took a hiatus from content creation last year. purchased my first home, welcomed our second son, life has been a bit crazy.
all that being said its wipe season and im back.
had to compress for twitter but its on my youtube
@scalespeeder i really feel you should be able to get an optic at the start. Even if better gear / better optics are locked behind progression. Being forced to use irons always sucks ass and is a morale killer
Taking risks is good; last wipe's economy was trash (hard to tell what element impacted the economy the most - probably the dupers, and buying and selling vendor stock, eft:arena, etc.). EFT:Arena linkage for sure hastened progression (imo, that needs to be nerfed heavily), but I still feel that a flea lock will shaken up wipe enough to make it much more interesting other than just unlocking meta in 10 hours to gear diff timmies - which would've contributed to more casuals moving over to PvE than some flea lock, tbh. But, those 10 hours are now extended. The Mosin Mans are back.
And... Really... MOST of the casual players have already moved to PvE long ago; so those blanket statements of "casuals will just leave the game," and "nail in the coffin" type shit, is just noise. Any casual player still playing PvP is playing the mode for spontaneity and the inability to predict every moment - those casuals will NOT move to PvE; PvE is too predictable and boring.
The FIR hideout change is rough... imho, needed. We are playing a survival FPS looter-extraction game with RPG elements; doesn't matter how you rearrange each term but looting is part of the game. And, you can target farm every barter item with relative ease. Ask @RNGingy , she literally knows where everything spawns. You realistically didn't have to loot much in Tarkov to progress and I think that's a fundamental issue - so the change requiring FIR items for hideout progression is good one. But, that's my opinion, and time will tell if the populace agrees.
With all this being said, I feel that many players will acquire a more enriched progression experience over the course of wipe than before. Give it a chance. Who knows, maybe nobody will like it, including me, and everything will just go back to normal several months from now.
Also, I have a feeling that wipes will now last a year with the new prestige system. I hope I'm wrong. I better be wrong. Six months at MOST for future wipes; not wiping the game regularly is bad - just like IRL. Don't let it crust.
#EscapefromTarkov
stalker 2 is a great game. people that went into it expecting a follow up to the mod packs already set themselves up for failure as that was just never going to happen.
i enjoy the game a lot and im looking forward to the future of it.