The StunLock

There isn’t a strict rule surrounding what should and shouldn’t be the nature of a relationship between the developer and the player. Some communities expect more out of their devs, and some a little less. The reality is that, pragmatically, there isn’t anything beyond making a purchase and receiving a product that should be expected between the two parties.

That’s the kind of rule I keep for 99.99% of dichotomies that make up the difference between player and developer. For that remaining .01%, we can look to Escape From Tarkov (and OSRS, but that’s for another time).

EFT is a game that is so complicated from a programming perspective and so demanding from a hardware perspective that it only becomes natural that it’s developers, Battlestate Games, have to rely on their community to check for niche, obscure problems in its implementation.

BSG isn’t a AAA studio: They don’t have hundreds of hands on deck to fulfill quotas, they don’t have Microsoft money backing their plays, and they definitely don’t have the benefit of an extremely large player-base to do their bug testing for them in any passive way. What they do have is a keen, genius vision for their game, strong knowledge of combat gear and weaponry, and a community of middle-aged men who, in some cases, are mathematically inclined.

All of that to say that the myriad of interactions that can be experienced in-game, from weapon jams, to ammo fragmentation, to armors doing wild calculations between inherent Aramid Fabric protections and the steel plates in front of them as different calibers of ammunition, all have their own niche problems in-game and the only way the 99% of us would ever know about it is if the top 1% of EFT players who dedicate an extraordinary amount of time to the game tested for these problems.

A great example of this lies here. This video is just one example of many that showcase the community’s ability to sacrifice their time in testing the game out in pragmatic and extensive ways. It’s entirely possible that without this kind of testing, things like specific armors ignoring plating entirely might go unnoticed for years before a casual player catches the problem on a whim.

It’s that sort of commitment that makes the relationship between EFT’s player-base and BSG one of greater debt on the side of the developer. If Nikita (or BSG as a whole) up and quit on the project entirely, the community wouldn’t be upset because the game is fun and “how unfortunate!”, they would be outraged because, at this point, the relationship they have with the developer and the game is less like a customer / business relationship and more like a marriage between two people who are over the honeymoon phase and really putting in the leg work to keep things from falling apart. (And they’ve been doing so for years, now).

There isn’t a strict rule as to how a community should approach its relationship with the developer(s) of its game. But with Escape From Tarkov, the magic within the title is baked right into the keenly unique relationship the community shares with BSG. It is the most tedious, frustrating thing I’ve ever experienced, and I can’t wait to see where the game is at come 2025.

GLHF,
-E