Escape from Tarkov - something something insert Russian memes here

[SausageBayonet]

Speaking of the Tarkov cheating epidemic.

Anyone here have any experiences with that single-player mod? Please, do share.

 

[Secret Asshole]

Speaking of the Tarkov cheating epidemic.

Anyone here have any experiences with that single-player mod? Please, do share.

So I can't sleep, I broke my hiatus I randomly decided to answer this post.

Single Player Tarkov is basically a different experience. If you are expecting that heart pounding sensation, its not really there. And that's honestly OK. No longer are there questions if you got killed if he was using ESP or a no sound mod or an aimbot. There's not going to be guys hiding in weirdo spots or extract camping.

I'll speak about vanilla. Basically, it is an entirely PvE experience. You've got Bears, USEC and Scavs/Bosses running around. Due to limitations in the game engine, whatever side you pick (Bear/USEC) those AI will be friendly to you in the game and will typically have really good equipment on them. Really, aside from that, its basically the same looter shooter without the worry of some bullshit taking you out (I mean, there still is). You also get the 'offline' options too. Want a scav war with a horde? Sure. Need to kill scavs but there never seem to be any? Put them on high. Want Scavs and PMCs to be super deadly? Up the AI. You can also pick your edition. So you can play on EoD or Standard. Another big benefit? No match times.

The Flea market is entirely simulated, and I've not used it for selling, just buying. Unlike in game, there's no guarantee if the item you want will be available. But it is there to use. Traders and quests basically function the same. The PMCs will take stuff off of Scavs they kill, but they don't really loot the map.

Where it gets REALLY crazy is that it opens you up to something regular Tarkov doesn't have: Modding. Want all the bosses to spawn on all of the maps? Sure. Want every Scav to be a raider with Gen 4 and the best ammo? You can do that too. Want improved AI for PMCs? There's a mod for that too, which can make them fucking brutal. It also allows you to add different guns/clothing. Want a bigger stash? You can have one. Want Kappa but want to use it with quests? There's that too. There's also custom spawn points, and cheats as well. If you don't like your faction being friendly, you can change spawn rates of PMCs so only the opposing factions shows up. There are also flea market mods which instead simulate the base game's flea market better for a different experience. You can also alter the amount of free loot that spawns as well. There are so many options it'd take forever for me to list them all.

And of course, you can cheat if you want. Hate doing a fucking quest? Use a save editor and insta complete it. Same for stats and money.

There's also the opposite, in which mods enforce hardcore rules (you can't buy anything from traders or use the flea market and you can only sell. you can't insure and heal after a raid). So there's that mode as well, which might appeal to some because you can do a hardcore playthrough without worrying about hacking. And of course there are hacker free lab runs as well.

On the other hand, it can be slow to update. Typically they update every major patch and along with minor patches. But they do release a dev version if you couldn't wait. There are some bugs and minor weirdness, but nothing that has completely broken my game. The bugs that are in Tarkov are still in this too of course. Some people have trouble getting it to work, but for me its honestly as smooth as butter. Another thing I noticed is that loose loot is abnormally low compared to single player Tarkov, but this can be tweaked through mods/config files.

Its a very customizable experience and you can make Tarkov what you want it to be. The editing tools can be powerful. Or you can just play it like Tarkov and be a filthy 'casual'. Fuck 'em. There are also reports of people getting banned for using it, but I haven't been banned yet. Typically you just keep them in separate folders or just delete the multiplayer Tarkov after you use it. Honestly, it is easy to see how much cash they would make if they did something like this.

So, to sum it up:

Pros
- Hacker/Cheater Free
- Extremely Customizable to your play style
- Freedom to mod it and play at your own pace
- Can do different playthroughs without worrying about getting them ruined
- All features of the base game
- New Guns, Clothes, Items
- No Match Times or waiting for players
- You can edit in events like the dehydration event or other events
- Simulated Flea Market

Cons
- Slow to Update and doesn't update every patch
- Some people have trouble getting it to work
- Can possibly get you banned
- Random Bugs (Quests available popping up after Scav runs, low loose loot traders breaking after turning in a quest requiring a restart)
- Will not be as tense as regular Tarkov
- No Co-Op play
- All the Bugs of normal Tarkov
- Friendly PMCs of your faction (may or may not be a bad thing)

The Funny
- Makes the Tarkov community scream in rage and salt as people leave their bullshit for their own fun and call you a pirate

 

[ADN_VIII]

Tarkov is a game that has no idea where it wants to go with itself or what audience it wants to have.

I've put about 200 some odd hours into Tarkov and would be confident in placing pretty much every issue on the devs shoulders. The game the devs made attracted the shitty playerbase it has. BGS has an idea of what game they want to make, but have zero concept that they have to make certain concessions in order to attract an audience. Hardcore, ultra realistic shooting is an incredibly tiny niche market. 1:1 realism isn't fun to play for most people because actual combat isn't really fun or conducive to video games. The small group of people that do enjoy this near 1:1 shooting experience are usually very sweaty, very often try hards, and usually have atrocious social skills. This meshes perfectly with the sweaty, try hard, and asocial developer and leads to an incredible downwards spiral. The game gets harder to get into and, crucially, harder to stay in. A new or returning player that manages to start and stay for a bit will be overwhelmed by the sweaty try hards that the devs design the game around.

Between the sweaty try hard players, the sweaty try hard devs, and the nonsensical quest and XP progression structure, a new player will pick up, play for a bit, then leave the game alone because there's no edge for them to peel back and get into the meat of the content.

I liken Tarkov to shellfish. The old players are the ones with king grab and hammers and the knives to crack the shell. The new player have one of those rubber mallets that doctors use to tap knees and a plastic knife are told that they need to accomplish the same things the old players can do in the same time and with the same efficiency. It's absurd.

 

[guidmaker]

The final nail for me was when they introduced a bunch of arbitrary thresholds in-raid to solve complex problems. It's a huge design smell, a hack where nothing good can be accomplished.

Examples:

• 50kg weight limit
• 10 minute raid timer + XP threshold for non "run-through" status

 

[ADN_VIII]

Also the game's optimization is horrendous. I had Tarkov on legitimately every drive I own, a conventional HDD, an SSD, and an NVME drive and could never get into a match in under 5 minutes.

By comparison, I can start Arma 3, go through the menus, connect to a multiplayer server, get onto the map and into a role, then kit up and be ready for an operation in less time than it takes for Tarkov to just load.

In terms of file size, Arma 3 is triple the size of Tarkov with a greater in game scale but still has a reasonable loading time. With mods it can be five or six times the size. There's no excuse for this kind of poor optimization.

 

[Mooger Meng]

I'm starting to think that the name "Escape from Tarkov" is a tautology - you're not trying to escape the city with your loot, you're trying to escape the game with your sanity.

 

[ADN_VIII]

I'm starting to think that the name "Escape from Tarkov" is a tautology - you're not trying to escape the city with your loot, you're trying to escape the game with your sanity.

You are not wrong.

 

[Lards and Lasses]

So how is everyone enjoying VoiP?

The new shotguns are fun, but the revolver one has a horrendous reload time, as if your character is afraid of chipping a nail on the casings. I'd kill to have one IRL tho. The taurus circuit judge doesn't even compare so don't @ me with that shit

I don't play factory because it is pure cancer aids for COD fags, but I imagine a lot of the chad players are getting their shit kicked in by low tier dudes doing leg-meta runs with the double barrel for only 9k a pop.

 

[ellroy]

Secret Asshole and others have offered some good criticism toward the game. This my take after playing recently as a complete beginner as the game was 30% off for Christmas. I bought the Edge of Darkness version just to get a head start on what looked to be a very grindy game.

First, Tarkov is horribly unoptimized. Like worse than S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on release. Their lack of clear minimum and recommend specs is sign that they aren’t optimizing and you need a 3080 and very fast processor to run it. My i7-7700K and AMD Vega 64 machine can’t break 60 fps on medium. I’m doing a new build in the next two weeks so we’ll see how it performs on a Ryzen 9 5950X and a 3080.

Concerning the new player experience. Nothing is explained. Prior to purchasing, I occasionally watched some Twitch streams, read the wiki, and looked at some online maps. That wasn’t enough. Want to buy something, the game doesn’t explain that you have to check a box with no text or a clear symbol to allow the item (money in my case) to leave your inventory for the purchase. I had to look that up online because I thought I wasn’t allowed to buy something until I complete a quest or two. The game doesn’t explain why you need to pack food and water because you can die of exhaustion very easily. I did die of that on a PMC raid and I got no warning that this was going happen until it was too late, I had less than 30 Kg of kit and the game starts killing me without a heads up. Thanks for explaining that one to me, now I need to make sure I buy plenty of water and food for upcoming raids that don’t guarantee a financial return.

The game is also notoriously unhelpful by not giving you a warning that you’re entering a night map without the right equipment. I accidently selected midnight on woods without a weapon light or NVGs. I spawn in middle by the powerlines without any sense of direction since the game doesn’t want to give a you a compass because of how it approaches items (more on that later). I start walking trying to follow the lines thinking I will intersect one of the roads and wound up stepping on a mine near a wrecked armor vehicle, so I must have been close to the western edge of the map. I had insurance paid for but I never got my stuff back even though the likelihood of any player finding my body on a dark map, in the middle of nowhere is low.

The game is also unhelpful telling you where the exit points are. I was on woods as a Scav and went to the factory gates for exit, turns out that exit needs a PMC to cooperate with you to exit. That’s hilarious given the state of the game with players shooting at each at first sight. I went to the mountain stash hoping to find the exit but didn’t realize it was tucked away at the base of the mountain not near the top. I give up and then try to make my way to the scav bridge but couldn’t get there in time so that raid turned into a failure.

When it comes to game items, it gets way too micro, especially with the hideout upgrades. The hideout used to be straight money upgrades at first but now it wants nuts, bolts, multitool, toothpaste, etc. That means I have to waste time trying to check random bags and tool boxes over the maps to find low value items just to get my hideout going. It’s also a ticking clock because the more time you spend raiding and leveling up, the sooner you exit out of the free heal grace period. That means getting the hideout upgrade to boosting healing is the highest priority. Problem is now you are at the mercy of the game’s loot RNG to get what you need. Talk about a grind to just get started.

Scav raids is a nightmare to do because player scavs are more likely to shoot you than not due to the culture of the game. There is a karma system in place but its pathetic. Fence’s attitude towards you drops and you have to be a complete asshole for a while before all the scavs will treat you hostile on spawn. Given how limited time is for Scav raids, there is no incentive to not gun down player scav since there is a likelihood they are carrying loot, provided they don’t shoot you first. They need to change scav karma, there cool down timer for the raid should increase if you have low karma and if you have high karma should get decreased down to 10 minutes. Secret Asshole’s idea of the AI scavs immediately turning on you is a good idea too, that will turn factory scav runs into less of COD deathmatch.

PMC runs are too risky for a beginning player. You have limited resources and you need to bring so much kit while you are learning the game. Given how low the TTK is and some maps the shot could come from anywhere being out in the open, the PMC raid is just high risk, low reward. It also doesn’t help that there is no PMC karma so you can get killed by fellow faction members, which adds more risk playing solo. I’m so worried that once I end free grace period for healing that I won’t have everything I need to get my hideout upgraded for improved healing.

I don’t get the dev’s game direction. They have no in game store for microtransactions like Red Dead Online does, but the game is very much a grindy feast or famine game geared for people that can play eight hours a day. With Price’s law dictating that 10% of the game’s population will dominate, where are the devs going to make up the costs once enough players have enough of the difficulty and it gets around that Tarkov is too hard? I just don’t get these decisions. Why add healing time? Do you want players to not play and just quit because you can’t let them go another raid due to some arbitrary healing mechanic? The game needs an easy initiation period so players can get set up and feel invested, so they don’t give up.

I want to like this game but I don’t have the time it looks like it will take to have access to the better items. Of course it doesn’t matter since they already have my money but I’m certainly not going to recommend this game to others.

 

[The Grognard]

Having played Tarkov since 2017, my main gripes with it's development have been mainly towards excessive focus on appeasing streamers at the expense of gameplay and balance. Tarkov used to have an Aimpunch mechanic in that where hitting someone first would throw off their aim but because streamers complained about getting killed because the other guy shot first, it got removed. It also used to have a mechanic that the more stuff you carried, the noisier you are. This of course, offended streamers because they couldn't be completely quiet with ceramic plates, carrying a dozen spare mags and a backpack the size of Lichtenstein, full of golden jewelry.

That said though, they did finally add an inertia mechanic so people can't just zig and zag with ultra-fast AD movement.

 

[Mike Stoklasa]

Streamers are the bane of gaming. They are largely why I stopped playing Tarkov.

 

[Dave.]

I have heard extremely mixed opinions on this game. What's kiwi farms' consensus?

 

[Mike Stoklasa]

I have heard extremely mixed opinions on this game. What's kiwi farms' consensus?

When I played, it was the multiplayer STALKER game that I wanted. Now I just replay STALKER.

 

[The Grognard]

I have heard extremely mixed opinions on this game. What's kiwi farms' consensus?

It is very much a game you will either love and/or hate. For me, it scratches an itch nobody else does but it's one of the most ineptly run projects there is.

So, here's three things I love about Tarkov:

1. Combat itself, when it works. Very few games have done this sort of high-stakes gunfights as well as Tarkov has done. It is tense, tactical and rewards the better player immensely. Anyone in the heaviest of armors can still drop to a well-aimed Makarov shot to the face. It is a rare multiplayer game that does weapon jams and weapon heating well. Armor actually matters.
2. Atmosphere. It captures the feel of being in a very hostile place full of people who want you dead and are willing to do anything to solve their problem of you breathing. Level design is pretty good for what it's going for.
3. The level of customization for both your weapons and what sort of a load-out you bring is vast and there's room for a lot of playstyles. Focusing on a specific category is perfectly viable as long as you adapt to it's needs and demands.

Now, the three things I hate about Tarkov:

1. Technically, this game is a miracle that it even runs. It has technical issues all over the place, weird bugs and loads of jank that will absolutely put your tolerance for weird bullshit to it's limits. Net-code is still very much suffering from weird de-sync shit and substantial peeker's advantage.
2. A dev-team that is bad at planning what they're actually gonna be doing with this game in regards to it so they end up doing a lot of baffling designs solely to appease the loudest idiot streamers and sycophant redditors.
3. The cheater & hacker population is still very much a problem and I genuinely doubt Nikita gives a shit about it as long as they don't fuck with big streamers.

In short, it is very much a rough diamond that wouldn't exist if it was made by a non-insane studio but it would also work better if the studio wasn't insane.

 

[Site of Origin]

I bought tarkov 2 years ago, wasn't able to get into the online because I just don't have enough time. Recently set up SPTarkov and modded it so its more like an online experience where all PMCs are hostile regardless of faction, removed scav timers, and tweaked the AI.

Pretty fun, love the gun sperging you can get up to. Still a lot of tension in raids as well, the AI with tweaks pulls off some good plays and can have really good gear.

 

[Serbian Peacekeepers]

EMUTarkov is really cool , but i wish the community never went through that split a few years ago, the mod would be alot better if the two sides weren't constantly trying to one up each other

 

[Site of Origin]

EMUTarkov is really cool , but i wish the community never went through that split a few years ago, the mod would be alot better if the two sides weren't constantly trying to one up each other

I wasn't even aware there were two sides, what was the cause of the split?

 

[Secret Asshole]

I wasn't even aware there were two sides, what was the cause of the split?

Emu tarkov wants to add co-op, SPT Tarkov doesn't allow it. They are afraid it would bring a lawsuit so they split.

 

[Serbian Peacekeepers]

I wasn't even aware there were two sides, what was the cause of the split?

This is my understanding of what happened , so it might be totally wrong.

Back in 2019 the og creator of emutarkov , or at-least the orginal version of it , the Maoci stopped working on the project , a person named senko made a off shoot of the EMU called SPT and kept working on it , added modding support the whole nine yards , our current offline tarkov experince is thanks alot to senko. Well after a few major updates to the EMU senko decides to add DRM to the EMU , meaning you have to own and have installed Tarkov itself to play it , people get mad and senko says its easy to remove by anyone with simple coding knowledge , we went from full clients being given out for free to drm for a mod , people weren't happy . senko moves the discord over to some alt-tech shit and then back to discord , i stopped following the community during the move to alt tech and came back late last year to find configfreaks doing what senko used to , and senko being a full blown anti piracy crusader , with permanent banners on the SPT website saying if you have a pirated copy you will be banned with no warning.

 

[Site of Origin]

This is my understanding of what happened , so it might be totally wrong.

Back in 2019 the og creator of emutarkov , or at-least the orginal version of it , the Maoci stopped working on the project , a person named senko made a off shoot of the EMU called SPT and kept working on it , added modding support the whole nine yards , our current offline tarkov experince is thanks alot to senko. Well after a few major updates to the EMU senko decides to add DRM to the EMU , meaning you have to own and have installed Tarkov itself to play it , people get mad and senko says its easy to remove by anyone with simple coding knowledge , we went from full clients being given out for free to drm for a mod , people weren't happy . senko moves the discord over to some alt-tech shit and then back to discord , i stopped following the community during the move to alt tech and came back late last year to find configfreaks doing what senko used to , and senko being a full blown anti piracy crusader , with permanent banners on the SPT website saying if you have a pirated copy you will be banned with no warning.

I was wondering wtf those banners were all about. Maybe he's doing it so the devs don't come after them? Dunno. SPTarkov works really well and the mods are pretty sick. Having a ton of fun getting shit on by PMCs