Yesterday, a small Escape From Tarkov patch launched, which mostly featured fixes for a few issues that had appeared in recent weeks. However, there seems to have been one undocumented change that has disappointed a lot of players.
Shortly after the most recent patch launched, players of the controversial PvE mode, which still has a number of issues despite the patch, noticed that loot levels in high value areas were significantly lower.
On social media and community hubs such as Reddit, players were reporting that high value areas such as rooms in Labs locked behind key cards or marked rooms were giving significantly worse loot levels. The KIBA Arms Store on Interchange also went from having a wall full of weapons to take to just one or two being available for players to loot.
While there was no change mentioned in the patch notes, it seems that the loot levels in the Tarkov PvE mode have been toned down, with some claiming they are now similar to what is found in the PvP mode.
There is some speculation that the change allowing AI PMCs to collect loot as they move through the map could be a factor in the lower loot, but this wouldn’t explain why locked rooms have lower loot levels unless the AI has the ability to pass through locked doors.
Overall, this seems to be an undocumented change to Tarkov that lowers the loot levels, which could be a response to the bug where PvE players could enter empty raids and loot freely. This somewhat messed up the economy, as players could keep running raids with little risk of death and get high value loot.
It seems unlikely that the loot levels will return to what they were in the PvE mode, as there was a lot of high tier loot available on almost all maps, which was somewhat messing with the quest and hideout progression in the mode. Keeping it in line with PvP seems like a solid choice, but given the feedback from PvE fans in the last 24 hours, it looks like a lot of players are wanting to see a return to higher loot levels.
With some issues still outstanding in the PvE mode, it wouldn’t be surprising to see another patch in the coming days, which might make further tweaks to the PvE loot levels and hopefully improve the performance and fix other issues. Until this happens, it seems unlikely that the ability to purchase the mode will be added, which a lot of fans who are on the standard edition of Tarkov are still waiting for.
