You Won't Be Able to Select the Map You Scav On, Eventually

Right now, player scavs are more powerful and potentially lucrative than ever before. As more items, maps, bosses and ways of earning rubles in-raid have been added into the game, so to have player scavs. In addition, getting your scav karma up to a maximum of 6, combined with buffs from the intelligence center, means you could be scaving into a raid every 5-7 minutes. Just having Streets exist in the game means there are literally millions of rubles just laying around waiting to be looted by players. And if you know where to look, with a bit luck, you could walk out of Streets a very rich breeki boy. And while people aren’t upset with scavs being an effective way of making money, many have made their disdain heard about the sheer number of p-scavs on maps like Streets. They can spawn in as early as 6 or 7 minutes into a raid, which as a PMC is not something you want to see. If I’m going to die, let it be from another PMC who outplayed me, instead of a humble scav who caught me with my hand in my pants reloading or healing. It kind of makes every other map obsolete. One potential mechanic that was talked about in the most recent TarkovTV podcast was the removal of allowing player scavs to choose which map they would like to load into. Now initially, that seems like a rather drastic and scary change; players all have their own habits when it comes to running their scav. What maps they like to loot, what their goals are in that particular moment in time, and removing the ability to pick where we go is certainly not something to ignore. If this change does get added at some point, it’s going to ultimately shake up how players engage with their scav to such a degree where previously never scaved on maps will be getting lots of love, one way or another. It’s definitely one of the more divisive adjustments that were talked about, so let’s break this down and see whether or not it’s a positive or negative change in general.

Way back in the day, when the game was much more devoid of items in general, making 100k rubles in a scav run was considered huge. There wasn’t a lot to find, and the best-case scenario was finding an unlooted PMC body that was juiced. Nowadays, the opportunities to find items with value are all over the place. The inflation in Tarkov is real; everything is so expensive to buy. But that kind of also is the same case for selling items as well. There are plenty of single slot items worth 5 or even 6 figures in rubles, should you know what is worth keeping and selling at either the traders, or on the flea market. The flea market certainly has a hand in making scav running so potentially lucrative. All of this to say that by forcing scavs to join a random map, it changes things. Drastically.

Not being allowed to choose where you would like to loot will teach players more of the high traffic locations across all the maps in the game where there might be loot. With the addition of the hidden secret stashes across most maps, people will also learn to route those containers depending on which you spawn on. Customs, Interchange, Shoreline, and Woods all have a ton of these containers that are useful should you not want to run around and enter the danger zones of each map. But that kind of comes with the territory of playing on your scav. You get to run around and find the scraps left behind by PMCs who entered the raid earlier. Which is something else using your scav on random maps will help solve. The potentially long queue times. Because certain maps are more popular than others, this can lead to severely long queue times on the maps. Mainly, Streets. It’s just so powerful of a map in terms of the sheer amount of loot that is on it. With up to 14 players on it and not one but two bosses as well, the possibilities are actually limitless with what can be taken out of that map as a scav. Especially considering that player scavs for some reason tend to spawn in less than 10 minutes after a raid begins, which is ludicrous to think about. No map should have any player scavs in before even 15 minutes unless the game can’t find a server for you.

As someone who still enjoys using their scav on other maps like Woods, Customs, and Reserve, they still have plenty of money potential across them. But as the wipe goes on, people are less interested in finding loot or items for their hideout, and really just want to run into heavily geared PMCs so they can fight and potentially take their stuff for themselves. Which I totally understand. It’s probably the only real negative I can think of when it comes to random maps for your scav. If all you want to do is go and fight other players, regardless of whether or not you win, you just enjoy that experience, if all the players are on Streets, and it takes you 5 random scavs load ins to get on Streets, that can certainly be frustrating. Another potential negative is getting repeat maps back-to-back. That I can see as also be frustrating, so my hope would be that BSG can implement some kind of backend system that makes it so you can’t get the same map twice in a row. If you are someone who loves to loot and scavenge a map for every morsel on it, it’s going to be quite challenging to do so if you get Factory 3 times in a row. The idea isn’t perfect, but for a more authentic experience as a player scav, looting maps, potentially running into other scavs or even PMCs, not being able to choose where you load into is a big deal. And it’s something a lot of players have been advocating to be changed for a long time.

Again, not being able to select that map you would like to scav on is scary; having that power taken away from you is something a lot of people aren’t going to be okay with. But the thing is, everyone now must play by the new rules. And should you get your scav karma to max, if what Nikita said is going to be true, then you will regain the option to select that map you’d like to play on. As someone who got max karma for the first time this wipe, just the benefits we get right now are worth it. But adding that as an incentive is going to make a lot more people work towards it. Right now, it’s just an idea; nothing is set in stone. The implementation could be different, getting the option back could also be different. We don’t know for sure. But I am interested in hear what you have to say about the idea. Thank you very much for taking the time out of your day to watch this video. Be sure to leave your thoughts down in the comment section below and be sure to subscribe for more videos about potentially drastic changes to beloved game mechanics in Tarkov that we all know and love. I hope to see you in future ones.