I finished the three days for my first week, went on a short trip (there are fewer and fewer Spring Break trips with my kids these days, so I will take what I can get), and then started up week two of training. Without any confidence, I decided instead of moving to Medium AI, to spend another day on Easy. The only thing I got from that was confidence that everything I had learned was sticking, because I racked up the nearly the same number of headshots and kills in two raids on that fourth night as I had in all the previous matches.
But Medium…that was the real revelation. The first match wasn’t bad. Riding high on confidence, I motored around the map doing fairly well for myself. And then the confidence got a little too high. In the next three matches I 1) died to the first person I saw, 2) got blasted right off the bat, swarmed, and killed, and finally I 3) grenaded myself missing a doorway bounce.
Thoroughly disgusted, I took a break and gathered my composure for one last attempt. I did better, though I extract earlier than I should have and lazily body sprayed more than a few baddies with multi-clicking.
I decided to change things up by doing an Offline Customs raid, which I had been doing as training previously, to see if my success in the Factory arena was paying any dividends in the larger game. The answer was – not really. I still had a bit of time left so I did a Scav run and got pretty much nothing for my troubles.
Last night, I decided to make one change. While Factory is mostly small and tight, the two big rooms is where I’ve been trying to fight, so I can learn movement and medium ranges. And the truth is, at that range, in the murky low light arena Factory is I died to someone I couldn’t even see to shoot back at, and my attempt at moving and hiding failed because, again, I couldn’t see them. So I made the decision that going forward, I would use a sight of some sort on my weapon. I tried my Spector variable but it was too scoped. So I’m sticking with Holosights from now on. That and my previous night’s learning, brought me some peace of mind, and a much better tally:
I ended the night with a Scav run where I had some fun VOIP interaction with another player doing his Scav run as well. I will say for as brutal and cut-throat as the game is, the player base has far fewer jerks than I’m used to from other PvP experiences. Ultimately, Tarkov can quickly humble even the best player.
So that’s technically it for Week 2, since I only committed to three nights a week. But I technically still have two nights left in week two, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I squeezed in more action before the real challenge hits next week – tackling Hard AI!
Harbinger Zero 