Playing Escape from Tarkov Months After a Wipe Drastically Changes the Experience, and Here's Why You Should Try It If You Haven't Already

Playing Escape from Tarkov from a fresh wipe always feels chaotic, but at the same time, it brings out the most competitive version of players. Everyone is trying to get ahead to finish certain quests and farm certain items to capitalize on the market and progress faster.

Games run through specific quest areas on each map, and there are fights everywhere with some of the weakest loadouts. The scene quickly changes after a week, as some of the players who progressed extremely fast keep playing and “bully” those who get left behind. As the fresh wipe enters its “mid-wipe” phase after just a few weeks, and the gap among players widens exponentially.

This gap keeps on going until the player base slowly declines, like any other multiplayer game with a massive update. However, after playing a few games several months after a fresh wipe, the experience oddly changes.

Every Raid Becomes a Mystery, Some You Won’t Even Experience Playing in the Early Wipe

Starting from scratch is basically always the same – go through the early Customs, Factory, and Woods quests and then head into other maps. In this case, most advanced players rarely run these maps unless they feel like hunting down bosses. That’s what you would expect in most raids. You’ll see very geared players run through the boss spawns and exit fast if they aren’t there.

So on these maps, you rarely encounter geared players unless you go for the bosses yourself, which you shouldn’t do if you are still trying to progress early. Raids become peaceful, and some players you encounter are more likely to be new to the game and trying to learn.

The game becomes easy, but there are also some anomalies, both good and bad. I’ve seen players run the weirdest loadouts imaginable, which you would rarely see in an early wipe. Things like having class 6 plates while running a Blicky (toy gun) with some matching streamer items, naked GL40 loadouts, and even players cosplaying as some of the bosses (wearing their full loadout) but swapping the weapon for just a Taiga.

Raids become wacky, chaotic, and surprisingly easier as well. There are way fewer exfil campers, fewer mechanically gifted FPS players, and some actually become more friendly.

If you want to progress through your quests, you’ll definitely breeze through them. However, it is a different story if your quest requires fighting PMCs, which would make it way harder just because there are fewer players.

During a fresh wipe, every raid is almost capped out, bringing the maximum number of players available on a map every single time. So, if you want to get elimination quests, especially on specific locations, it’ll be extremely hard to finish, which is a big downside to the experience.

However, the late wipe (or should I say end wipe) experience is mainly seeing other players have fun, bringing the craziest loadouts, going to more uncommon spots where you rarely encounter players, roleplayers, and a bunch more. Every raid just becomes a massive question mark, and it is definitely worth trying out. Maybe just don’t try to run the Labs. That’s still mostly a competitive PvP zone.