Hello there. This is gonna be a long one.
I've been playing Tarkov for 1200 hours at this point and this is my fourth wipe so far. I love the concept of the game, and I want to continue playing it because nothing offers what Tarkov does. I want to see this game succeed, get released, and finally get it's financial success because I know how much effort certain people have put into the game.
However, this post is not about praising Tarkov because everyone knows that there are things to love this game for. This post is about all the issues the game has, and boy do we have a lot.
- Halloween Event 2022. Man, where do I even begin. Whose idea was to make an event THIS way? No, seriously, I want to know. Events like this are supposed to be fun, entertaining, spooky, grindy, but not whatever the hell BSG has done. Random negative effects at the beginning of the match? Constant energy drain which means you can't stay in raid for more than 5-7 minutes unless you bring a whole backpack of food? Unknown poison that kills you in two minutes unless you run straight to the extract and pay 60k to Therapist to remove it, or unless you are one of those crazy people who bring augmentin or xTG to a raid for no reason? Increased weapon malfunction probability which is probably the worst game mechanic so far? Pumpkin "lootboxes" that drop poisoned food which doesn't even replenish your hydration and energy meter while giving you a random negative effect? Like come on, man. Every single one of these additions is straight up terrible. I know BSG doesn't care about their playerbase as much as we'd like them to and will just do whatever they want, but this is just spitting in our faces. SOLUTION: just don't do this again. Period. Last year''s Halloween event was awesome. Sweets boosted your stats, raids turned into haunted nights with bots rushing you, bosses were easy to find and kill. THAT is a good Halloween event. Leave it at that, and some new masks – and you are golden. It doesn't need these artificial handicaps with debuffs and weapon jams. It doesn't make the game more spooky, it makes the game more annoying, considering that Tarkov is already not the most relaxing and well polished game already.
- Weapon malfunctions. I already mentioned them before, but this section is entirely dedicated to them. Guns don't work like that, BSG. A brand new gun doesn't begin to jam after going through 2 mags. A brand new gun doesn't overheat to glowing red after 20 shots. A brand new gun doesn't randomly lose its accuracy and start shooting in a "cone". A gun shouldn't lose 10-20 points of its durability after two action packed raids. I know you are trying to simulate the griddy and dirty environment of Tarkov, but god damn this is like the worst possible way of doing so. SOLUTION: Tone down the malfunction chances. Make it so brand new guns NEVER jam, regardless of how many bullets you send through the barell, until they get to like 90-95% of their durability. Make it so guns begin to jam the way they do know when they hit 70-80% durability. Make it so guns don't start glowing red after holding the trigger down for more than 5 seconds. You want to tell me my Scavs 48/100 AK with no buttstock and cover is slightly more prone to jam compared to my brand new decked out 400k M4A1 or Mutant? I get it, guns need to be lubricated and cleaned regularly, and it is hard to maintain them in some abandoned basement in the middle of a warzone without proper supplies, but wasn't the point of having the repair system and tools in the game to simulate the players taking care of their guns after they can afford to do so? I know you all worked hard on adding those hundreds of gun jam animations, but for the love of god – tone them down. It is not realistic, it is annoying. You could also make it so you simply can't buy a 100/100 gun anywhere and the only way to obtain it is to actually find it in a weapon crate, with your own hands, basically unpacked as if it has just arrived to Tarkov and was lost. That way people will still have an option to own a brand new gun, while being able to buy a 90% one from the traders and anything lower on the Flea Market. There is no point in having weapon durability in the game if there is barely any difference between 95% and 70%.
- Weapon recoil. This one is just abismal. Have you ever held a "stock" M4 or AK74 in real life? Yes, they have recoil, but not nearly as much as they do in the game. Right now it feels like 9mm has the recoil of 5.45 and 5.56 cartridge, 5.xx has the recould of .308, .308 has the recoil of .338 and so on. This is not realistic at all, it's just dumb. Even fully decked out guns still have more recoil than their "stock" real life counterparts. I shot an M4 and an AK74 when I was 16 years old at the gun range and yeah, I wasn't laserbeaming the targets from 100 yards away, but my "spray pattern" was still better than that of a PMC in Tarkov. It honestly feels like the characters just limp wrist these guns because ain't no way a trained PMC who's been shooting guns for years and who is able to survive in an active warzone has this many problems controlling the recoil and landing shots. SOLUTION: reduce the recoil on ALL guns by, I don't know, 25%? 40%? You don't need to make it like Call of Duty (although Modern Warfare 2 that just came out has some decent recoil to the guns), but whatever we have in Tarkov right now is just not it. I've been playing shooters for 15 years at this point, and as I said before, I have 1200 hours in Tarkov. I still can't control the recoil in this game unless I am crouched/proned, or unless I just tap instead of spraying. However, when I do spray – I pray to the gods of RNG to land my shots. Surprisingly, every other player seems to always headshot me, but maybe I am just bad or unlucky. This could be user error and I am not complaining about dying in a game you are supposed to die a lot in. Also, remove the compensated recoil mechanic that you have right now, please. I don't want to be fighting the recoil AND my character who is a total goof and starts compensating for recoil after like 5 shots. If he can compensate for recoil, he should be ready to do it on the first shot, not after. He knows when he is going to shoot because I know when I am going to shoot, so he should be ready, just like I am. No person in reality would start shooting a gun without having a good grip on it and without being ready for recoil. Right now it feels like PMCs just act surprised when you start firing your weapon and only later remember that they have to compensate for recoil. Yeah, seems legit, when a professional mercenary doesn't know how to shoot his guns and the only way of making the recoild bearable is by spending half of an African country's annual GDP on mods. This mechanic is just dumb, I am not sorry.
- Camera recoil. Not going to say much, but this mechanic shouldn't be in the game in the first place. You can actually leave the recoil the way it is right now if you just remove the camera shake when firing full auto. My PMC starts staring at the stars whenever I go full auto and again, just like with pretty much everything else on this list so far, its just dumb. I don't even want to explain anything about the recoil in this game anymore because everyone knows its dumb, and if you think its cool that some guns literally go out of your field of view when you fire full-auto – then you are dead to me. SOLUTION: Just remove the camera recoil. That's it. It will only make the game better. You can still have a little bit of screen shake, but it's just common sense. Your body may be moving, your gun may be moving, even your head may be moving when you are firing full auto or tapping quickly, but your EYES keep looking at whatever you are looking, they don't roll up to the sky because you start shooting. It's just stupid, please remove it.
- Sound. So many things have been said about sound over the past years, and yet the best solution you came up with is removing Steam Audio in the future updates? Really? Steam Audio is literally what makes the sound in this game actually work. I'd rather deal with a sound bug or random Scav screaming into my ears here and there, but be able to hear what's going around and pinpoint directions than not be able to hear at all. The fact that the sound is not working properly on stairs and different levels of the building (which I assume is the main reason you are removing Steam Audio) is not Steam Audio's fault – it is your game's engine which is blocking that sound because you have "audio boxes" on your map with different sound settings for each. The fact that your sound changes right as you enter or leave the building is not Steam Audio's fault – its is your the way you implemented sound barriers in the game and how they are imporperly put together. Removing Steam Audio won't do anything because the audio engine of Tarkov itself is piss poor. That's why you added Steam Audio in the first place. Nothing will change because the "blocks" that your maps consist of will remain the same. Removing Steam Audio without having an actual, better option is just lazy and we all know "SoonTM" doesn't work. Been waiting for Streets of Tarkov for how long, over two years at this point? Yeah, keep the empty promises to yourself. SOLUTION: Leave Steam Audio in the game and fix your damn maps. If you have to redo the sound "boxes" for every single map, patch the holes in sound barriers and collision models, add more effects – do that. That will fix the sound. Removing Steam Audio won't, it will only make everything even worse because Steam Audio is not the issue here – it's your code, people
- Netcode. It is a meme at this point. "Netcode roulette" is a thing and it is painful. I don't want to die because of how your game servers are set up. I don't want to die because I can't see the guy on my screen while he already sees me and has started firing on their end. I don't want to play this roulette every single time I am fighting someone in close quarters hoping that I will have those precious miliseconds to kill him before I appear on his screen and get head-eyed. I don't want to shoot people multiple times, see blood coming out of their heads, limbs, torso and so on just to die a second later and see that the server thinks I haven't even shot. The amount if times I hit someone in the head on my screen, watched them shake it off, turn around and kill me and then see "ammo used: 0" on the post-raid screen is frightening. This is all because of how your servers work: they collect the data from clients, then distribute it to other clients making sure everyone gets the same data, but it doesn't always happen. Switching to server based option is a clear winner in my opinion since everyone will have the same data at the same time, based on their ping. There is a whole heap of issues with it and we all know them. People playing on servers with high ping teleporting around from your perspective while having the game run smooth on their end because the server has to wait for the player with the lowest ping and not the other way around, cheaters who abuse this system, backend errors, disconnects. All of this could be fixed if the game was server based. SOLUTION: Easy. Ditch the client based option and switch to server based. I don't care how hard it is, just do it. It is an obvious oversight which was fine at the beginning when you guys didn't have money for proper servers, but 6 years after launching the game and earning $50 million dollar in revenue in 2020 your top priorty must be fixing this key issue. And stop hiding behind the fact that the game is still in beta – betas take months at most, not 6+ years. Just because you keep changing core mechanics every year and don't know what else to add to the game doesn't mean you can abuse the beta state and pretend like its okay because "the game is in development". It's 2022, every game is in development until their servers shut down.
- Cheaters and BattleEye. This problem goes hand in hand with the netcode and server issues. If your servers are waiting for the client to send the data to them – all that cheaters have to do is not send info about their cheats to the server. The server and Anti-Cheat has no idea whether the guy is just a pro/luckiest person in the world and is able to hit multiple headshots 100 meters away with a pistol dropping a whole squad of players, or is actually using cheats. The server and anti-cheat has no way of knowing if the guy is LVNDMARK's son and knows how to prefire every corner, or is using wallhacks. The server doesn't know that the guy has invincibility cheats if guy's client doesn't send any info about being hit back to it. Hell, this goes beyond just the shooting aspect of the game: speedhacks, magnets, teleportation cheats – all this can be easily done as long as the cheater is smart enough not to send the data to the server. The reason I stopped playing Labs is because I've died probably 50 times to cheaters who are flying around the map, opening doors and pressing buttons from a distance, saying "Hey you, I know you are in there" when I've been sitting in a room for minutes not moving, trying to wallbang me as soon as the raid starts, killing me with invisible granades that make no sound. Like man, come on, do something. Banning 3000 accounts once a year isn't going to do anything. This isn't fair. Players don't like to die to cheaters in a game like Tarkov. If someone kills me with cheats on CoD or CSGO – I simply leave the match and that's it. Yes, I've wasted a couple of minutes of my life and have to to find a new game, but I am not losing anything. In Tarkov, on the other hand, I am hundreds of thousands of rubles and hours of my life spent grindnig for that gear. This isn't fun. This isn't "a part of the experience". This is straight BS. SOLUTION: I don't have one. Use a different anti-cheat or something, implement a system similar to CSGO where players can review the games where other players have been reported and determine whether they are cheating or not, add a replay system so that we can see how we died and then based on those replays your team can ban people more efficiently. Remove BattleEye and opt for something better. BattleEye never works, it's been on the market for ages now and is known for being one of the least reliable anti-cheats ever for a reason. Just get something else, something better. EasyAnti cheat, for example, or develop your own solution with all those millions of dollars you are earning. The fight against cheaters has been going on for decades now and it's not over, but pretending like cheaters don't ruin your game is pathetic.
- AI. Scavs, bosses, raiders, rogues, guards – all AI in the game is bad. Regular Scavs shouldn't be able to head,eyes me through bushes from a 100 meters away before I even see them. They shouldn't survive a couple headshots because the damage of my bullet drops. They should have inertia, suffer from fractures, malfunctions, recoil and so on just like PMCs do. They should panic, surrender, spray in fear – they are "yesterday's civilians", after all. Bosses and mini-bosses like Rogues shouldn't be able to laserbeam you from the other side of the map the second they see you unless you use a right peak and approach them from a very particular angle. Clearing out the Rogue camp or Reshala or Shturman shouldn't be done using the exact same strategy every time, approaching from the same angles and peaking the same way, and dying if you make a single mistake. Bosses shouldn't be able to gun you down in 1 frame after you magdumped them and hit them with 20+ bullets because of their enlarged HP. This is not immersive, challenging or realistic. It is cheap and lazy. You had 6+ years to work on your AI, make it move around the map, feel dangerous and fun to fight, but instead you decided to make them whistand a dozen bullet hits all while shooting perfectly at you from 100 meters away using ironsights, and hitting you dead center mass with every hit. SOLUTION: Make the health pool of the AI smaller. Regular scavs shouldnt have almost double the HP of a PMC. Make them less accurate, so they miss their shots, while still being dangerous enough by being unpredictable, moving around the map, using stimulants like PMCs do and so on. Add new animations where they blindfire, crouch, prone, try to get a shot on you instead of just rushing you the second they see you and murdering you point blank like Rogues or Tagilla does. Make them stand out more through their animations at longer distances so you don't mistake Killa for a regular scav and get gunned down from accross the mall. Decrease their eyesight, make them go check your location out if they "think" they spotted you – anything but turning them into terminators. Current AI is just lazy. Try copying the AI from F.E.A.R. where the bots were dangerous not because of their enlarged health pool and pinpoint accuracy, but because of their tactics, movement, numbers and unpredictability.
- Performance and visuals. I don't know what is wrong with Tarkov, but I get constant freezes, errors, bugs and so on. I get around 80-120 FPS depending on a map on medium settings. I have a 3080, 5900x and 32GB of RAM, and for some reason the game still needs more. I get stable 144 FPS in modern AAA games at fully maxed settings. Most of them look better than Tarkov and "feel" better. Despite having decent FPS, the game doesn't feel smooth. It feels like I am getting below 60 frames with constant hiccups and freezes no matter what settings I use. I don't know how to describe it, but it just feels like I am moving in water or whatever. Lighthouse and Reserve are basically unplayable because every now and then (read: every 10 seconds) the FPS just drops to single digits for a couple seconds. Restarting the game, closing other programs, changing the settings – nothing helps. On top of that, the game looks pretty bad at longer ranges. Everything is grainy, the anti-aliasing barely works because objects appear to have "stairs" the farther they are from me, the lighting is terrible and either is too birhgt, or pitch black to the point where you can't see anything in the darker areas. The textures are fine, especially the ones on the guns, but when was the last time you looked at the ground or grass? That thing got 2007 Call of Duty 4 textures. I don't mind the game looking not as good as AAA titles. It is an indie of sorts, after all, and the one based on Unity on top of that, but man, the fact that not only it looks bad, it also runs like crap. Granted, it is still a pretty game, but not for 2022. The graphics might've been impressive when it originally came out, but there is no reason it should run this poorly on modern machines. SOLUTION: Optimize the game. Optimize your code. Apply some new techniques and features. Either fix the performance issues, or make the game look better.
- Lastly, the future of Tarkov. The game has been stagnating for the past couple wipes, in my opinion. Changing the inertia, the economy, the AI, the recoil, adding couple hundreds jamming animations to guns, bunch of new items and keys, adding new empty maps with nothing to them – that's not evolution. It feels like instead of bettering the game, BSG is just trying to add more stuff to it to look "busy". It should be quality, not quantity, and oh boy is it the other way around with this game sometimes. Tarkov has been walking in circles for the past couple years with barely anything new or good since most of the changes were aimed at making the game harder, less enjoyable, more grindy (besides inertia, that one is good and actually is better than what the game had before). You can't just ignore the issues that the game has and pretend like they don't exist while adding more meat to the bones. SoonTM doesn't cut it anymore when you charge over a hundred dollars for one of the editions of the game. Arena was supposed to come out in October, it is November now and we don't have any updates on it besides that initial reveal teaser and a blog post. It's almost like a fever dream because there is NOTHING on Arena, and I was actually looking forward to it the most because the standard Tarkov game loop is getting boring for me. Streets still haven't been added and you've been working on it since 2020. It's been a year since Lighthouse was released and it is still not completed. You gotta stop adding branches to the tree and start putting leaves on the branches that you already have. Terrible analogy, but you get my point. SOLUTION: Fix the existing problems first, make sure what the game already has works perfectly, then move over to the next task. No one will care about Tarkov in a couple years unless these core issues are fixed. New players don't stay for long, and pretty much every streamer or long-time player hates the game or dislikes one of (if not all) the issues I've listed. We still continue playing it because it has no alternatives, and hence – no competition. However, sooner or later the competition will come and unless Tarkov changes – it is doomed. You guys had 6 years of a headstart, and you aren't using it. Stop promising and teasing things if you are not going to implement them anytime soon, and focus on fixing what's already broken. We don't need another 20 5.56 guns because M4 or HK are still the best 5.56 guns with AK-101 coming in close second. We don't need more 7.62 guns because Mutant is still the king, although RD-704 is very good too. We don't need more granade types, more character skins, more glasses or face covers, we need substantial changes and fixed to what's already in the game.
I didn't expect this post to be this long when I started typing it, but the more I wrote the more issues I remembered. I might not have covered everything, and maybe I missed some aspects of what I've covered. If you've read this whole thing – thank you, and I am truly proud of you. Feel free to add more or comment.
I am not trying to rant or whine without a reason. I've offered my solutions, because I think they might actually be good for the game. I want to see Escape from Tarkov succeed, I want to see it live and grow in popularity, I want to keep playing it and enjoy the hardcore nature of it. I want to keep dying and losing my loot WHEN IT'S FAIR. I want to keep winning over other players and taking their loot. I am not the best at Tarkov, but I am not the worst either. I just voiced my opinion and I am sure there are many others who share my viewpoint. I am sure BSG won't read this message or listen to it, because they rarely do, but maybe – just maybe – they will start thinking about fixing the game's issues rather than ignoring them. The game is barely making any profit despite having a revenue of over $50,000,000 in 2020. The numbers are definitely higher now since the popularity of the game increasing, but if the game was actually in a good, finished state and didn't have all these issues – it would make you more money and attract more players. No one wants to come to a restaurant, order a steak, and get a dead cow on their table and a note which says "sorry, you'll have to cook it yourself". This is how this game, unfortunately, feels these days, and the fact that it is not bringing BSG any money is on them.
Peace
Edit: typos
