4Game

I say this as a person with 900+ hours in the game, this game's design is held back tremendously because the devs have focused so much on the PVP aspect of the game.

Sooooo many other MMOs have an insane amount of different PVE activities to keep you entertained for hours on end and connected with others. World bosses, raids, free roam, random encounters in the world, random unexplored locations like caves and enemy camps, main story missions, etc. Games like Guild Wars 2 are designed for the idea of just roaming around and coming onto things that are interesting that you can do wherever you are. And because of this, they can expand what the world offers and different abilities and weapons and gadgets and such.

Then you have the entire Guild system in every MMO which allows players to join each others guilds, do things together and have wars/battles between guilds and build a huge sense of community. Right now, Tarkov has absolutely none of this community aspect. The most "community" type aspect we have is just voice comms in raid, that's it. There's no social hubs for any players to find and talk to each other. No global chat, no anything like that. Then you have the "looking for group" which almost never happens with strangers because they can just kill you and fuck you over. Who would want that?

This isn't to say that PVP shouldn't be in Tarkov, but Arena should've been the PVP mode for this game. Again, every other MMO has a specific PVP mode for players that functions similar to Arena. Because Tarkov's only mode is PVP, there never really feels like you are doing anything different per raid. Even if you have quests to do or maps to explore or things to scavenge, the game again revolves around the same concept, kill other players. This gets repetitive and tedious VERY quickly once you get to about 2nd-3rd wipe, and even for the wipes I've been enjoying (I'm on wipe 7-8 by now, i started playing in 2017) I get burnt out super fast around level 20 because I get tired of doing the same shit over and over with no variation. "ooh instead of killing someone on factory I killed them on shoreline, the variation!".

TL:DR : All I'm saying is that if the devs really start to hone in on the PVE aspect of the game, they could just go on for miles with the cool shit they could create without having to worry about balancing every single thing in the game for PVP. Thermals for example, overpowered as shit and they're meant to be that's the point, but because of PVP they have been toned down tremendously. Same thing with all these attempts to stop RMT and extend wipe length like FIR, taking items off the market, set limits per trader reset, etc. All these things are in the game because of the PVP aspect. Imagine a social hub that players could go into and talk with each other, talk with traders in person, take 30+ minute raids on maps with a huge incentive to explore and scavenge and fight AI and complete quests, etc. I really love this game but I see it on a downhill roll because the devs aren't introducing anything crazy to the game and imo it's because everything has to be PVP focused. You can release all the new maps like Streets and Arena and all that, but unless you can really introduce huge new game mechanics that really expand the game, people are just going to get burnt out faster and faster with each wipe like I have. All the friends I have that used to play this game a shit ton don't anymore for the same reason. Every wipe functions the exact same.