Escape from Tarkov Pre-Wipe Event 2020

Escape from Tarkov players have been preparing for the game’s 2020 wipe, and the pre-wipe event has finally arrived. The developers at Battlestate Games previously revealed that the 2020 wipe date would coincide with the game’s next major update. That update is 12.6, and it’s apparently right around the corner. Here’s what the Escape from Tarkov pre-wipe event 2020 means and when you can expect the full wipe to land.

Escape from Tarkov | Pre-Wipe Event 2020

The Escape from Tarkov pre-wipe event for 2020 once again sees the game flooded with damage-dealing Raiders. Fans may recall that such pre-wipe events tend to occur shortly before server wipes, at which point the game resets all progress and deletes all inventories.

The pre-wipe event for 2020 has just recently begun, meaning some players are being caught off-guard by high-level resistance. Many or even most of the Scavs have been replaced by Raiders, the likes of which can and will kill at any given opportunity.

Going by past events, it’s likely that the influx of Raiders will only last a matter of days. Typically, pre-wipe events begin no more than a week before the update is released and the wipe is executed. By all estimations, the 2020 wipe is imminent: Escape from Tarkov may be wiped this weekend, or right around June 1, 2020.

Whenever the specific date may be, now is the time to finish up with any pressing matters. The wipe will reset all of your mission progress and delete all of your inventory items. The only thing you’ll be able to keep are your weapon presets and your list of inspected items.

As such, now is the best time to try new strategies, sell off your items, or just get to know the maps better. After the wipe is complete, you’ll find yourself as a low-level character without any gear. Most maps turn chaotic at this point as everyone struggles to find new weapons. The more awareness you can practice, the better your chances of survival will be.

The Escape from Tarkov pre-wipe event means that the 2020 wipe date is right around the corner. Now is the time to tie up any loose ends before global progress is reset.

Escape from Tarkov Error 260 | Servers Temporarily Unavailable

It’s not always easy being an Escape from Tarkov fan. Sometimes the game glitches or crashes; other times it won’t load, or simply refuses to connect. In the case of error 260, it seems as if the game can’t even contact the servers. What does Escape from Tarkov error 260 mean, and what should you do when you find the servers temporarily unavailable? Read on to find out.

Escape from Tarkov | Error 260 Servers Temporarily Unavailable

Escape from Tarkov error 260 appears when the game client cannot reach the game’s servers. That’s why the message says “servers temporarily unavailable.” Most of the time, error 260 appears during unplanned server outages.

Error 260 is very closely tied with error 213. In fact, both errors tend to appear around the same time and under the same circumstances. As you may expect, both of these errors show up when servers go down.

Fortunately, neither error 260 nor error 213 correspond to any problem with the game client itself. Breathe easy: There’s probably nothing wrong with your PC. These errors both correspond to server-side network issues, and they tend to appear when an update to Escape from Tarkov is being deployed.

As such, there’s nothing you need to do to fix error 260. You’ll be able to reconnect to the game once the game’s servers have stabilized. However, if you suspect that your game software or home network is causing the issue, it’s worth checking on the current server status. Websites like DownDetector can help you rule out any local issues, and the Battlestate Games Twitter account will keep you up-to-date on any planned server maintenance.

If you run into Escape from Tarkov error 260, don’t fret. The servers are temporarily unavailable, either for maintenance or due to an unplanned outage. You should be able to reconnect to the game as soon as the servers come back online.

Escape from Tarkov devs reveal new map & changes for patch 12.7

The new Escape from Tarkov map has been revealed, and lead developer at Battlestate Games, Nikita Buyanov, has also revealed what they have planned for the next update, patch 12.7.

Battlestate has been on a roll in 2020 with frequent updates addressing players' complaints, adding new features and improving stability and performance in Tarkov.

They are continuing to ramp things up, unveiling their biggest map yet during the PC Gaming show, which will take the fight for survival to a more urban environment.

"It will be the biggest and most detailed location ever," Nikita explained, "there will be a lot of explorable buildings and underground [areas]. It's an attempt to recreate the realistic modern city."

• Read More: How to get Escape from Tarkov Twitch Drops

A short preview of the map, showing a player entering an exquisitely detailed building and then checking out the view of the skyline, gives us a glimpse at what exactly Nikita is talking about.

What's coming in Patch 12.7?

In addition to discussing the new map, Nikita also dived into some explanation of what players can expect from the 12.7 update.

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"12.7 is more like a technical patch. It will include the big addition called the expansion of Customs location. It will enlarge the overall area by 30, or ever 40%."

• Read More: Escape from Tarkov dev confirms looting changes after 12.6 patch

Then, in the next update (presumably 12.8), Battlestate will "totally overhaul the skill system," and introduce a new boss, Senator, who will be able to heal his partners and search for stashes.

"A really big amount of cool features are to come this year, we'll try to bring some new experiences for you," he concluded.

Unfortunately, no dates were given, but it could still be a few months away or more. After all, the most recent wipe in Tarkov was only a matter of weeks ago.

Escape From Tarkov is brutal, stressful and exhausting

*Click*, went my gun. Not the good, Richard Beymer kind of click. The “you’re out of ammo and definitely dead” kind of click. The survivor in my sights had shrugged off my first few shotgun blasts, leaving me at the mercy of his assault rifle. He turned, shouted, and aimed. Then his gun clicked too, and I charged him with my tomahawk.

It was a glorious moment, but nothing else in Escape From Tarkov has lived up to it.

Escape From Tarkov is the name, escaping from Tarkov is the game. You spawn in on one of six current maps, have a rummage, then get out of dodge with as much as you can carry. In your way are a mixture of NPCs and players, the latter of which will almost certainly have better gear than you. That’s fine, because they’ll almost certainly shoot you before you have a chance to spot them. Especially if you’re playing when it’s really, really dark.

I don’t like it.

It’s in beta, so I best chuck in some caveats. The bugs and occasionally laggy servers are offences that can be waved away as early access indulgences, and I can only hope that the worst of the other guff (more complaints incoming) will get cleared up. At the end of the day, though, it hardly matters. I’ll always find Tarkov conceptually off-putting.

My overarching goal can’t be the acquisition of better loot. Not when that goal is stated so nakedly, and not when pursuing it feels like so much work. As a means to an end, sure! My patience for trawling through buildings in Plunkbat is bountiful, and I’ve whiled away many a happy hour on Destiny’s treadmill. In both of those games, though, I’m playing with a broader purpose: there are objectives on the horizon, and I want to be best equipped to shoot them. Tarkov wants me to loot first and ask questions later, but I can’t stop asking “Why?”.

Why do I want to spawn in with a good gun when I’m bound to lose it? Why do I want to spawn in with a poor gun when I’m bound to lose it? Why do I want… any of this? There are answers, and some of those answers lie in insurance. Every item you spawn in with can be insured, which gives you a chance of getting it back so long as nobody else pinches it. Which they will, of course, if you bring in something that’s good enough to be worth bringing in. The problem compounds, not dissolves. I wind up losing money before I’ve done anything.

Making insurance decisions is work, but the toil doesn’t stop there. In fairness, part of that toil is embedded in military simness which others will find endearing. The in-game ammo checking. Weapons with more than a dozen attachments, and buttons that let you flop your character into almost as many positions. It’s all very involved.

Great, you might say. “I like my shooters fiddly.” “Granularity is good.” What is unequivocally not good, though, is having to wait for a search timer to finish on every box and bag you’re unfortunate enough to dip your fingers in. Then for another timer to transform whatever you’ve found from a silhouette and into something you can actually equip. Bizarrely, that black box problem extends to the out-of-round shops, which already involve more faff than an airport. Just look at them.

Argh.

ARRGH.

The first of those screenshots shows one of the seven traders, who have cool names like “Ragman” or “Skier” but lame currency restrictions like bitcoins or horse figurines. I eventually found out, through googling, that those bitcoins are rewards for completing quests – finding stuff or killing stuff. This ensures that only the most experienced players get access to the deadliest weapons. Hurray.* (I still don’t know what’s up with the horse figurines.)

Money can also be spent on the player-run Flea Market, where you can fleece your own gear. I tried to sell some cigarettes, but wasn’t a high enough level.

I did have one break from the deluge of faff. It was an actual deluge: a storm with proper thunder that lagged behind lightning like it’s supposed to. I was escaping from the Darkov, inching my way through woodland drenched in blackness, rain and atmosphere. For that brief life, I stopped worrying about loot and just lost myself in wander. Then I got shot from behind.

Nearly all my Tarkov anecdotes end that way. That melee from earlier? I won the stab-off. Then, while I was searching the dude’s corpse for something to stop myself bleeding, someone snuck up and shot me. I’ve only managed to escape from Tarkov once under my own steam, and that was just with a measly shotgun. (You can spawn in with so-so gear as one of what are normally NPCs, you see, then keep whatever you scarper with.)

My other successful escape was with friends, when I basically just followed their bums to victory. That’s another off-putting oddity: you can play in up to groups of five, pitting loners against impossible odds. It was nice being the bullies, but I feel for the bullied. Even though two people did manage to ambush us, and I’m pretty sure I accidentally killed my pal Greg.

Here comes the rub. I checked into Tarkov because I saw all my friends having a great time there – and they still are. They’re going to read this and tut at me. But I am not like them. Dan best sums up our differences: “it’s the game for people who find screens like this appealing”.

That makes me want to run away screaming. For me, Escaping From Tarkov is a hollow endeavour. Empty in purpose, brimming with faff.

*I’ve since been told the weapons in the shop are pre-made configurations, and there’s nothing to stop you buying all the individual parts. Apart from having enough money to do that, which you’ll only have if you’re experienced – or if you bought one of the more expensive versions of the game.

Escape From Tarkov has sent me on a long quest for some toilet roll

Deep in a rusting warehouse, in a broken Russian state, I scope around a corner and stumble across the site of a massacre. Four, no, five bodies stretch the length of the hall, slumped and discarded. After reeling from the dead I click into Tarkov mode… Someone in that pile might have a roll of toilet paper!


Though there is no military value in bog roll, Escape From Tarkov thrives on loot. All the gruff men scouring the levels, with their carefully arranged layers from a tactical Urban Outfitters, are basically popping out for something from the shops/corpses. It might play a bit like a survival shooter, and it might also feel like a battle royale game, but “winning” is simply a case of getting out of the vast levels with more stuff than you entered with. You don’t need to be the last man standing, but you do need to have netted something for your time.

In my opening days as a scavenger, a roll of two-ply with a puppy on the wrapper was about all I could focus on. It was an easily understandable requirement in an otherwise baffling game. Vendors in Tarkov will often require additional items to trade alongside rubles. I wanted an armoured vest, and the vendor needed some loo roll and soap alongside payment. Hygiene is important, especially during an apocalypse, and somehow, somewhere I’d already found some soap.



So I had a purpose, which was good because it was a rare moment of clarity in a game that thrives on obfuscation. When you’re asked to Escape–as the title behooves you to do–you need to work out where the unflagged escape routes are (there are in-game maps, but every single person in the community will tell you to use the game’s wiki). Looting requires you to take the time to uncover what you’re looking at, leaving you in prime position to be turned into a corpsey lootbox for someone else to rifle through. It’s chaos! I chose to focus on that single item, hoping I’d learn the rest of the game by Andrex osmosis.

Each round has a time-limit hanging over you like someone banging on a toilet stall demanding you hurry up, but it’s not a swift game. It’s built for stealth, with a control scheme that plays like an accessible Arma. Stances and speed are adjusted in small degrees. As I traipsed across the warehouse strewn Customs map, I learned that running full pelt around the map was a sure way to get dead. Then I learned that doing the same, but crouching, just made you dead in a more compact position. It was starting to feel like the only way I would escape would be to load into the level and run straight for an exit. I tried that. I did not make it. Death was around every corner, hidden in every shadow, squatting in every bush. You don’t learn by doing; you learn by dying.



And using the internet. Google told me the dorms in the Customs map was a known loot haven. There’s no guarantee with RNG, but I figured that there was a good chance that I’d uncover my totemic toilet roll in that squat little collection of buildings. I somehow made it there alive, and snuck in. Like dorms everywhere, they’re incredibly unwelcoming. Dark, claustrophobic, and a place where high-level NPCs spawn. I stalked the corridors, cracking doors and checking rooms, closing them as I went, because I was taught to be respectful even during an apocalypse. I found piles of crap and burnt-out detritus, but no loo roll. When I discovered a body pile on the roof it was full of worthless military doodads. This is a world with more shotguns than sponge soft shitter sheets.

So I backtracked downstairs and froze: half the doors were now open. I wasn’t alone. I crouched and backed up the corridor as another player emerged. He was zig-zagging, checking every room. I settled into a prone position and watched, fascinated. He never once looked at me. He wasn’t aware he was being watched. It was like looking at myself many deaths ago. This is how I learned that you really, really need to take your time and plan every step as you hunt for loot. What a clumsy idiot I must have been! A walking target, crazily mumbling about commodes. I can feel all those crosshairs converging on me as I type this…



Then the door into the building opened and another played entered. I shot at him and missed, the guy I had been tracking dropped back into a room, and the new player shot me in the face. I’m not sure there’s even a lesson in that. It just happened. Maybe if I’d had the toilet paper I’d have been more cautious and let them fight each other while I tried to make myself smaller and less shootable? I’ve since stalked around Tarkov as stealthily as the controls will allow. I still died in a garage with a hand full of rubles and no poop paper, but at least this time I saw my murderer for more than a second. We even engaged in a what could charitably be called a face-off.

In a way, Tarkov reminds me of One Red Paperclip, a website where a guy started out with a paperclip and traded his way up from it until he owned a house. Risking life and limb for a roll of toilet paper is just the start. With the TP, I can trade onwards and upwards, to the point where I’ll be able to fit out my hideout with a room that generates toilet paper. That’s the dream. The hideout also has the capability to store a BitCoin mine, but right now that’s so far off that it might as well be a time machine. Or a bidet.

For now, I’ll keep playing. There’s someone out there in the same position I’ve been in. Zigging when they should be crouching, zagging when they should be trying to work out what grip fits perfectly on an HK 416A5 5.56×45 assault rifle by searching the wiki on their second monitor. I hope I find them, if only to see if they have a roll of two-ply on them. I still really, really need it.

Escape from Tarkov creator gives terrible excuse for not including playable female characters

We’re in a brand-new decade, but that hasn’t stopped some video game developers from falling back on inexcusable explanations for why you can’t play as female characters in certain games. This time, it’s courtesy of Escape from Tarkov creator Battlestate Games, which offered two convenient excuses for why — despite the requests of many players — it will not let you play as a female character in its ultra-realistic military survival sim.

Excuse number one is that, as the Russian-based developer explained on Twitter, playable female characters can’t be included “because of game lore.” It’s not exactly clear what that means, but Battlestate seems to be suggesting that its game, which is set in a fictional region of Russia and features an armed conflict between fictional private military companies, doesn’t have a narrative that supports female combatants.

That’s despite the insurmountable narrative evidence of female characters who are present in pretty much every piece of post-apocalyptic fiction ever made — because, you know, women exist — and in basically every other military survival sim and battle royale shooter on the market.

Excuse number two is a bit more forthright: “there will be no playable female characters because of... the huge amount of work needed with animations, gear fitting etc.”

The developer is getting predictably eviscerated on social media, especially considering its previous tweet seemed to suggest it had no problem animating in non-playable female characters for storyline quests, thus undermining its “lore” excuse.

It’s also curious that Battlestate is only responding to the idea now because a three-year-old interview with an employee of the development team had been recirculating online in which the employee insisted women couldn’t cut it in the high-tension environment of Tarkov. “We came to the conclusion that women can’t handle that amount of stress,” Battlestate dev Pavel Dyatlov said at the time. “There’s only place for hardened men in this place.” Battlestate has since said the employee was “reprimanded and properly instructed,” presumably only in how to talk to the press.

Battlestate’s response here is not a new one. Nearly a decade ago, developers were making the same exact excuses, most notably back in 2014 when Ubisoft creative director Alex Amancio said Assassin’s Creed Unity wouldn’t feature female playable characters in its four-player co-op mode because it would add “a lot of extra production work.” Of course, future Assassin’s Creed games — including Syndicate, which was released a year later — featured female protagonists. This was conveniently after former Ubisoft animator Jonathan Cooper chimed in amid the controversy in June 2014 to say it would take “a day or two’s work” to add playable female models.

Series like Gears of War, once a testosterone-fueled military series, just released its fifth installment with a playable female main character. Even games like Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, a game that, like Escape from Tarkov, launched in early access and also remained plagued by bugs and technical issues for months on end, had the resources and insight to include playable female characters from the beginning. It’s also worth noting that Battlefield developer EA DICE had to vigorously fight its own fan base to include playable female soldiers in 2018’s Battlefield V, despite the historical evidence supporting it.

Although it shouldn’t need to be said, women have been able to participate in active military service — yes, even in Russia — for decades now. Perhaps Battlestate should take a few immersion cues from the real-world history of planet Earth; here’s a Wikipedia page to start.

3 beginner tips to help you start off in Escape from Tarkov

So far, Escape from Tarkov (EFT) is the biggest game of the new year. Bringing in over 200,000 viewers on Twitch at all hours of the day, EFT has taken the gaming world by storm. While a lot of it has to do with the holiday drop system on Twitch, people are still playing the game even though the event has concluded. It’s taken a couple of years, but the community is starting to realize how enjoyable, yet painstakingly difficult, EFT can be. As such, there are thousands of first-time players hopping on EFT and simply don’t know what to do. If you fall into this category, we’ve got some beginner tips to help get you started.

1. Start playing in Offline Mode.

Escape from Tarkov offers little to no tutorial for most of its features. From the Trading system to your Hideout, you’re currently left to figure out most aspects for yourself.

Though it can be daunting at first, EFT really boils down to a few simple concepts. The best way to learn those concepts is to spend time navigating the menu and playing in Offline Mode. Many players don’t even know Offline Mode exists since the game doesn’t tell you about it.

It essentially is a world filled with only NPCs or “Scavs,” as they’re called. If you die to one of the Scavs, you don’t lose any loot, so it doesn’t matter. Offline Mode allows you to explore each map, learn the Extraction Points, and figure out where some of the best loot is.

You can access Offline Mode by clicking on your desired map, clicking next twice, then choosing the option to play Offline. You can also set how many Scavs are on the map and their difficulty level.

2. Examine everything available to you.

From the Escape from Tarkov start menu, you’ll see the Trading option, which you want to click on. Within the Trading menu are eight different kinds of dealers, the Flea Market, and the Auction. Although, we’re more concerned with the dealers.

Each dealer sells and buys different kinds of loot. For example, Therapist sells medicine, maps, and other items that may be useful to you. Though, upon first looking at Therapist’s offerings, you’ll see that most of her contents are blacked out. This is because you haven’t examined those items yet.

To examine an item, click the middle-mouse button or right-click and press Examine. This will allow you to see that particular item in both the menu and in-game. Spend some time examining everything each dealer has to offer. Doing this makes it so you don’t have to examine a certain item in the middle of a match.

3. Learn the Customs map first.

While you’re open to explore a few different maps, learning Customs will give you a bigger advantage. Customs is one of the middle-tier maps in terms of difficulty, but many of your early quests will involve going to Customs. Quests are tasks in Escape from Tarkov given out by dealers that give you XP and increase your reputation with that dealer.

The faster you’re able to learn Customs, the easier each quest will be. To give yourself a little boost, head into Offline Mode like mentioned above and explore each nook and cranny.

Those are our beginner tips for Escape from Tarkov! Keep up with Daily Esports for all EFT coverage.