4Game

I've been thinking about the timeframe of the boost provided by the Air Filtering Unit. You spend ~160K rubles on a filter for a 20 hour boost of +40% physical skills. That's a cool hideout feature, but the 20 hours seems like a weird timeframe.

Most "committed" players who are in tarkov for the long haul probably play between 4-8 hours a day, with some people able to commit ~12 hours if they aren't working or have other responsibilities at the time.

So lets say we start our 20 hour filter at the start of our gaming time – for most people that's after work. You pop in the filter, and get 20 hours of +% skills gain. For our average player, thats 6 hours of benefit before you need to go to bed for work the next day. So 6 hours of benefit, then we sleep for 8 hours, then we work/commute for 9 hours. At this point 23 hours have passed, so our filter has run out 3 hours ago. The notable exception for this would be weekends, when 20 hours might net you ~12-14 hours of benefit, but almost guarantee wasted time when you sleep. The point is 20 hours almost guarantees that some of the benefit will be wasted while the player is sleeping.

So what's the big deal? How is it different from the generator? With the generator, some of the benefit is wasted when you sleep, but with 2 big differences. First, generator fuel is extremely cheap compared to the air filter. Second, generator fuel provides a benefit even while the player is asleep – long crafting jobs, bitcoin generation, etc.

So what would be better? One approach would be to make the air filter item timeframe shorter. Reduce the benefit from 20 hours to 6 hours, but balance it accordingly. Change it to a 2×2 item so its easier to bring out of raids, make the crafting time in the lavatory slightly shorter/cheaper. This would allow players to effectively use air filters when appropriate, and use multiple slots when they have extended periods to play. Alternatively, you could increase the timeframe to something like 48 hours. In this case, I would keep the item size the same, increase crafting time in the lavatory slightly.

Either way would make the air filtering unit feel useful rather than wasteful.