The StunLock

In the patch Notes for 0.14.1, Battlestate Games announced that in the near future, players will be able to purchase mico-transactions that give them an edge over other players. One change, in particular, seems to be BSG trying to farm cash out of their most loyal of players.

Frankly speaking, this isn’t necessarily anything new for Escape From Tarkov, and players who are sounding the alarms might be jumping the gun, at least in light of a few of the changes. Despite my obviously reserved nature regarding micro-transactions, I’m willing to extend an olive branch to BSG and observe that some of this news can go one of two ways, while one specific part of these changes is obviously a strict negative for the game

According the patch notes presented above, players will be able to buy stash space with IRL cash. To me, that’s completely fine. Players were already able to do that through buying the more expensive versions of the game. I don’t particularly like that, but I do recognize that BSG needs money to keep the game running, so whatever. And, frankly, the ability to start a wipe with the actual, literal beta container through what is, essentially, a micro-transaction is infinitely more egregious in terms of the macro advantage it gives players, so more stash space matters little to me.

The caveat here being that if the stash space increases are essentially infinite, I think the game becomes relatively silly relatively quickly as stash expansions find themselves sitting in useless-town for some non-negligible portion of the community. Aside from that, I don’t think paid stash expansion is the biggest problem with Escape from Tarkov’s Patch 0.14.1 notes.

The real Issue with the Patch Notes

is that players who want to use the coop practice mode will have to pay money for it if they haven’t already purchased Edge of Darkness. Who even uses the practice coop mode, in the first place?

The only players I can think of who use it are in-game testers who do the laborious work of making sure BSG’s game runs correctly (and you can be sure it doesn’t!) It’s true that these players who are already veterans of EFT need to own this version of the game right now anyway, so they’ll be indifferent to the news.

But as far as new players go, it’s disappointing to see that BSG is willing to farm them for the sake of capitalizing on their interest in seeing how the game works. It’s these same players who are, potentially, going to keep that interest for years on end and become initiated in the community as one of those fans who tests out functionality in-game. And remember, we need those kinds of players, so BSG using them to squeeze out extra cash, I think, is a little scummy and is an idea that should be rescinded.

GLHF,
-E