Dying to cheaters wouldn’t feel so bad if you could just gear up again and go. With all meta ammo gone from traders and being craft only or having to find it in raid by killing players and certain scav bosses, dying in a sus way after taking so long to come up with good gear feels absolutely terrible. Same with armor, finding a slick or a RYS in a stash only to lose it in the next raid to a cheater is terrible. Meta guns being untradable on the flea market and being forced to pay vendors excessive prices for them, same thing.
Same goes for certain loot spawns, keys are already hard enough to find, add cheaters into the equation and how are we even supposed to have a chance at finding rare keys when the cheaters jack them before you have a chance to find them?
I think that, at least temporarily, the game needs to go back to what it was 5-6 wipes ago where loot was abundant, high tier items were easy to acquire, you could buy ammo in high amounts from traders as well as meta armors. The game was fun then there is no reason to think it wouldn’t be fun if we went back to that. Bitcoin prices should go back up to 500k.
More money = feeling less shit about dying, also it means less motive to RMT and pay hackers for carry because even a bad player can enjoy accessing some decent kits. So the number of cheaters will definitely go down significantly. Part of what makes people cheat is difficulty in getting better gear.
I know some of you will hate this idea but I fell in love with this game when as a 2-3 wipe player I could get 200 million by the end of the wipe and that never made the game feel “too easy” or “boring”. The current system makes you value your life more sure, but also it causes a terrible hacker infestation so which is worse. Some people quitting because the are tired of running meta kits, is still better than a ton of people quitting because they are sick of the hackers.
