. Sit back and count the green. You're on the way to making Yacht money.

GTA Online gets a lot of free DLC on a regular basis and we lap it up. Live and random freemodes, new vehicles, Lowrider jobs, special multiplayer modes. There's more variety here than strippers at Vanilla Unicorn, and it's often geared to what the player community asks for. You can never say that Rockstar's vision of what GTA Online can deliver is drying up.

But events such as Friends in High Places are just as welcome, and if the amount of people playing anecdotally is anything to go by, just as popular as the latest DLC drop. It highlights just how much content there is in GTA Online. It kicks life back into a game with the simplest of rewards. I'm playing missions I haven't touched for years, not since I upgraded to the new-gen systems. The daily rotating roster keeps it fresh, and I don't want to leave any of this easy money on the table.

The last time Rockstar ran an event that reused content was the double cash rewards for Heists last summer. That was on a larger scale and lasted for four weeks. But shortly after that we got the Ill-Gotten Gains DLC - so big it was split into two.

Now we're earning big cash with Friends in High Places, was it just an excuse to bump up our bank balances, or will we see more big payouts over the next couple of weeks? And if so, what future DLC will be spending our newly acquired cash on?