Tarkov's Expenses are Too Expensive

If there was one aspect to Tarkov that could be compared to something like a living organism, it would for sure be the economy in the game. Both the flea market, and the natural economy created by the traders in the game. If you’re watching this and have played for a couple years now, you’ll know that one thing is common across the entire game and all the items that are sold to us: everything has gotten insanely expensive over time. To be fair, the economy from the sounds of it, will be getting completely redone from the ground up once the game is closer to official launch, but for the time being, that’s not where we are at currently. And we’re not getting there for a long time, either. So, let’s talk about the economy and how everything is arguably too much money for no real good reason other than because it can be.

Now, making money in Tarkov can be easy. However, doing so requires a shift in your mindset when you play, and your overall expectations of what will occur during a raid. There are tons of tutorials and ways of getting your hands-on hard-earned rubles, so we won’t be going into the how of this conversation, but moreso the why. Why do we need to farm money in this game? Should we be able to hit rock bottom? What could be done to maybe alleviate the need to farm money or be stingy with it? These are some of the critical questions I want to think about as we talk about this. For starters, making money itself; there are a lot of ways to go about this. Your scav is an excellent way of doing so. But the problem with this is unless you have Intelligence center level 3, and max karma, you won’t be able to run your scav enough times to warrant actually making good money. Sure, you might get lucky and find some really solid treasure loot once, or stumble across a couple dead PMC’s who haven’t been picked clean. But after that, there is at least a 15 min wait before you can try again (again, assuming you aren’t maxed on scav cooldown). In the meantime, what will you do? You can PMC run sure, but honestly with how the game is right now, it doesn’t feel good to go in with a kit and die to a scav that is aiming at your teammate and not you with one shot. With the way feedback and response is in Tarkov right now, and how egregious it is, I don’t blame people for either not wanting to PMC run or resorting to playing very low geared and getting their stuff pushed in every raid. Obviously, at the end of the day, it’s BSG’s game; they’re going to do what they want with it, and we have to accept that. And I have. But if there is one criticism myself and a lot of other people in the community have said numerous times, is that Tarkov doesn’t respect the player's time.

If all you want to do is go into a raid, with even a medium-level kit; nothing crazy min-maxed. Maybe just a moderate AK and a level 4 armor. You really can’t do that consistently from the get go. It’s not like more arcade-y shooters where death doesn’t permeate throughout your experience. You just respawn and keep on going. There is a buildup you need to go through before you can just run whatever you want. And having tons of money helps facilitate this and then some. But that requires a time investment some people may or may not have available to them. For a game that isn’t an MMO, it sure feels like the time investment required is comparable to something like a FFXIV; people who have the ability to play more, will be leaps and bounds ahead of people who have a fraction of the time. This aspect of the conversation has been talked to death about, but I’m not coming at it from a casual versus veteran perspective. I’m coming at it from just a life circumstance perspective. For some, they might love this game to death and are willing to put up with its BS because they just enjoy it that much. However, they may not have the time to invest as much as they would like. So, maybe they can only level up to the mid 20’s before the game resets, thus not allowing them to experience the freedom of using whatever they want because they have an exuberant number of rubles sitting in their stash.

Now, I’m sure the first question you might ask is why should BSG cater to these people who can’t play all the time? They don’t have to, so they should do as they please. And you’re kind of right. Would it be nice for them to ease some of the attainment of some of the more sought-after items and weapons in the game? Maybe. In all honesty, anything they do to make the grind a little more streamlined I would kind of be down for. I mainly play this game; it’s my go-to whenever I have time. I enjoy other stuff here and there, but currently, there isn’t really anything else vying for my attention. And if I want to make a video talking about Tarkov, I kind of have to play it, you know? I have definitely advocated for BSG making the game harder and take longer to level up. But I can’t really say the same about how they have been handling some aspects of the economy.

An example of this, a simple one, but an example regardless, is one of my personal favorite weapons, the ADAR. You find them a lot of scavs, you can buy one straight up from Skier, or, and this is something I’ve done for years, is find an ADAR for cheap on the flea, and swap out the lower receiver for a brand new one also from Skier. Now, the lower from Skier used to cost only 7k rubles. That has since changed with this wipe and all the changes they have made. It’s double that now; almost 15k rubles. Which you might scoff at and ask that’s nothing why are you complaining? And, again, you’re kind of right. It isn’t that much. But my problem isn’t how much it went up, but the fact that it went up in the first place. Did the lower receiver being 7k rubles break the game? No. It didn’t. Did raising the price to twice the original amount fix the game? Also no. It didn’t. So why change it at all? Other than because people have lots of money lets inflate everything to a ridiculous level, there isn’t a good reason for it. BSG didn’t change the price of the M4 lower from Mechanic; it’s still 20k. If anything, I’d argue that is more worthy of a price hike than the ADAR. And this goes way beyond just weapons and parts. Food and drinks, meds; they have gone up so much overtime it’s wild that we have to pay almost 50k for a salewa, but they go for half that on the flea. It’s almost like that’s what the community has agreed is the actual price for that med. But enough malding about the stupid stuff, it’s just an observation that a lot of things don’t get the same treatment, which is unusual because a lot of issues that they have tried to address have either been not that bad, or a by-product of their own design. If anything, the ADAR change just reinforces how we should be able to build more guns from scratch from the vendors, and have it be on average, on par or a little cheaper than buying guns straight up. I mean, there are a lot of options available to us, and we even got the SCAR-L lower now, so we could build that all the way if we wanted too. But I wish there was more of an emphasis placed on building guns, instead of buying guns.

The economy in Tarkov is a fickle beast try to even tackle. You adjust one thing, and ten other items you didn’t think of become a problem. The flea market has definitely made things complicated to an umpteenth degree. And while getting rid of it would be a cosmic earthquake to the game as a whole, we know it’s not going anywhere. It’s been reigned in over the years, and the wild west of the flea has been adjusted considerably over time. Which is good, because I don’t want to go back to seeing level 6 armors on the flea for cheap and having everyone run them whenever they have money. But, to say the flea didn’t have a colossal impact on the game, and arguably some of the decisions by BSG in regards to the overall economy, would be a lie. I’m curious what is going to happen as we approach the 1.0 release of this game over time and would love to get an idea if they are still planning on redoing the economy across the board, what we could expect from that. This won’t be for a long time I reckon, but I am curious; leave a comment down below if you have an idea as to how you would try and balance the economy, or at the very least, make it feel more conducive to a better user experience, and not feel so bloated in terms of prices because people can attain millions of rubles. I’m curious if anyone has been stewing up an idea or ideas on how they might adjust some of the game's economy, and be sure to subscribe for more videos about how everything is way too expensive in Tarkov. I hope to see you in future ones.