I Tarkov Poorly

Finally, after years of playing EFT, I have completed Punisher 6 and have secured my own Secure Container Epsilon. That thing has 8 slots - it's huge. Twice the size of the little alpha I've used all these years. I started it on Shoreline, because I was doubling with some Peacekeeper tasks.  I even used the SVD at long range (as it was intended) and sniped some PMCS from afar.  I tried sniping on Reserve and that was boring. Ran some of my ammo runs on Reserve carrying that SVD around, but never encountered PMCs.  I finally decided to just cheese it and run dorms on Customs over and over. That mostly worked. I also tried fighting the PMCs in the industrial area, but that rarely went well.  The SVD is really big and ungainly for a cramped place like dorms, but it's easier to control the fights there.  My very last raid I needed only one PMC kill to finish the quest.  I went to dorms. Two story was completely empty. Three story the same. I was descending the ...

Halloween The Halloween event is behind us now. It was mostly fun. I switched to the MCX using .300 Whisper and the VPO-209 with Geksa.  Both suppressed to avoid attracting too much zombie attention.  Carried a pistol too for when I'd inevitably run out of ammo. Leaned on it on several occasions. The MCX was awesome. The VPO-209 was perfectly adequate. Died a lot. Survived a lot. Killed a lot. I think my record was 65 zombie kills in a raid (from which I survived).  Anyway, it was a fun event.  My goal for every raid became reduced to simply kill zombies and extract.  As a solo, trying to conduct a moving gun fight was just too difficult with the zombies.  So my strategy was to try and plot of path of safe spots on the high ground, like cars and trash bins, that I could clamber on and use as a firing platform. I'd prioritize pistol zombies first, followed by the fast ones. The slow ones could be ignored if ammo concerns loomed (pretty much always). So kill ...

Before the current Halloween event I was pursuing the Punisher quest line and trying to level up Mechanic and Peacekeeper, which meant I was running a lot of raids on Shoreline. In several of my raids the weather station was the first real hot spot that I encountered. Sometimes in the first minutes after spawning, sometimes a bit later. But in four of the times that has happened, I have encountered a trio of PMCs at the weather station - them having gotten there before me.  Once I engaged and got killed. Once I approached very cautiously and killed them. And twice I approached cautiously and watch them leave the area, heading toward power or the resort.  And on one of those two occasions where they were leaving, I tried to follow them, hoping to snipe them from behind. But when I got to the edge of the weather station cliffs, looking over where they had just departed seconds before, there was no sign of them.  Did they vanish? Were they removed by the game, or did I ...

Apocalypse  EFT has a new Halloween event: Zombie Apocalypse.  Cool concept, but has been decidedly "meh" for me.  I have yet to survive a single raid. During this event PVE is no longer using local servers, but the official remote ones. The whole reason I play PVE is to avoid those servers. Unsurprisingly my first raid had a Disconnect after I killed one zombie and then the game was aborted. Nice.  I've tried this several times, but it mostly hasn't gone well.   Lately I've been running a very high ergo AK-105. That weapon has been great to me, and I can easily stock up on good ammo on Reserve.  I never run scav runs ( I hate those ), instead I occasionally run Reserve looking for Raiders and ammo.  It's been good, and in PVE mode, D-2 is a safe easy extract. But for the zombie event, the AK-105 just isn't cutting it. I load up HP rounds, which, in theory, should have plenty of flesh damage but I'm just struggling.  Maybe it's because of the...

 In my last post I boasted how the "E" in PVE stands for "Easy".  Tarkov is showing me the error of my ways. I've been dying left, right and center since making that post.  Punisher Part 1 I want to finish the Punisher quest line. It's something I've never done, and I've always wanted the larger secure container than my little four slot alpha.  First up: kill 15 scavs on Shoreline with an AKM.  Shouldn't be too hard. First raid goes well, moving around the map, killing scavs. In the last battle I run into a PMC, who messes me up a bit, but I prevail.  It's getting late, my meds are low, my food and drink are low. Let's call it. Plus, I have a daily to extract alive. In the post mortem I see that I got 8 of the 15 scavs.  Nice. Tomorrow I'll finish this out. For the second raid I'm also trying to do Anaesthesia and Scrap Metal. So I have 6 markers on me, to mark tanks and Sanitars lurking spots. Best get to it. I move out, marking ...

As mentioned in my previous post, I started playing Tarkov again after a long break.  It was going as it ever did: lots of death.  The desync was becoming very trying and after a particularly frustrating fail I went and bought the PvE expansion and have been playing that now instead. At the time of the switch, I was level 16 or so in PvP mode, with maybe 300,000 rubles in cash, and exactly 0 PMC kills. A new record low.  Even when I started playing EFT four years ago and was an absolute noob I had more PMC kills than that by the time I reached level 16.  Of course, Arena makes me level up faster, so the comparison is not equal.   Nikita, if you are reading this, please bring back the ability to choose an individual server. Or at least give me the choice of prioritizing low ping at the expense of a longer wait time.  So I've been playing PvE.   It's fun. It's far better than simply dying every time I draw near another player. But it's too easy...