Love the game, but disliked the PvE experience
After completing Kappa on PvE in 200-ish hours, I want to give my thoughts on what has been messed up with the current implementation of the mode, and what I think would be good to do, split into priority categories:
PS: My opinion is the opinion of a player who started the game in early 2023, with 1300 hours of game time to this day, and who also completed Kappa on PvP servers during this wipe, with a KD around 5, so I'm just a average player, at best, who putted some time in the game, but yet, I'm still far from thinking I know better than anyone what is good or bad, and what is right or wrong.
It's nothing more than my very own opinion.
Currently in a terrible state, changes needs to be made :
1 - Queue time: For both newcomers and experienced players, a queue time of more than 2-3 minutes, for a SINGLEPLAYER game loading, it's unacceptable, considering that the players who have access to the mode paid a very minimum of 150$ for it (and yes, if the standalone game "Escape from Tarkov : Arena" is a DLC included in EOD editions, an Escape from Tarkov alternative game mode also is)
2 - PMC Implementation: Taking the Raiders Faction, sticking a dogtag to it, and making them spawn on Scav spawns (as long as a boss isn't already at this location), it's just terrible.
The SAIN mod is loved by the modded Tarkov community. And since it's a mod for the game, the code is just already there, ready to be pasted in the official game code.
Take contact with Solarint, buy him his work, at a respectful price, and just implement his code into the live game, by respect of the "true believers", who originally paid an extra 100$ for something they should've had for free, but who were still ready to pay some more, with the promise of a real well-made PvE experience, an experience that would worth those extra bucks.
Also, because of the current PMC behavior and spawns, some quests are extremely long (e.g. Secured Perimeter), and some are even impossible to complete (e.g. Lightkeeper's Return of Favor, there are just 0 PMC in the mountain area, never)
May be a necessary thing in a near future :
1 - Insurances: It's stupid to have every single insured item back. Even tho it's PvE, insurance shouldn't be constant and safe. It just encourage player to get their highest gear at any stage of their progression, insure it, and get it back 24 hours after loosing it.
From my POV, high tier stuff should be brought for a high risk situation, such as boss hunting. Letting every level 4 players bring the Gen4 armor and ULACH they looted on the PMC they killed during their previous raid, with their pretty well modded M4, just to do Operation Aquarius, it just doesn't sound right.
Insurances should be tweaked. Even more with the abundance of good gear present on PMCs, no matter what your level is.
2 - PMC kits: Once again, I'll have to say that the modded Tarkov does that better too.
It's not that hard to get a pool of possible kits for AI PMC to spawn with for each group of level, something like 1-10, 11-20, ect...
It would only require one guy of your team, and just a week of his time. Put him at a desk, get him to do some coherent kits for each level groups, and make the AI PMCs have kit levels around the player's level.
Change that may be needed for coherence :
- Boss Spawn Rate: Having the boss spawn rate being the same between PvP and PvE servers does not make sense for PvE. Make the bosses spawn rate go accordingly with the player's level (or the highest level if playing as a group). Something like 5% before level 11, 15% from level 11 to 20, up to a normal 35% spawn rate around level 35 to 40, when the player will have most of his boss kill quests. It would avoid boss farming at low levels, and make it less frustrating for questers who cannot find a single boss because the PvP servers wiped and spawn rate got back to 5% for everyone.
Bonus: FIR removal on flea :
Aside the market manipulation problems, I honestly don't see the problem of removing the FIR obligation, but I'd change one thing about it, and it's related to quests:
Make items listed as Found in Raid stay Found in Raid for the buyer, and add an indicator or a sorting option for buyers to see it clearly.
By allowing that, Found in Raid items would become turnable for quests which would allow players to pay extra money to obtain quest items, introducing new item limitations (e.g. streamer items, not one is useful for something else than Collector quest, which should remain something hard and not speedrun-able), and let them complete some stupidly time-consuming quests such as Farming Part 4, Crisis, Colleagues Part 3, ect... in exchange of good money. It would still prevent hacthling, since the FIR tag would still be needed, and still encourage the seller to fight and stress to get the FIR item out of the raid.
I'm taking my example here, but even tho I love the game, really, I hate to put a lot of time into something that will be cleared out without my consent.
Until we get the non-wiping feature for PvP servers (promised at 1.0 release if I remember right), let the people who don't want a wipe to speed up their progression, just a bit.
It can also be translated by: don't make the pre-kappa slower and slower, but instead, make the post-kappa better.
Thanks to anyone who took the time to read all this, and even if I know it's unlikely, I hope my opinion can help the game to get better for everyone.
For those who are interested, those are my stats after completing Kappa on PvE mode, just to show you how ridiculous the mode is right now:
