The existence of the Flea Market has made it so any person over level 10 can just go on and buy a Slick and 120 rounds of 7n39 Igolnik whenever they want. Of course this is expensive (+/-700,000R total), but unless you're intentionally playing this game inefficiently, this is obviously not an unattainable amount of money even for level 10-20 players. Hell, a player that only does Scav runs on cooldown and immediately runs to extract can make several million in a few days. The high cost only precludes players who don't play the game a lot, or ones that throw away money by taking dumb, disadvantageous PvP fights.
In my opinion, these kinds of things: S-tier equipment and attachments, and high pen ammo should be rare because they are difficult to find, not because they are expensive.
The way that I would like to see this happen is like this:
- The best armor, ammo, etc cannot be bought or sold on the flea market. To acquire them, they must be
- Found in-raid (doesn't have to be FiR status obvi) – on scav bosses, raiders, and other high-value locations like marked rooms.
- Bartered with traders (the bartered items must have FiR status) – a military cable FiR could barter for 30 rounds of M995 from Peacekeeper. 5 FiR Bronze Lions could trade for a Slick from Ragman. Just examples but you get the idea.
- Weapon attachments that provide large benefits should either operate like above, or come with trade-offs.
- Generally it should be difficult, if not downright impossible, to build a 68 Ergo – 35 vert M4 that also has a 60-round mag and a variable optic. Low -recoil attachments should be heavy, which should reduce ergo. 60-round mags should make your gun much heavier, and take much longer to reload.
- Grips and stocks that provide only large positive attributes should have to be looted yourself from bosses or raiders, or traded for with FiR barter items. So they would have to be unable to be sold on the Flea and removed from the traders' traditional Ruble purchase inventories. Making them just be "expensive" isn't interesting or fun.
- You would still be able to sell these items to traders, so if you'd rather just cash out instead of use them you would have that option.
When everyone has the ability to get the best gear whenever they want fairly early into each wipe, it makes using the best gear not exciting or rewarding. Wearing a Slick should give you some sort of reassurance that you won't be 2-tapped by a full-auto rifle. But when the ammo that completely invalidates the best armor in the game can be bought by anyone, it makes it so you might as well run a class 2 PACA – that ammo will kill you in the same # of shots anyway.
Finding a valuable barter item in-raid should be exciting for even high level players late wipe.
Finding 30 rounds of 7n39 should be exciting. Loading into a raid with only enough 7n39 to fill 1 mag (and the rest BT or whatever) should be exciting.
Being able to build what is now considered to be a "meta" weapon should be exciting. Not everyone should have the ability to take one into every raid. Loading into a raid with an extremely efficient HK should be exciting.
I think these ideas would bring a level of "gear-fear" back to late wipe players and really keep the game fresh. What do you all think?
