Tarkov’s latest update, patch 12.12.15.4, might be one of the worst updates for any game that I’ve ever seen.
Where do I even start?
Well, first off, all traders are inactive.
At first, I thought this meant that you simply couldn’t buy or sell to them, which honestly would be interesting, albeit a little frustrating. It would add a dynamic to the already hardcore survival aspect of things.
But it’s worse.
Not only can you not buy from or sell to them, but you can’t interact with them at all. This includes things like tasks, healing after a raid, insuring your gear, and repairing your gear. It’s all gone. Did you accidentally get melee’d by a cultist in a night raid and you don’t have a way to deal with the poison? Good luck! There’s no way to actually remedy that aside from finding Augmentin within the first few minutes of a raid! Did you have a task you meant to turn in, but forgot? Hope it didn’t lead to an important follow up task or unlock something important!
If you’re a new player, you literally don’t get to unlock Jaeger through the task, so you cannot progress. At all. You’re simply stuck until this event is lifted. Insurance is only accessible via Fence, and it costs quite a bit more, while taking much longer for your gear to return (if it returns). Lastly, unless you have a repair kit (which isn’t the most common thing to find), you don’t get to repair your armor or any armor that you find.
Going back to the new player bit: it might genuinely not be worth starting the game right now, simply because you quite literally cannot do anything to progress your account. Dying in a raid is so insufferably detrimental, and the gains you get are not worth the risk, especially when you’re just learning the ropes of an already incredibly difficult game. I get that the goal is to create this ultra hardcore, immersive shooter; but when your core mechanic prevents you from doing much of anything in the game except for Scav runs, you drive away potential players from even playing.
Oh, speaking of Scav runs, they’re currently bugged. They aggro your Scav if you kill a PMC. So if you happen to get a player kill, A.I. Scavs will come for you. Now, I’m not one to really consider bugs or minor mishaps detrimental to my experience, but when your free Scav runs aren’t even worth doing because of a bug, the game becomes unplayable.
But wait! There’s more!
There’s apparently an event where the Scav Case craft in your hideout accepts roubles, and gives you nothing.
…That’s it…
That’s the whole event.
I don’t even know what to say about that one.
Even if this “event” lead to something bigger, the incentive to do it doesn’t make sense. There are other games that do things like this, most notably Elite: Dangerous, and it’s almost always a major community effort, and the rewards are there and transparent. I’m not saying that BSG has to copy Elite: Dangerous, but when you’re asking your playerbase to spend their roubles on something, you need to give them a reason to. After the fact, BattleState Games put out a tweet, implying that the money collection from Scav cases are going to lead to some type of reward, adding the amount of money needed for this event to presumably succeed. At the time of this writing, the amount needed is…
1.2 trillion roubles.
I would be less critical if this were any other game, but again, you’re supposed to be an extremely difficult, super hardcore game. I don’t mind the game being that, as that’s part of the appeal. If we’re playing a difficult game, it needs to feel worth it to go through said difficulty. A lot of the worth is the satisfaction of doing something difficult, but when you can’t even continue doing said difficult thing because the game cut off the means to progress, why bother? It’s a giant mess that will likely drive away many more players than it would bring in. I would understand slightly more if this were a pre-wipe event, but even then, it doesn’t make sense. None of the pre-wipe events have discouraged people from playing. Free Labs entry, multiple raid bosses in every map. Those have made things fun and interesting. This doesn’t make me want to play.
I hope that this leads to something worthwhile for the playerbase. Escape from Tarkov is one of my favorite games right now, and I would love to keep playing; but right now, I have to just let the event pass and hope this doesn’t harm things in the long term. I’m cautiously hopeful. The game has always bounced back from bad states or implementations. It’s not the end of the world. The payoff for all of this might be huge and everything will be okay.
Hopefully.