Hey guys, this is my first wipe (12.12), I have played for about 600 hours and want to share my insights about the state of Tarkov, particularly the things that I could see improvements being made upon. Since this is a large post, please read the sections that may be relevant to your viewpoint, something you may agree or disagree with.

Perspective: I'm at Level 40, K/D around 5 however "relevant" that might be and about 200M Stash Value, S/R of 55%.

Gameplay

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• Quest Design:

The overall quest design gives incentive to use different guns/equipment but I have some criticism to the way they are structured and progress throughout the game. Specifically, a few quests all take place in the same areas, sometimes after completing the exact same route. Often, those quests take place in areas where there is no loot or an abundance of loot which both leads to frustrating situations. I would like the devs to consider new locations for a few quests or bundle some quests together. For equipment quests, I'd like the relevant trader to provide the mission item once and then have a small discount on those items as long as the player has the quest incomplete.

Jaeger quests especially can feel like an absolute chore, a lot of these requirements for quest completion do not happen naturally but need to be forced over and over again.

Quest rewards are all over the place and should be reviewed regarding their EXP/money gain, Daily/weekly quests suffer the same issues.

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• Gunplay:

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Recoil feels terribly inconsistent, recoil stats are absolutely meaningless and high-level traders serve a way to circumvent these issues somewhat. This is probably the only game in my 20+years of videogame history where you have such little control over your gun. Not only is it nowhere near the perceived holy grail ("realism"), it is unrewarding and simply not fun to shoot a lot of the guns available in this game. Recoil feels entirely removed from player skill, point-shooting and full auto is all I see on Twitch (with a few rare exceptions). On top of that, camera recoil is added in to give the player a look at the sky for no good reason at all.

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Attachments should serve as a small but still significant modifier to let the player feel the progression. As it stands right now, attachments at level 4 traders are overpowered in my opinion. Furthermore, there are way to many useless attachments which reinforces the "META" issue. Losing your sight picture because your gun shoots and the stupid bounciness of red dots just doesn't portray the way guns should behave if this game wants to be the realistic shooter it claims to be. A lot of the attachments sold exclusively on the Flea/by Traders do not make sense price-wise. For example, you cannot buy the USP threaded barrel from Traders, on the flea it is at least 20k – for a handgun. Just buy the 5-7 then. This also creates Meta weapons, which should only be slightly better than their equivalent in that category and/or be expensive to run consecutively.

I would like to advocate for a system in which player skill is taken into account, by removing the recoil control skill entirely and introducing semi-random patterns to the guns. Yes, you would need to use your mouse to compensate which is the way FPS games have done it for decades now. Instead of using tested and approved systems it seems like BSG like to go their own way, which is cool with a lot of the design decisions but sometimes it just doesn't feel good gameplay wise.

By changing these systems for balance reasons, more issues are introduced, which can be observed by looking at pistols. Not only do they shoot low calibre rounds which should translate to low recoil, in Tarkov they shoot low on the target and bounce left to right excessively. Regarding pistols, there are only really 2 viable options: the 5-7 and maybe the Shrimp, mostly because they are the only ones worth using with the current recoil system and have ammo/attachments available.

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Inertia tries to remedy the fast paced AD/AD spam, but to me it just feels like input lag when it should really be acceleration/deceleration based on weight. Also, max strength completely nullifies this implementation. Furthermore, it just shows more problems with networking instead of solving that core issue first. Overall, this is a great idea, just the implementation needs to be tweaked and balanced.

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Soft Skills with how they are implemented right now seem to be a goodish idea overall but their scaling is all over the place. Arguably, max strength and endurance are the most op skills in the game and completely change the dynamic of gunfights and interactions. Cheesing them also feels terrible and should not be the intended way to gain that advantage.

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Ammo Availability is arbitrarily chosen to favor certain combinations instead of enabling all the guns to be used in some capacity. 9mm is a dead calibre in this game unless you're going for leg meta. Also, 5.56 and 5.45 seem to have taken a huge hit to their viability. A lot of the ammo crafts are terribly balanced, take forever and only yield 1-2 raids.

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Spawn points are very predictable, some are way too vulnerable to too many angles at the start of the match which creates frustrating 60 seconds death due to "unluckiness" which simply isn't that great in terms of game design. Yes, I'm aware that you can just hide in a bush for 5 minutes which to me is just extremely boring, you don't get much out of it and if you die shortly after, enjoy your 0 EXP because you wanted to avoid spawn RNG.

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Map Layout is generally speaking very good, there's plenty of variety and BSG tries to make unique maps and it shows. Here are a few examples I have problems with and my reasoning behind that:

– Shoreline: Few extracts, 2 major congestion points, bad loot distribution and Scav spawn distribution. Pier area – if you want to die, this is the express method.

– Reserve: This map looked amazing at first glance, until you realize that 95% of your engagements will be just after you spawned or underground. The extracts are also not that great.

– Lighthouse: I'm a Bear PMC. The only way to fight rogues reliably is to get on the hill on the east side where everyone will be heading anyway. If you spawn near the southern coast, you might as well head to extract straight away. Otherwise the map is really fun to play.

– Interchange: The lighting is just terrible, there's no other way to put it. Yes it is very immersive but it's just not that engaging for gameplay. Especially since Killa and Scavs in general have very unpredictable instant head;eyes capabilities.

UI/UX

There should be character slots for a map and the rangefinder, as a new player I found myself alt-tabbing way too much in this game.

Buying/Selling on the Flea is an absolute chore and just annoying to deal with especially knowing that you need to sell a shitton to just get one (!) more slot. It also fails to prevent what it is probably trying to do which is to slow hackers/RMTers down. I'm over 12 Flea Rep and at this point I'm willing to make less profit because it feels like wasting time.

End of Game Screen/Stats are never accurately explained, just show me each interaction with each target, their faction and how much damage were dealt to/by them. If you don't want to spoil that information in squads, make this information available to me after the match has completely ended. Also, I am very much in favor of killcams, it could be very minimalistic as well like showing the route that the player who killed me took on a basic map and my corresponding movement.

Map Orientation should always be North, this is just confusing for new players.

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Hideout

The Water Collector being tied to Jaeger is not a great balance decision and shows disregard towards the players who chose not to buy EOD. In my opinion it is a form of soft Pay2Win.

The Air Filtering Unit Duration is absolutely unreasonable. Especially considering that it doesn't even work for a few weeks already and there have been zero acknowledgements from a BSG representative. This seems to be a common issue since before that, the Solar Power which is ridiculously expensive didn't work either.

EoD/Version Stash Upgrade – I know this has been talked about a lot of times. Just decouple it from Jaeger and make it cheaper and you've solved everything. I don't see how EOD buyers would be against that change.

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Technical Issues

FPS and Hardware Utilization is inconsistent and doesn't scale properly with settings. This is probably extremely hard to fix or lessen the effects of and a lot of major AAA companies have issues. Regardless, there should be efforts taken to enhance FPS without solely relying on the upcoming DLSS implementation

Audio has been talked about a lot recently, while horizontal audio seems fine, vertical audio is inconsistent or sometimes not even present. Veritas made a stellar video and I do agree on all of his points except when he talked about the max perception perk not making a huge difference.

Desync – Every game suffers from it but in Tarkov everything seems to be majorly delayed. Considering how little actual players are on the map at the same time, lagging player models are inexcusable, destroy all immersion and semi competitiveness in gunfights.

PiP mode – Scopes have awful lag and sway because the scenes are essentially rendered twice. Please have a look at Modern Warfare 2019/Warzone which also has the PiP mode and very less noticable lag.

Hacking – There is not enough BASIC data validation taking place in Tarkov. There should be no way a character can move at 500 km/h or know what loot is where, yet here we are. People selling 50 GPUs at a time? Wow.

FoV has some serious implementation issues at the moment which can totally break your experience when using scopes.

Sensitivity – I have never seen a game screw as much with your controls as Tarkov does. It doesn't even achieve what it tries to do – go with the times, we all got DPI switches on our mice it just doesn't make sense to be hanging onto that.

Community

Tarkov heavily relies on the community to find out stuff which should be public information like bullet drop, penetration and damage. While it provides them great opportunities to discuss and make videos about, there's a lot of reliance on them to get it right. If you ever played Path of Exile, tabbing out and using 3rd party tools is just tedious.

Furthermore, I would love to see a BSG representative handling issues/bug reports on the forums and occasionally on Reddit to address current problems and how they'd like to fix them.

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Thanks for reading and I'd love to read your input!