Hunger Strikes in the Gulag Archipelago

[etra_kurdaj]

I'm currently 2/3 the way through - fascinating book about the political prisons that existed in the Soviet Union. There was a section on protests from the prisoners and it had some relevent points I wanted to bring up in relation to EFT.

A prisoner doesn't like their circumstances in prison, so they do a hunger strike. But this tactic only works if the prison cares about your welfare and has a responsibility to keep you alive. Prisoners quickly learned that no, their captors did not care about the prisoner's welfare and the government even passed a law in 1939(?) relieving the prison of any liability for deaths of prisoners. 

There was an extra wrinkle. At no point - for any person - ever in the history of the gulags - did any prisoner's health improve by virtue of the imprisonment. Barracks were bare, with no mattresses or sheets. Coats and boots were stolen by the guards for themselves; prisoners made do with usually the clothes they were wearing when they were arrested - for the duration of their sentence - between 5 and 30 years. Prisoners thrown into the penalty cells were stripped to their underwear. So with this information in mind - Russian winters being what they are - it becomes no surprise that labor battalions suffered up to 90% mortality rates during projects. 

So if you know you will only suffer a deterioration during your sentence, from

• the back-breaking 14 hour labor shifts
• the 7 oz of bread and 1 bowl of gruel of food per day
• the 30 degrees below 0 temperatures with no coat, boots, or warming fires
• the beatings from malevolent guards or hungrier prisoners

...why would you choose to further deteriorate yourself more than the circumstances are already inflicting on you? And yes, hopelessness and suicide were common.

 

WHY BRING THIS UP:

• Tarkov is supposed to be a city in ruins
• Businesses have fled - there are no supply chains or stores to keep vital goods in stock and available
• What supply chains that exist are those offered by thieves, black marketeers, or corrupt international aid. These shouldn't be reliable sources, but they are.
• Government services have evaporated
  • there is no reliable electricity
  • any water-pumping or purification services, if they existed at all - have broken down
  • sewage management / waste collection will have stopped, introducing tremendous contamination and risk to biological things
• The PMCs we roleplay as are NOT part of any formal organization that takes responsibility for their nutrition, health, or safety

 

So why are PMCs who've spent the most time in Tarkov able to sprint for longer, move faster, carry more weight with less issue, and generally be better at soldiering than someone who only recently left the benefits of civilization? Who's providing the PMCs their 4,000 calories a day? Who's providing the security to recuperate from injuries? Or just to rest? Between the bitcoin farm and gas cans from Jaeger, my PMC can live in his hideout indefinitely and build wealth endlessly. That doesn't sound like a city under siege or in ruin.

Wouldn't it make more sense for high level PMC's to be slower, less physically capable, than lower level PMCs? The benefit then to being a high level PMC is the upgraded hideout and the access to equipment from high-reputation with the traders. Yea the young PMC is a little faster, but he's also completely on his own in terms of resources.

Speaking on the traders, don't they really break the immersion by having almost every item and attachment available to the player - on demand? I'm asking seriously - what scarcity? From level 1 on, players with the Rubles can buy guns, ammo, food, water, and medicine, in as large a quantity as they can afford. Even if the trader runs out, they magically restock in 3 hours. 

Here is what I think would make the game feel more real and reduce the fakeness of traditional RP systems - because they are thematically incompatible with the bleak setting of Tarkov:

• the character faces an over-time disintegration of their physical prowess. No physical stat or attribute increases with gameplay or with experience, instead the PMC becomes more feeble, capping at a total 10% reduction in physical ability at level 70.
• the character does not automatically regenerate energy / hydration / health in the hideout. Instead, they continue to tick down. A player returning to the game after a few days should come back to a PMC at 1 energy / hydration / health and need to recuperate them prior to a raid. The hideout instead offers the tools to purify limited (very limited) amounts of water or to prepare freeze-dried packages of longterm foodstuffs, painstakingly carried out from raids and stored for these occasions.
• At no point should traders be offering frivolities like 4 colors of the same AR handguard. 
• Traders shouldn't be offering food, much less endless arsenals of AKs and bullets. 
  • Traders should be much more niched in their offerings
  • What they have to sell ought to be tremendously scaled back
  • What inventory they do have ought to refresh once a month, not every three hours. 
  • Finding ammo in raid - if it isn't the meta ammo - shouldn't be overlooked. Why doesn't the PMC need everything?
• Availability of traders should not be 24/7 on-demand. 
  • The game has a raid clock. Prapor / Therapist should only be available during day light and Fence / Skier only available during night. 
  • The flea market is a safe space that any marketplace would kill for - a completely secure, fair, and fast exchange available to all users on demand, without outages, theft, or corruption.
• The flea market shouldn't be removed - but it should be restricted. It needs to only be available for a few hours on any given day, and not available at all some days. 
  • Why is it safe - all the time - to trade with other starving scavengers like yourself? 
  • No one shoots up the flea market?
  • No one tries to "raid" it?
  • The "enforcers" of flea market security don't abuse their position and steal from greener PMCs?

 

BSG Crew are so fast on the draw to say "this is a specific type of game that may not be for you..." but they don't say what this game is, and how the gameplay or features achieves the goal. 

 

TL;DR bulletpoints

• What scarcity?
• What hardship?
• Tarkov is in ruin? Where? Name any commodity and my PMC can buy 10 of them at a moment's notice. 

[chrisragnar]

Because it's a game

[etra_kurdaj]

13 minutes ago, chrisragnar said:

Because it's a game

This line makes me want to vomit. 

If it's just a game, then give us kill cams and everything else other games have. 

[Havegunwillfail]

I also read the Gulag Archipelago and my thoughts were not dominated by how it applies to a video game to make it a misery simulator.

If you want to be miserable then all you have to realize is that what you talked about is coming to the West, already manifesting in many forms even. also on Youtube there is a documentary called 'Stalins Cannbal Island' which was also a Gulag camp in Siberia - I think - which was interesting to me. 

Cheer up will ya.

 

 

[Xeraphas]

On 9/29/2020 at 2:32 PM, etra_kurdaj said:

 

• the character faces an over-time disintegration of their physical prowess. No physical stat or attribute increases with gameplay or with experience, instead the PMC becomes more feeble, capping at a total 10% reduction in physical ability at level 70.
• the character does not automatically regenerate energy / hydration / health in the hideout. Instead, they continue to tick down. A player returning to the game after a few days should come back to a PMC at 1 energy / hydration / health and need to recuperate them prior to a raid.
• At no point should traders be offering frivolities like 4 colors of the same AR handguard. 
• Traders shouldn't be offering food, much less endless arsenals of AKs and bullets. 
  • Traders should be much more niched in their offerings
  • What they have to sell ought to be tremendously scaled back
  • What inventory they do have ought to refresh once a month, not every three hours. 
  • Finding ammo in raid - if it isn't the meta ammo - shouldn't be overlooked. Why doesn't the PMC need everything?
• Availability of traders should not be 24/7 on-demand. 
  • The game has a raid clock. Prapor / Therapist should only be available during day light and Fence / Skier only available during night. 
  • The flea market is a safe space that any marketplace would kill for - a completely secure, fair, and fast exchange available to all users on demand, without outages, theft, or corruption.
• The flea market shouldn't be removed - but it should be restricted. It needs to only be available for a few hours on any given day, and not available at all some days. 
  • Why is it safe - all the time - to trade with other starving scavengers like yourself? 
  • No one shoots up the flea market?
  • No one tries to "raid" it?
  • The "enforcers" of flea market security don't abuse their position and steal from greener PMCs?

Ok so what you're suggesting is all literally terrible.

Now it's better to be a new player and regularly reset your account so you are fresh. There is no gain from playing at all because you have base maxed stats.

You have 1 hydro/food/hp after not playing for a few days? Literally just reset your account because it is IMPOSSIBLE to play like this you will have less than 20 seconds in a raid to find BOTH food and water to not die from 1 tick of damage from hunger/dehydration. It's time to reset your account again.

Why can't I have different color handguards? Literally just remove non-stat affecting options that are nice for gun building.

Traders resetting once a month? Well I guess we will all just use RMT and hackers will be everywhere. Some items already sell out in under 30 mins how do you expect people to be able to play?

Oh the therapist will only be around in the day? Well I guess the devs wont be selling tarkov anymore since you can't buy meds if you have a job and need to work in the day hell all the meds will sell out before people even get home on the day of reset. 

Oh and you can use flea because you are busy working or doing something whenever it is open. 

Everyone lives in a bush and playerbase dies. 

No person wants your changes. You wouldn't even want to play if they made these changes. Go play dayz or something else.

[etra_kurdaj]

55 minutes ago, Xeraphas said:

I want the game hardcore, but not that hardcore.

 

I'm at maxed traders and the hideout is as far as I want to take it. I can run the best meta guns and kits every raid - not because of the flea market, but from the traders themselves. I don't need the flea market to build endless meta AK's shooting BP ammo. Hydration / energy is something player's fail on once, and then never again, because once it's on your radar it never becomes an issue again, because it's so easily managed.

This game, in its current state, is indistinguishable from any other FPS in a one-life mode. 

Whatever survival elements are in place are insufficient. 

[Xeraphas]

I never said anything about the flea market except your system is horrible and inclusive to only certain people. I don't use flea either but all of these changes are honestly bad except maybe making traders more niche in the items they carry. Even if you wanted to restrict traders or flea you should be restricting the number of trades per day so your system isn't bad an inclusive to only people around at the right time of day. Trade restrictions already do this though.