Escape From Tarkov 1.0 is finally here! The gold release is scheduled for a random time in the morning on Saturday, November 15th. Want a more exact time? Oh, you sweet summer child. This is Russia. Suck potato dick and give money for second house for mistress.
Tarkov is my most-played game. I have a stupid amount of hours....Half of that is flipping shit on the flea market at night, but even then, I have over 3k hours of raid time. I know every map like the back of my hand, and I have gotten at least max traders in eight different wipes. I also kinda suck! I generally average 7-8kD and that's only because I've stuck out the early madness and played when the game gets half dead before the next wipe.
There's been plenty of talk about cheaters in Tarkov, and for a long time, my response was "git gud." Tarkov is a game that requires a few hundred hours simply to know where you are going, and many of the people complaining that it was worse than any other game generally had very few hours in it. Cheating has plagued all PvP games since their inception, and Tarkov is no exception. The reason Tarkov can feel worse is that the death penalties are so high. You basically lose everything. Couple that with the obscene requirements for map knowledge, and new players are dying quite frequently to people they've never seen or heard. This can be a highly frustrating experience and overcoming it was a blast for me.
However, the last two wipes have been utterly horrific for the game in terms of cheating. It's gotten so bad that only 3% of the player base achieved level 15 in the most recent wipe. I am one of those who didn't. I got off of Ground Zero, and then Customs took a massive shit on my face, and for the first time since I was a Timmy, I had no gear. In the last few raids, when I was seriously trying to conserve gear, I would run to the closest hiding spot and try to wait out the raid. I hate playing this way but I was desperate to save gear and my KD had dropped from 5.6 to 1.2 in the span of a morning. Even doing this, I died to cheaters who came to sniff me out. I haven't touched the game since, other than to log into my account a few times to tell everyone on my friends list that they were gay. Yes, I am very mature, thank you for noticing.
I will be tentatively dipping my toe back into Tarkov come Saturday morning. They've promised to have a surprise in store for cheaters come launch. I know this is Stockholm syndrome, and I'm stuck in a sunk cost fallacy. I've decided that if they didn't fix the cheater issue, I will, for the first time in my life, join the cheaters. If I do that, I will be an absolute monster and only kill legit players in an effort to encourage people to ragequit and tell Nikkita to suck dick on Twitter. My game isn't tied to Steam, so getting banned will only affect me in the sense that I will lose my Unheard Edition perks.
Anyone else going to get on their knees one last time or looking forward to doing so for the first time?
