There is a weird sentiment going around in the EFT community that "back in the day" (which could be anywhere between 2017 to 2021, depending on who you ask) Tarkov was "more fun" or "better" in some capacity.
It wasnt. You just grew bored of the game before it was even finished. You grew complacent in the idea that you were superior to others at the cool new thing, and now that that is gone, your spiteful.
I beg you to please go back to when you bought the game and watch some old videos about EFT. It was not good.
You remember winning more gunfights because chest health was less (The Mosin Incident™), the player movement was glide-y and slower (yes, slower than post-inertia), and high tier armor was scarce without 3 versions of Slick and Hex grids everywhere. If you wanted class 6 armor it was Zabrello only and we called it "Fort Armor". You could heal faster, without animations or any real penalty. There was only one type of bleed and it was negligible. You could dump mags with the knowledge that you could refill them instantly, with no punch counter. You could even keep all of your mags (or even a whole case of mags) in you secured container.
The bullets in those mags? The best of the best of course! Of which you bought from traders and resold on the unregulated flea market, preying on lower level players to inflate your bank account with no effort. You bought M995 for 4$ and resold it for thousands of rubles. You flipped weapon cases and mag cases and item cases. Every trader reset was infinitely more profitable than the Bitcoin farm ever was.
You had a money printer and you exploited that to the fullest. But you still couldnt stand to lose anything.
Back when labs was free, and full of raiders that only spawned in the bay doors of Hangar or Parking, you would 5-man stack a door and wait for them to walk into it. Youd sit in the boiler downstairs and farm right next to extract. You all did it. Thats why so many clips from that time are in Z-Hallway by Parking. You all cheesed good gear off dumb AI exploiting the map without any consideration at all, cause everything was cheap, accessible, and boof-able. You had armored rigs on top of full plate armor, all of which you bought on flea from level 1 for cash. No barters, no FIR, no struggle, just commerce.
Why would they do this? Doesnt sound fun, right? Where is the risk? Where is the challenge? Well everyone was shaking and skittish to bring in gear because you couldnt load into a game without a fly-hacker zooting your entire team into oblivion because there was no anti-cheat at all. Cry about contemporary AC/RMT/etc issues all you want, but you know that any AC is better than none. Its simple binary. Something is better than nothing, and nothing was awful.
You shoved thermals up your ass. You shoved Altyns up your ass. Hell, you guys even found ways to shove entire RIFLES up your ass using bugs! Remember that? Hotkeying kitted M4's to your rig so when you died you would still have it and no one could loot it? Or using WT rigs to expand your Gamma's slot count, back when "kappa" was just a Twitch emote or your college's fraternity? How about the Factory exploits like the stairs by bunker? That one spot you could stand an be invincible?
I member.
Or the unbearable stutters from pre-0.12? We dealt with that for years. Huge multi-second chunks where the game would completely lock up. It was normal. You would see people freeze-frame like the end of a 90's sitcom and you would dome the fuck out of them. And you were rewarded cause you could flea market every bullet, every gun, every single attachment and thing off that body. And you reaped in cash.
You remember seeing more people and less rats cause there was literally no grass rendering beyond 5 feet. It was a green-screen carpet on any outdoor map and it was dogshit. The term "rat" wasnt even a thing. Wanna know why? Because stealth and tactical gameplay was WHY WE WERE THERE. EVERYONE WAS "RATTING" CAUSE THATS HOW THE GAME WAS PLAYED. NO ONE KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON. NO ONE HAD 10K HOURS. We all struggled cause thats what it was: no wiki, no guide series, no cookie cutter "just do this, everything else is dogshit" advice on twitter from people who were bored 3 wipes ago and just wanna be Mr Beast doing variety youtube.
We all loved that General Sam vid when it came out, but the tribalism is insane. You spend 1 minute in raid, cry "ITS DEAD" because you didnt get a multi-kill and 3 LEDX off spawn, then leave, or you camp exfils with KS's and impacts for a half hour for 3 second Shadowplay clips while sighing to yourself about "the state of the game". Its pathetic. Your all so entrenched in the idea of keeping up your appearances as a "GiGaChAD" or a "RaT gOd" that your slaves to your own playstyle. No wonder you all say you hate this game: you literally forgot how to play it. If you stayed around the map longer youd find more players, Chad, not everyone has max strength and 10 stims per raid, we actually have stamina bars and reaction times to deal with. And the rats? Maybe try actually being stealthy, moving around the map and playing the game like a normal human being? If you claim the game is dead and boring when you sit in a tree or a extraction for as long as you do, I dont think your opinion should be heard at this point. Your watching Netflix and scrolling reddit, not playing the game. Put your hands (BOTH HANDS) on your mouse and keyboard ffs.
Half of the map obstructions werent around. Half of each map's area wasnt around (half size Woods with no scav base). Hell, half of the maps we have today werent even out yet. So ya of course you felt powerful shooting scared low geared low levelled low knowledge players that you could see crouch walking 200m away: the only guides they had at that time was fucking Kotton of all people saying that the way to make money was to hatchet run factory and shove things in your ass from green crates.
And there were so many hatchet runners before Tagged and Cursed. So many. And they just kept coming because out-of-raid healing wasnt a thing.
And if you were too "cool" for that? Just run a scav and farm your friendly AI. You were free to massacre your comrades with no repercussions and flea market every single item.
The only direction to go was up.
Thats how the game was. Everyone benefited from busted systems then talked a big talk about how good they were cause they had rubles. Thats it. Thats all. The game was shit and we all knew it.
But then drops happened and it became a COD-killer. So now everyone has unattainable dreamland demands to make of a 80 person company making an indie game that was built initially for a playerbase of 30,000 people. Now its millions because they did something right.
Its late wipe. Some people have put the game down, it happens every half-year, every major shooter or battle royal release, every new Twitch craze. But the game is played in a way where there can only be 14 people on a map, max. If your game is empty, select more servers, move around the map, stay in the game and actually play it. Stop cowering on your local server worrying about hackers, stop complaining that you dont like the events and content we get. Stop trying to revise history like the best is behind us. You are just bored, or entitled, and thats fine.
Seriously people, be humble. The game has come a long, long way. Its not perfect, theres things to still come and to fix and improve, and some things I dont even agree with in terms of design. But to claim that old EFT, whether its 0.7.0, or 0.11.7, you are just wrong and reliving nostalgia through rose colored glasses. You all begged for this like a kid demanding a toy all year, only to see it under the christmas tree and scream that you dont want to play with that anymore. You outgrew your Pokemons. Get over it.
Some of us are happy with the development, believe it or not. And Ill keep playing no matter what social media says because it works. And it doesnt matter if its a concurrent population of 14 people, 30k or 2M, it doesnt matter if I get 2 "dead" raids in a row, it doesnt matter if I have 100M rubles or none, the core gameplay is solid enough to make me keep coming back.
And I know for a fact that come wipe or Streets or any new addition, you will be back too. Just remember that the game is what you make of it. Play differently, be patient, be thorough. Cause if you keep doing the same thing and expecting different results you will go insane, and nothing the devs can add or change will alter that reality.
