4Game

With each major update, my favorite changes are the ones that allow players to spend more time in raid. Since I started playing, we can now heal with Therapist after death, got a new way to easily load our shotguns / mosins, made room for a sorting table, and can automatically sort containers! I think everyone who comes back to the game after a few wipes notices these changes and appreciates them. Here's my suggestion, and I welcome all of yours 🙂

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After playing Tarkov for 2 years, I think downtime between raids is the greatest reason why I generally lose interest in the game. Survival requires me to unload my loot, and death requires me to build a whole new loadout. I think the best solution to reduce downtime between raids is to implement stash infrastructure changes that allow players to queue while managing their stash.

Pros:

1. Stash management becomes easier.
   1. Players can tidy up their inventory in bits and pieces between raids.
2. Players will run better, more diverse gear.
   1. Players are currently incentivized to build kits in bulk, which generally means armor without buy limits and weapons that require little modding.
   2. When time spent building a kit no longer takes time away from queuing for raids, it’ll be less annoying to use a diverse set of equipment for each raid.
3. Queue times are reduced.
   1. Players can spend a greater percentage of their time actively queuing.
   2. Players that drop off mid-wipe might stick around for longer.

Cons:

1. Development time.
   1. HTML errors that you often see when interacting with traders and the flea might break the queue.
   2. The handshaking process between the ‘stash inventory’ server and the ‘raid inventory’ server requires tweaking.
   3. This requires design decisions on tweaking existing UI elements and determining limitations of this system.
2. My apartment becomes significantly dirtier.
   1. I clean between queues.

Armchair developer implementation:

1. As a first pass, players can move the items in their stash between raids, but cannot:
   1. Modify their PMC in any way.
   2. Interact with traders.
   3. Interact with the flea market.

Stash layout data isn’t needed by the raid server, so we can safely modify this data (in theory). Additionally, we already have a system in place for client crashes during the queue. If it’s before ‘waiting for players’, we boot the player out of the queue. If it’s after ‘waiting for players’, we provide players with the ‘reconnect’ option and force them to play that raid.

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Adding features beyond the first pass will increase the required complexity significantly due to the new networking requirements. I think this interim solution would be a great quality of life addition and helps gauge player interest in expanding this system with minimal dev workload.

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tl;dr Here's my idea for an easy(?) quality of life change to Tarkov. Feel free to discuss this one or drop your own below!