Evolution of the Casual | Tarkov Geographic 

you either leave as a casual or see yourself become the sweat.

"They are met with disappointment after disappointment, but the occasional dopamine rush keeps them hungry and coming back for more" - How dare you attack me like this

Shout out to all the Momma Ducks keeping casual ducklings going through the wipe

This video explains me. When he said we morph into a rat the moment we find something valuable i laughed cause its true.... the last part got me tho, i wish i wouldnt have left

This wipe is really brutal for solo casuals the audio in particular is the main thing you can’t be stealthy and mobile at all and you can’t determine where the enemy is as well anymore. Coming up against a 3 man is just a gg. Especially if all of them are running better gear than you.

As a casual, I have never even gotten a taste of that "adrenaline-infused combat" as every encounter ends with me getting immediately headshot by the first bullet fired with or without a helmet.

There's also the friendly scav main, rarely starting engagements, and often looking to get as large a group of randoml people running around the map in unison, until a hostile chad causes the group to descend into chaos as they struggle to fend for themselves.

Its kinda painful to know I dont have enough free time (or priority) in a day to not be a mega-casual. Those adrenaline hits keep me coming back.

Third-Wipe Casual/Rat hybrid here. Love the video. Feel very represented. Of the Casual Archetype I'm a Solo brand and have failed to convince other friends to join me in anguish. Love the videos! Thank you for all the time it took to make.

As a casual, I struggled like this constantly. Fortunately, I found SPT-AKI, where I can play Tarkov in single player, and now I'm able to enjoy it again. It's not quite the same, but I can play an hour or two every week and not feel constantly punished for doing so.

Im a casual. I usually get hardwalled by quests and end up only doing Dailies or random runs for fun. The hard part right now is finding more people to play with, none of my group wants to come back until audio is fixed

OH, GOSH, thank you Leviticus for reminding me about Burnout Paradise. I nearly shed a tear, remembering it.

As a casual I moved to singleplayer tarkov after being burned out by the main game. SP tarkov is great if one needs to take a break from online tarkov but still miss tarkov's feel (gunplay? sound? this game has sth that draws me but i dont know what exactly) , or if one needs to learn the maps and AI mechanics. Returned to online tarkov this wipe, I still suck at pvp but I am much more comfortable fighting scavs and surviving. I don't quest much. After a day's work I just like to take my scoped sks/mosin and take a stroll in the woods.

joys of months of sp tarkov b4 buying eod stopped me being deemed a deer in headlights every raid 🤣 love this series keep up the good work dude !

Eh, Tarkov died for me after the FIR update. I can understand having to get found-in-raid items for quests, but limiting our market options and making it so killing people is barely worth more than getting trader value for their garbage was the most applejuice-smoking mistake Nikita's made to date. Playing the market used to be what'd fuel me having fun. Spend an hour digging through the market and generating a few hundred thousand rubles, buy a goofy kit that'd be funny to roll with, die and probably make someone else smile or cringe at what they found on me. Was a good time. Now killing other players still isn't worth much, except for their dogtag and maybe whatever they haven't shoved in their secure container while looting, but the sweats continue to shoot at players because this game's gone from something where you could maybe meet people and talk with them or get along in rare occasions to a bunch of toxic sweats running around with the word "hardcore" lodged so far up their asses they think that using the word means their life has purpose again. tl;dr, BSG has proven time and time again that they don't listen to their community, they don't care about making an enjoyable experience, and they've lost most of their vision for the game because 99% of the time their changes just seem to reflect whatever garbage has come from some streamer's mouth in between inhaling tendies and gfuel... or just that same garbage being parroted on their reddit page.

I adore this game! but it becomes really difficult to do anything when you get stomped by MegaTarkovManTTV or whatever every wipe because you just don't have enough time to get more than maybe mid tier gear. The pocketwatch quest kills me lol

As a casual I can say that my favorite part is when he says "casual" and then casuals all over the place.

Ah the casual. Tarkovs backbone of the community that's decimated every wipe and never comes back

I’ve fallen off a lot in the past 3 years of Tarkov. I would almost always start mid to late wipe, or get frustrated by the woes of playing solo early wipe and come back in later. This wipe is feeling pretty similar. So many people are already where they were last wipe I feel like I might as well just play other shooters. I love Tarkov, but my “breaks” continue to get longer and longer

myself being a casual, I feel this video so hard - I hope BSG can make EFT more casual friendly in some way without killing its spirit. I like that it is hard and I like to play the early wipe, but normally I end up at lvl 30 when the mid wipe starts (currently lvl 24), feeling a little bit burned out as I get the feeling that my few hours a week are not enough to make progress anymore. Keep up the good content :)

If a casual Tarkov video had a video title: ON TODAYS EPISODE OF GETTING MY ASS KICKED 😂

I have found my place in the simulair habitat of single player tarkov. Perfect for the casual gameplay.

I still remembered the time I was getting started as a casual four wipes ago. Got walked over by literally everyone and took a very long break. Got lured in again mid-wipe around a year later, got lucky and got to punisher 4, and now, starting my second full wipe (and one partial), there's no escape for me now. Edit: while the OCE server still allows some friendly interactions between tasking PMCs and ad-hoc D2 exfil parties, the recent influx of new players and casuals, with their lust for blood, really force me to match their aggression in kind

If BSG wants casuals back it easy to fix. Just go back to letting everything in the pouch retain the found in raid check mark even if you die. As a bonus, not only will casuals play more, they will also be more likely to fight instead of ratting and hiding.

Honestly i think starting to play this game casually was the best choice i ever made, the first 3 wipes i genuinely tried my best to become really good really fast. That burned me out quick as others had already thousands of hours of experience and catching up really isnt easy. I at some point basicly snapped and said fuck it i dont care anymore. I played the game until it stopped being fun. Uninstalled waited for next wipe. Playing casually was by far the best decision since imo the devs really stop giving a crap about growing their community. Some wipes i played till 5 or 8 some i played till 27 or smth

As a university student, this applies to my life in so many ways. Man I have LOVED the game, ever since I first bought Standard in 2018. The wipes have increasingly been arriving during finals week, even when I was in high school it sadly made me miss the most fun weeks of a wipe. Sadly enough, the game has been moving in a direction that's making it more and more difficult to play it on and off. After the first few weeks, most of the people I encounter are lvl 30-50 and oftentimes streamers that generally outskill or out-gear me. While I will always return for at least like lvl 20 each wipe, I have lost the spark I once had for this game.

Even tho bsg ignores us, the casuals are the lifeblood of the community

We morph into a rat when we get an item of interest as that is probably one of our only matches for the day and we want to make some sort of progress.

This is such a great video. The documentary I didn't know I needed! As a new player who started off after the wipe I feel a lot of this but I'm finding the game tolerable as long as I play it like a survival game and just ease into pvp instead of sprinting into the nearest gunfire. The standard game is a steal (especially on sale), the maps are gorgeous (especially woods), and the option to play as a scav is really fun. When you look at the gameplay loop as more about scavenging and survival I think it becomes much easier to recommend to a casual player.

Me and every friend I got to try tarkov has stopped playing. I did the math and on days I actually get to game I get roughly 3hrs. You add in getting gear ready and waiting 15 minutes to get in a raid just to get tarkoved. I literally bought a pc just to play tarkov so it gets really frustrating but I've found my peace playing games like stalker gamma

Casual whose been here for 4 wipes, I found my fun doing scav only runs this wipe. LVL 3 PMC, LVL 13 scav at the moment. Last wipe I did pistol only night raids rping as splinter cell. The wipe before that I was a mosin man locked to WW2 gear haha

I don't know what casual players you have talked to lol, the farthest I've ever got in this game was around level 15 and just barely managed to get the shooting range in the hideout, I haven't seen the flea market since they moved it from 10 to 15 lol. Typical raid yields ~200-1300 exp. aside from the real rare 2500-3k raid where the planets align... Thanks for the video tho!

So the "Unemployed" are sweats since they're neither a student or worker, agree 100% 🤣

The biggest problem about being a casual isnt that we cant play for 12h every day. The problem is that the game wastes a lot of our precious and very limited times in menus. Gearing, buying/selling, organizing the stash and loading into a raid easily makes half the playtime. And this is the biggest problem Tarkov currently has

Life cycle of a timmy when he finally becomes a tarkov brother

Lmao this video is spot on, I love tarkov but rn im only playing that shit til dark and darker comes out again with another playtest 😭😂

After 3 or 4 wipes, I've basically given up on any attempt at enjoyment from pvp. My last raid on customs with 5 netted player kills did not provide any satisfaction or dopamine at all. Playing the SP Community EmuTarkov version of the game provided some more enjoyment with a more chil experience

the apex predator is the streamer, who can get you removed from the game for literally just playing the game normally. God forbid you accidentally kill one.

PvE has made being a Casual with friends so much easier. I bought EoD years ago because i really loved the game, but busier work schedules and the massive hacking problem drove me to stop playing for a long time. Now, with PvE, im doing a couple raids every day, and big group runs once or twice a week with friends.

This broken wipe has finally got me to give up on tarkov, as a casual who could only put in a few hours weekly I actually just can't put in enough time to stand a chance. That combined with this wipe making every map but customs and factory so laggy it's unplayable. I'll still keep up with the game and watch content on it, but it's just too punishing for casual standard account players.

Need a cut up of casual clips with "In the Arms of the Angels" playing. "For just the cost of one PACA per day, you too can make it so that these beautiful creatures continue to get dunked on by chads."

the casual audience shrinking doesnt seem like much of a problem as of the present, but a game "locking out" the widest playerbase available due to its harsh, unforgiving nature will hurt the future sales and profits of the game, which could slow down or halt development

This is it exactly. The end of this video was perfect. If only BSG weren’t making it EVEN HARDER for casual players to compete with the ammo changes 😂

You have to mention how hard it is for casuals to keep up when we have smaller stashes and containers

I shit you knot, I've had THREE 'n!&&@ moment' fights since the new wipe. We both waste a mag, fail to kill each other, and move along our ways.

Nothing is quiet as scary as a casual that plays like a sweat

The scav AI being cracked, the sound issues and the constant cheaters are making it hard to stay with tarkov right now

Hey Leviticus thanks for the amazing content mate!

> Load the game > Spawn into factory > Die to a scav after shooting at it 12 times > "That was fun" > Exits the game and doesnt play again for 4 months

Little tip for the non sweaty players who get bored /burned out fast. Don’t sit down and say “I’m doing tasks today” unless you got tasks that are like “go into room get item, leave” then do those as those are gimmies. All the other quests will 100% complete just by running raids and looting shit. Just go load into a map, run around, grab some shit shoot some people and leave. The second I stopped going “oh I gotta go to interchange I need spark plugs” and shit like that, the game became infinitely more fun.

Basically me, forever a filthy casual who will never evolve into a sweaty chad.

That last bit definitely pinned down exactly why I stopped playing. I kinda just had my fill a few wipes ago, got to the point where I was having the same realization I did with CS:GO, that being that I was only really playing to watch numbers go up and because my friends were bugging me to hop on. It wasn't even really fun to be honest, questing's awful, gun play's cool but hit reg isn't, the meta's always something unenjoyable but ends up being the only way to play, hax still crop up plenty enough to be a pain in the ass, takes way too long to unlock the flea market (which was the only real fun part when I look back on it), armor and ammo type balance always feels really janky, and so on. I think the game's just turned into something different from what I was expecting when I got in to it way back, which sucks given I got an EoD copy.

Ah, good ol’ casuals. We are special, ain’t we

You should definitely make one on the experienced casual where you follow the casual that becomes slowly but surely a chad.

This feels so relatable. I have a 40 hour job, and have to take care of my family, and the only friend I have who also plays Tarkov, is just as much a casual as me. We mostly do scav runs together, or try to go for some of the early-game quests or try to get some items for the hideout. Yes, we're incredibly out-geared, but at the same time, the few moments where we do get the jump on other players feels very rewarding. I can't wait for the "No Wipe" server, when progress is finally somewhat permanent. Tarkov is a game I do truly enjoy playing, but I just can't sink as much time into it as people, who play it 6 hours a day with a full squad.

If nothing is done then the game will slowly turn into sweat fest over time, and even then the sweats that are less skilled or dont have as much time as streamers will lose the intrest as they now will be primary target of more competent sweats/streamers. The game will slowly morph into a game where only the best of the best will have fun, and BSG is not going to do a thing about it.

I'm almost 2 months in ,gonna be my first wipe day soon , I can't wait to have these kinda fight, one of my favorite parts of playing Tarkov so far is fighting other low leveled players and having an intense drawn out fight. So excited for everyone to be in the same boat , gonna be sick

Been waiting for this

I'd love to see a video on the goblin playstyle.

Fantastic video! Great message and delivery! I found myself tired of repeating this cycle and only plan on coming back if they introduce permanent AND wipe account as well as Arenas. Other than those, I shall continue being an addicted spectator.

for me, i play a decent amount, but i’ll almost never play solo, other than maybe just running factory for a stupid kill quest or something. the game is just so much more enjoyable when you got friends to dick around with, laugh off deaths, and most importantly, throw all your goop into the nearest foliage or body of water for prapors frogmen to go dive for

"This may not necessarily be a bad thing" I would (personally) disagree for a couple reasons. Without casual players, the game doesn't grow. If new people don't come to the community, said community risks devolving into a circle jerk, making even less new people join and driving away people from it, thus creating a vicious cycle. Casuals are important, if not fundamental to the ecosystem of the gameplay loop. Sweats stroke their ego, and more importantly their quests with easy kills, getting them to kappa faster, and making them happier. Casuals benefit from being numerous as it means the likelihood to run into a disparaging lobby clearer diminishes, thus leading to them playing longer, maybe even upgrading to EoD. From a business point of view having (thankfully) no way to catch whales outside of the one time purchase of EoD, the death of the casual player would effectively lead to a stalling of BSG's cash flow, and when one considers how thankless and toxic the sweats can be, why would the dev team put in the commitment to make the game good, maintain servers, and interact with the community? They'll push to final version and within a few years servers will be brought down because they were too expensive or because the devs moved onto another project where they would be better appreciated. Or alternatively the devs would have to monetize the game more aggressively, which I doubt would fly well with the player base.

In my time playing Tarkov as a casual from 2021 to 2023 in the exact timeframe mentioned I only amassed seven PMC kills- six from this new wipe as I made it to the early wipe after it dropped a couple days later😊

I don't like playing solo anymore so I play on team finders and help casual people out when I can. Gotta raise some Timmies to kill some Chads

There is no real evolution for a casual, like me for instance, it takes an entire wipe cycle to MAYBE hit lvl 35 or so (that’s the highest I’ve ever gotten) and that’s generally with my sweat friends helping me when I’m actually able to hop on, not only do I have my job, I have 3 young kids my eldest 2 are 3 and change (twins….yay….) so as you can imagine I’m sure, I don’t exactly have free time to play tarkov on a whim, on my work days, shit I’m lucky if I can manage an hour and as I’m sure you’re well aware, that’s a single raid, with loadout building, load times, the raid itself and managing what was found IF I survive, on my days off I can maybe squeeze out 3 hours a day if I push my luck but I really mean it, my wife gets pretty annoyed because I then have to try to rush through chores before I go to bed myself and often times I make a mistake or miss something etc so it ends up being an issue later, but don’t forget what ole Nikita said himself iirc, this game isn’t meant for casual players, and if they don’t like it they can go play something else so that’s what I do nowadays I hop on when my friends are available (which is essentially never because of my schedule) but otherwise I’m sticking to other shit even if I don’t really enjoy it

Very cool, u can also make "Evolution of the Noob" would be intrseting.

this footage feels like home

Spot on explanation of the Casual Carl

As much as people hate this, what keeps the lights on are not the sweats its the casual base. The people who work 40-60 hour work week, juggle family and kids...and choose what to wind down with. There's a bunch of games that compete for their attention and as long as Tarkov focuses on the sweats who are early 20's players...the amount of players flowing in and out of the game will always be low. Eventually the BSG will move to either a Pay to Win model to keep the servers running and people will accept it after initial backlash or go a full subscription model. Either way....BSG better figure something out to foster a healthy casual ecosystem before the game is completely finished.

thank you for reminding me about the existence of Burnout Paradise, lol

As a causal I love this game but already quit this wipe as I have been undoubtedly been killed by multiple cheaters. And I have never moaned about cheaters in this game but it seems prevalent currently. Especially on Interchange

For music you use, i think some of the far cry 2 ost and ambience would fit really well My opinion^*

lol at 2:00 when it says “Strength lvl 15” i’ve never got that high strength in a wipe

we can only hope that when tarkov is gold, wipe stops being a thing so we can atlast finish main quest line

It's weird that casuals are the only ones who truly escape tarkov ain't it?

I was a casual, I quit Tarkov a few years ago... my reason was the game never left beta! I got tired of major changes every wipe and sometimes even mid-wipe. Just when I thought I figured out how to play the game, something massive would change and I had to relearn the game. I don't have time or energy to relearn a new game every couple of months.

I personally found a middle ground - while I somewhat stayed, I didn’t really sweat harder. The parts I enjoy about Tarkov are the guns, the voicelines and the plethora of items you get to toy with or just look at, not the PvP - therefore, SPT basically became my go-to - although it definitely doesn’t compare to actual Tarkov in terms of how it makes you wish you were sawing your balls off and making stew out of the remains. I did find myself drifting further by the day from the Tarkov experience towards playing Zero Sievert on Hardcore difficulty - the same old lose all your shit on death, even more annoying critters stroll the place, all packed into a nice 2d version of dopamine delivery.

My friend and I litterally just gave up this wipe, played the first and second as much as we could (2 hours a day and thats if we even played) but now I cant be bothered to do peacekeeper quests again

After a workday i could spend either a 30 minutes or 4 hours on EFT, depending on how much i'm getting spitroasted by fellow escapees Just one more level and i've unlocked Flea, it's been a good wipe, gents!

PvE made me go from Casual to actually enjoying the game.

My first wipe was a unique one, to dip my toes into the water, I played SPT (Yes I bought EFT earlier in a sale) and managed to get to LL3 on 2 traders casually. Then the wipe came at an unopportunate time for me, I was grinding in War Thunder. So I let that pass and just decided to play EFT later, when the gigasweats are on full power and when the casuals have the edge on me. It became an adrenaline and frustration fiesta but those small rushes of dopamine when extracting was worth my current 50+ hour effort. I just need a portable bunkhouse key for God's Sake!

I've played tarkov for 6 wipes, probably 1500+ hours and I still get bored after level 30-35 and see myself as more and more of a casual.

Overall 3345h in Tarkov... I'm still more between Rat and Casual... Can't morph into sweat... Dunno why... :D

"the casual audience is dying" tbh its no wonder why, nothing is there to really reward them especially when from the time they start to the end everything is stack against them every step of the way. as someone who plays casually because unlike most i have a job and like to shower i cant spend all day every day grinding out a game and make it my sole focus. theres other things to do and more fun games to be played then exclusively tarkov 24/7. even then i dont feel its the game its self that makes people quit or the lack of a fighting chance at the beginning but instead the community that makes this game their life and defend every facet of everything taking even minor criticism harshly about the game. i understand tarkov for many is a passion but belittling casual play and flaming for an already difficult experience for a player who cant or doesnt want to spend that amount of time on it only causes people to fully quit. those dormant accounts then either end up rotting or end up being hacked by cheaters for rwt mules or someone with malicious intent causing for many the game to become is inhospitable lets not forget the wipe where interchange was impossible to take 3 steps into for this very reason, with cheaters or the chads that only grind pvp and want more rubles. there was so much bloat for interchange you couldnt get tasks done. in short, the community and nature of tarkov creates a lot of stagnation for both no life and casuals alike most diversity is quickly dealt with and players leave potentially creating more cheaters

Just look at BF4 to see what happens when there are no casuals. Nothing but the best guns from the dirtiest angles with the rattiest mindset possible. And new players are in a "can't beat em join em" scenario.

it’s really the traders I think. I can never get level 3 or 4 traders in the game because of the time I have. And there’s just so much powerful gear for the people that sweat and grind the traders. Making the difference between us even more profound. Hell I have trouble getting level 15

Would be cool if there was below lvl 20 lobby’s with less loot or something

It’s crazy to have a game where it takes 3 hours a day just to be a casual player

To be honest, this video is pretty much about the exact type of person I am However, I think I won't even touch this wipe for one simple reason(other than not having too much time for it): optimization. My PC is decently allright (8 GBs of VRAM, I7 7700K, 16 GBs of RAM), and I'm using the same settings I used last wipe, that worked perfectly, but right now I can't get my game to run normally, I keep getting lag spikes and stutters that make the game genuinely unplayable. Currently, that's basically the only thing holding me back from at least casually playing Tarkov, which is really sad because I really do love this game....Well, for the meantime, back to Rising Storm 2, I guess :(

I escaped from Tarkov in a personal record of 8 levels. Between some of the worst audio I've ever experienced in a modern game, the grindy, sometimes buggy, boring quests, and the single time I was killed by a cheater, I realized pretty quickly how little fun I was having, particularly as a solo player. Always next wipe I guess.

With the new ammo and armor changes casuals will have way more fun now in mid-end wipe

I am one of these. It didn't take long before i couldn't take it anymore

fucken right ima morb into a rat when i find an item of interest

I would love to play tarkov, its my favorite game, but I don't have time. Because I don't have time I miss wipes, then start so far behind as a solo sometimes I don't bother. Sometimes I just boot up modded stalker because I can at least pause it

Due to this game being so popular, its hard to have fun when you encounter squads of 3 or 4 m4 maxxers later in the wipe. There should be seperate lobby for solo/duo goers, being casual is brutal for this kind of game where u dont have any sort of skill based matchmaking etc.

wait, you're meant to raid for 3 hours a day? I do about 6 hours a week if I'm lucky!

as a brand new player this wipe i didnt learn as much from this video as the sweat one so i guess i know where my destiny lies..

Love your videos, would you confiding making a video called the evolution of the troll.

Every wipe Nikita does his utmost to make the game impossible to play if you have a job

Three wipes is what I got out of Tarkov before the cheaters finally made me quit.