I have been playing The Cycle: Frontier all weekend, which has a very similar game-play loop as Tarkov with different polishing. It has proximity chat as one of the features, which makes SO much difference in a game like this. In Tarkov it is almost always "Shoot first, questions after" but with prox chat a VERY large number of my encounters were similar to, "Hey, are you friendly or are we going to have a situation?" before fighting. Sometimes the responses are, "Please don't kill me I have a quest item" and sometimes they were, "I am coming for your loot". It added a very immersive experience and allowed people to team up naturally during the raid, betrayals happened a few times but that is to be expected and is part of the experience. However it is interesting to see that when you talk to people and remove some of the anonymity of the internet, people are generally more helpful and friendly in games like this. I traded loot with people during raids, gave people quest items for free, got some quest items I needed for free, made friends and went on subsequent raids together, etc.
One raid we had a pretty big group looting in one of the larger locations and got attacked by a squad, using voice chat we were able to communicate and defend our location and kill the team attacking us. It was a LOT of fun.
TL;DR I think Proximity chat will be a very good edition when they add it to Tarkov and will change the player experience for the better.
