How Escape From Tarkov wiped out years of goodwill in one catastrophic week

It’s a bad time to be an Escape From Tarkov fan. Developers BattleState Games announced this week the addition of a new $250 edition of the extraction shooter, which included a full PvE version of the game, bigger pockets for PMCs in the full version, and an equippable item that will make AI-controlled Scavs less aggressive to players.

A brutal survival-focused battle royale, Tarkov's special sauce is the mix of scarcity, danger, and rare opportunity. It's a game where finding a particular medicine can make half-a-dozen failed runs feel worthwhile, where a door key is worth its weight in gold, and where you'll go through long stretches of poverty, slowly building up your stash and eking everything you can out of sub-optimal loadouts. It's a shooter, sure, but a shooter where every single item matters a whole lot more than in any other game.

So, extra benefits didn’t sit well with many owners of the existing top-tier $150 Edge of Darkness (EoD) edition, including myself. That version has been available for players to buy into the closed beta since August 2016, and for its considerable price promised  access to every future DLC coming to the game. The argument, coming from content creators, Reddit users and angry fans on the BattleState Games Discord server is that this PvE version of the game is a new DLC and therefore should be handed out to EoD owners for free. 

BattleState Games initially denied the new mode was DLC and tried to play word games, which went down about as well as you'd expect. The backlash was absolutely furious and, after a few days in the bunker, the developer half-admitted to getting it wrong, bowing to pressure in damage control mode and saying that all EoD owners will get six months of co-op play for free, with a rather substantial catch:  Battlestate can’t do this immediately, because they don’t have the server capacity for everyone who’s bought the EoD edition. As PCG's Ted Litchfield put it, this is an enormous unforced error. 

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