4Game

Quick disclaimer that this argument is entirely based around my personal opinion on what a good balance between realism and playability would look like in Tarkov.

The meta in Tarkov right now is "always peek first." It's actually gross how easy the game is if you peek first, and it feels especially worse in the past month or so. The amount of kills that I've gotten from lazily peeking people who are holding angles in dorms is unfair. I see them for over a second, and they see me for a quarter second before they die. Even if they see me for the full time, my client has dumped 10 rounds into them and reported it to the server before they even shot, so I'll always win that fight (the "I didn't even shoot on his screen" scenario). It's completely broken and also feels incredibly unfair when you are on the receiving end. And I'm not even talking about the desync spikes of dying deep behind cover etc which are incredibly bad, but instead the solid half second or so of player model lag that almost everyone on the server has. Just have a buddy stream their perspective on discord and watch their model in game; no matter what their ping is, you'll see a good half second of lag between what they are doing on stream and what their player model is doing from your perspective. When you shoot someone in that half second, the bullets still register. Improving that desync between player perspective and server perspective would make holding angles viable, but not over-nerf pushing and peeking. I would love to be punished for lazily peeking angles with no info, I want to know that when I swing and kill a two man, it's because I out aimed them, not because I saw them for twice as long as they saw me, or that my client reported my shots before theirs.

I see a general consensus that adding inertia to movement would be a positive change, but I honestly believe that the movement is in a good place right now. It feels very clean and responsive and adds another layer of skill to gunfights; the guns are already laser accurate so having to track someone strafing extends the fights and would theoretically allow the player with better aim to win all things equal. For me, the root of the issue is the combination of zero inertia movement and player model lag. I believe that getting swung on and dying to someone strafing out of cover at mach 10 would feel much less cheesy if you both saw each other for equal amounts of time. A large portion of the clips I see from people complaining about movement is this exact scenario, someone strafing out of cover and killing them within a second. With some improvements in the desync between client and server, it would feel beatable and become more of an aim battle rather the swing and kill/get swung on and die meta right now.

The realism arguments for the addition of inertia (flying adad spamming Michael Jordan super soldiers bad) frustrate me because imo at the end of the day, this is a game with realistic elements, not a combat simulator. Adding inertia with the current player model lag would likely not change much in the area of getting swung on and killed instantly. It would, however, make it even more terrifying crossing a road, running a field, and heavily favor the person who spots you first with little chance to turn a fight (and I do get that some people would like that change).

I also believe that some of the "add inertia this guy shouldn't be able to adad spam away from my perfectly accurate bullet hose" crowd may be dismayed by what the game would look like with heavy inertia and better netcode: think both parties holding angles afraid to peek aggressively while spamming grenades. How do you think a csgo match would play out if there was only one round with no offensive objective, no recoil, and it lasted 45 minutes, and when you die so does a piece of your soul?