Let me preface this by saying that I started playing on the wipe of end of year 2020, start of 2021. Back then, flea market was level 10, you could buy virtually anything out of it, there was no inertia and BTC values were on the roof.
I believe this is both the best and the worst wipe I've played, at the same time. I've been playing around 8 hours a day (I do home office for another 8-10 hours) since the start of the wipe, only stopping for 2 days due to being sick. I had around 1000 hours before the start of the wipe, and I have around 1500 at the time of this post. I'm most likely going to hit 43 soon, although I might just stop playing the game.
Let's start with what's good. Streets is fun (I have a really good computer). Not having to worry about rats (my worst fear) is fun.
Now let's go back with what's bad. There are a lot of issues this game has right now, and they're most related to the discrepancy between what's the "endgame" and what's not "endgame". Let me start with the elephant in the room since Veritas video: inertia. It doesn't suck, but it has not been properly balanced, and its current state right now really sucks. There are a lot of bad movement limits that creates problems in the long run; one of the biggest is that since you don't have movement when running anymore, hitting people in the stomach is easier, and since the "bug" for extra damage on the stomach is fixed, it also means that in close to medium range, armors without stomach protection are nearly useless. Shotguns and SMGs simply do too much damage and you're way too exposed to do anything about it since TTK is too fast.
Recoil is, in my opinion, a problem. Since the last changes to recoil a few wipes ago, most of the weapons became useless. You can't really go full auto with any gun without having horizontal recoil making it seem like you're drawing around the enemy. And horizontal recoil can't be controlled, unlike vertical recoil, which is also stupidly bad. I understand the idea of having better weapons become just "better", but have every single weapon be bad doesn't accomplish this. UMP is my favorite weapon for close range because of this; because it's just better than having your weapon shoot the moon. Weapon balance just really sucks. It would make sense if you would get a lot of experience and bonus and the recoil would drastically lower as you play with the weapons; but it's not the case. There are a lot of solutions for this, be it EXP, just low recoil, etc.. Current implementation is bad.
Key changes are absolutely terrible. I understand the idea of "prolonging" the wipe, but that would be with the average population, not the chads that are going to play 8h+ daily and get to max traders in a month. That's not going to do anything. Having the timmy not being able to get to their quests in a few attempts will only get them to quit faster. Having items have lower spawn changes for the starter quests means people will stop playing because they can't progress. It doesn't make any sense. I have 4 hours to put into a reserve run for safes and drawers, but your average player with 1-2 hours won't have, and it won't help them with that. In that sense, early game quests are dumb; you're putting people out of the way of most valuable spawns, but at the same time they're all clumped in the same loot spaces that everyone is looking for.
This ties in to the fact that this is the wipe that I had the most fun, while being the wipe that I found the least amount of people in the raids. Last year I found the same amount of people in raids in APRIL as I'm finding right now. It's not the game isn't fun, it became a chore.
And then we have some of the other issues that end up piling on this. You have bad weapons, and to have minimally viable weapons you need things like peacekeeper 4 (for stuff like… M80?). I don't care that M80 is good, I care that all the tier 6 armors are bad and there are very few viable tier 5 armors. You have a lot of bullets that are very viable to kill tier 4 armors, making them much more useful to protect from scavs than players. The change for PS was good. I don't think the change for M80 was.
Let's talk a bit about progression. You're going to unlock level 2, then level 3, then level 4 traders. What do you get with it? Well, for ragman, over level 2 you have some acceptable tier 4 rigs, and then over level 3 you have great tier 4 rigs. And you can buy one of the best tier 4 armor + rig combo over flea market, which is level 15. Don't get me started with any other trader; most of their stuff is useless, most of the time. Tarkov is great because you can buy and make the most of out of all weapons – but most of the time you're just going to buy the BiS you can at the time, or a favorite gun. There are very few reasons to play PPSH over, say, UMP. Traders don't really offer much progression unless over level 4 and possibly 4. I didn't care for ragman 4. There isn't anything there that interests me.
Then there's lightkeeper, intel 3 and solar panel. Lightkeeper is seemingly the "endgame" which 99.9% of the players simply won't do, or go for it. It's useless. His rewards are useless. His quests seem more like a grind than a challenge. While I was very hyped for him, it just look like a chore. Timegating 24 hours new quests or gunsmith quests is just plain stupid. The new far-forward items are also dumb ideas. You unlock solar panel and intel 3 around level 30, but you can't really build them unless you're lucky as heck or go labs constantly, which most of the playerbase won't go. So a part of your hideout can't really be built because you're just not living the game as much as the other people.
Kappa is also another endgame gated by level 55, which is 2-3x the exp I have right now. There aren't many quests to push you there, and I have no plans of grinding 10k-20k EXP matches for 8 hours a day for the sake of getting 3-4 more slots on a safe container and an armband. I would assume most of the playerbase not only does not have the time to do it, they'd rather be doing something more.
Aside from endurance, strength, and armor repair (which is broken), there is very little progression over skills. Quests that ask for it are basically quests that once you've "played more", you just unlock them. You don't go leveling your charisma or your search skill, you just keep playing the game until you have enough for that.
Other quests, too, seem just like a grind. Shooter born in heaven being 125m doesn't mean you're better a sniping. It just means you have less viable spots. Over streets, there are very few spots you can "camp" for 125m headshots. And with fewer people playing that map, it means this quest will most likely become near impossible in the future. Capturing outposts is just another grind; there's no challenge, you just go there and camp the same spot for a few raids until you get your quest done.
TLDR: This is the wipe I had the most fun, but at the same time the wipe I found the least players. Too many problems on whether you should "prolong the wipe" by making it hell for the new players, or just making the game a chore so it become "slower". I don't think the game is dying, but I do feel like it's becoming something else, dividing the community so much that there won't be many players to play with in the long run.
