I will keep this as brief as I can to actually be helpful. Do not buy Read Dead Online.

More following from here, if you care.
If you are interested in the genuine vanilla online; do not. It is un-moderated and prone to cheaters. If you are interested in RedM based RP, it will work through trial and error. Make sure you already have a Rockstar account, because Rockstar will require secondary DRM. Make sure you have a CFX.re account, because the mod team THAT ROCKSTAR RECENTLY BOUGHT will require a third level of DRM through the RedM launcher. Once you have your accounts in order and you've got them in properly, it will still probably take restarting RedM a few times the first time to get it working right for some reason. I would recommend downloading the Source SDKs from Steam as well because a fair number of servers will use them. Then, I'm assuming you have a DISCORD account but have it on hand because a number of these servers will use it as a fourth level of DRM AND whitelisting simultaneously (some just whitelist with it).

If you have gotten past all these barriers, you can now RP! But you haven't actually learned the finesse of the game because there's no 50+ hour single player campaign to get the feel for the controls on, you will waste the time of real people in the RP servers because even though you're narratively rich and capable, your grasp of the controls are feeble. Without those 50+ hours of other content to futz around on you can feel kind of dead in the water even with hundreds of hours on Red Dead Redemption 1.

Thank you so much to the very lovely people of Rainbow Road for actually helping me! If you get this far and are gay as hell, check it out.

All-in-all, do not buy Red Dead Online. Not even on sale. Buy Read Dead Redemption 2 when its on sale, at the very least.

I will keep this as brief as I can to actually be helpful. Do not buy Read Dead Online. More following from here, if you care. If you are interested in the genuine vanilla online; do not. It is un-moderated and prone to cheaters. If you are interested in RedM based RP, it will work through trial and error. Make sure you already have a Rockstar account, because Rockstar will require secondary DRM. Make sure you have a CFX.re account, because the mod team THAT ROCKSTAR RECENTLY BOUGHT will require a third level of DRM through the RedM launcher. Once you have your accounts in order and you've got them in properly, it will still probably take restarting RedM a few times the first time to get it working right for some reason. I would recommend downloading the Source SDKs from Steam as well because a fair number of servers will use them. Then, I'm assuming you have a DISCORD account but have it on hand because a number of these servers will use it as a fourth level of DRM AND whitelisting simultaneously (some just whitelist with it). If you have gotten past all these barriers, you can now RP! But you haven't actually learned the finesse of the game because there's no 50+ hour single player campaign to get the feel for the controls on, you will waste the time of real people in the RP servers because even though you're narratively rich and capable, your grasp of the controls are feeble. Without those 50+ hours of other content to futz around on you can feel kind of dead in the water even with hundreds of hours on Red Dead Redemption 1. Thank you so much to the very lovely people of Rainbow Road for actually helping me! If you get this far and are gay as hell, check it out. All-in-all, do not buy Red Dead Online. Not even on sale. Buy Read Dead Redemption 2 when its on sale, at the very least.