0.12 – Return of the Hatchlings

Based on 0.12 patchnotes it appears to me that Hatchling play style will return in mass. These are my arguments:

Motives:

  1. We have been playing without a wipe for a long long time. Major income sources like LABS were available for a long time. Most people do not need hatchling runs. With the wipe most of us will be broke. Most of people will need a "loss free income experience".
  2. With changes to scavs and new bosses the death rate will greatly increase at the start of the 0.12. Such that most people income will go down requiring a new source of "safe" income.
  3. With the 0.12 a large chunk of casual players will return back to the game so you will have more people and less hardcore people. Casual playerbase will not have any moral issues with doing hatchling runs.
  4. This is the first start ever with anticheat enabled. All the people who wanted an easy play will not have cheats available and will have to look for another "easy" way to play.

Opportunity:

Amazingly opportunity for a hatchling playstyle is completelly unchaned in .12:

  1. Yes, now go to 30% health upon death. But, it is meaningless for a hatchling since you can go into the next run with 30% and do exactly the same as if you had 100% health. You are not getting shot at or trade fire with anyone, you run to a loot and stash it in a secure cont.
  2. Moreover, you can heal yourself in the hideout with meds. Cost of meds compared to a cost of gear is negligible, hatchling running makes you way more money than meds required. And again you don't have to heal from 30% if you are hatchling. Heal legs and mayby stomach at best.
  3. Ability to put loot into secure container has not changed a bit. Such that the main enabling mechanics for the hatchling play is the same.

Expectation:

Hatchling will go rampant again. In days from 0.12 release streamers will post videos on how to do money runs with a new mechanics and substantial level of research will be instantly available for people to follow.

Mitigation:

Proposed change to lock secure containers to a loot during a raid met significant retaliation, although it would be the best approach. So I would examine following variations on that:

Option 1: You cannot put any loot in a secure container during a raid except keys, keycards, dog tags and money. So if you find money or keys you can stash them into a secure container, but you can't do industrial scale hatchling looting on everything you find.

Option 2: Have a timer on items put in a secure container during a raid, such that if at the moment of your death an item was in a secure container for less than N minutes it will be lost. So if you find anything and jump out of a window to exit a raid it will be lost. If you had the item in the container for say 10 minutes and get killed it will be saved.

Option 3: Upon death do the following check on items in a secure container:

For Each Item in SecureContainer.Items {
    if Item.IsFoundInRaid == true {
        if RandomInt(0,100) > 50 {
            Item.Destroy()
        }
    }
}

Such that any item in a secure container which has the "found in raid" flag has a 50% chance to be lost. This will be a little effect on people who play to win and survive, but it will dramatically reduce income from industrial scale hatchling runs.

I hope I'm mistaken, but we will see it my prediction holds quite soon, Like soon soon actually.

Thank you for your interest.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EscapefromTarkov/comments/dk6v47/012_return_of_the_hatchlings/

leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *