Battlestate Games has recently conducted an in-game survey to gather player feedback on the current state of the Flea Market. This initiative aimed to understand how players feel about its impact on gameplay, progression, and overall balance. While exact numbers won’t be disclosed, we’ll dive into the key findings and how they compare to discussions on social media.
The survey’s primary goal was to collect data that would play a crucial role in game balancing. This engagement underscores how direct player input shapes the evolving ecosystem of Escape from Tarkov. In their own words, this is what Battlestate Games shared:
We appreciate your time and effort in submitting your votes in the in-game survey system and are really thrilled to share some key insights from it with you.
Findings below will not include exact numbers, yet we will try to reflect the percentage distribution of the players who voted.
The primary purpose of the survey was to gather additional data that will play a huge role in the game balancing processes as well as help us get a better understanding of what players are truly looking for in Escape from Tarkov.
The feedback provided by the community showcases how engaging with players’ sentiments can strengthen the bonds within the Escape from Tarkov ecosystem.
Poll in Nikita’s Twitter vs. in-game survey results
Here is where we’ve seen first correlation between Twitter vs. active playerbase: while Twitter audience was more of negative towards lock of the Flea Market in-game results showed us that nearly 50% of respondents believe that lock of Flea Market benefits early game progress and makes looting aspects of the game more purposeful as well as engage players to stay in raids longer.
Main challenges
So far both Twitter replies and survey data had told us that lockdown of Flea Market not only slows down the progression of the players but also adds more challenges: one of the main concerns of players was lack of barters for keys to progress further down within traders’ tasks. Following with the second most popular response – Hideout FiR requirement. This created bigger challenges for the playerbase.
This also sums up another biggest point: inability to purchase gear needed for tasks (e.g. Setup) as well as armor, medicine and ammo.
While we do believe Escape from Tarkov is a hardcore and realistic shooter we also share an understanding that challenges should come naturally and not gatekeep players where it’s not necessary.
With the data gathered we will continue to explore different options to find the right balance on this matter.
Changes to Flea Market
Here we also saw an interesting outcome: nearly 30% of the total number of respondents shared that they are satisfied with the current way Flea Market operates and would not change anything in it.
While this has been the most voted answer it still shows that nearly 66.6% of respondents look for some type of changes to Flea. This gives us a ground field for some potential changes we can make to increase the number of players satisfied with the Flea Market to 50% and above.
Outcome
All in all, we’re constantly monitoring both our in-game data as well as your direct input via surveys, so that we can refine our understanding of how data correlates to in-game states of balance. We truly believe that with the help of the community we will get a better understanding on what aspects of the game seem off and how we can adjust them.
In the future, we also plan to share survey results in a similar format for some surveys.
