TaterSalad Escape from Tarkov Review

Pros: When everything works, the gameplay is freaking awesome. Cons: Buggy to the extent of losing hard earned loot/quest progress. Slow server-side processing times. No refund policy, even when errors are obviously prevalent on their end. (I'm against someone playing and attempting refund because they don't like a game, but server instability is a different animal.) Biggest bug to date is if there is an error immediately following extraction, you will most likely lose all loot and quest progress from that raid. As a programmer, this is 100% avoidable, yet it happens with their current code. Users are in the Tarkov discord reporting it to be widespread at this very moment, all losing their loot and progress at end run. Crickets from BSG, not even a warning on their launcher that they are experience issue, throw the players to the wolves. Performance wise, let me say in advance I'm a retired MCSE and CNA. The issues are not pc specific, nor local ISP specific. The loading screens drop sub 10fps on occasion, with a gtx 4080 super only running at 20% util, i5 12th gen running at 30%, memory between 16-29 of 32gig.Tarkov has known memory leaks, to the point the game options screen has a check box to turn on a memory cleaner. GPU benchmarks in the upper 80 percentile of the same version on userbenchmark, proc in the upper 90%, memory in the upper 95%. 990 pro nvme averaging about 7.1g/sec read speed and about 6.8 write, benchmarking in the upper 80%, All temps vis HWmonitor are well below accepted limits, the highest being the proc that, at max load/benchmark, can go up to 62c, bios update, set to default, minus xmp to get advertised mem speed for that ram (5600 ddr5) Idk what they are doing in their code, but the progress indicator at times just churns and even stops for periods of time, perhaps waiting on backend server data, again, idk. The Tarkov discord community comments go something like this: 1. Lost all your stuff? Welcome to Tarkov. 2. Fix the problem, that would require concern and effort from BSG (parent company) ... 2 stats they never leveled up, and so on. I REALLY like this game when all goes well. but I cannot recommend purchasing it at present.