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Searching my username alongside "Tarkov" will turn up a fairly unflattering paper trail re: my relationship with the genre. Reading it in chronological order resembles the journal of somebody trying to quit caffeine while living above a coffee shop. I'm not quite sure how I managed it, in the end.
This gets at something hard to convey to people who haven't logged the hours. Hardcore extraction shooters share a structural feature with actual combat, or at least with everything I've read about actual combat: long flat plateaus of tedium, occasionally interrupted by short bursts of unfiltered terror. Your life isn't, strictly speaking, at risk, although I suspect if somebody pulled the actuarial tables on long-term Tarkov players we'd find some interesting blood pressure data. But the stakes are higher than in any comparable genre. A single death can wipe out days of progress. Every kill you score has cost somebody, somewhere, an evening they aren't getting back.
The thing that makes this fun (where "fun" is being used in roughly the same sense that ultramarathons are fun, or possibly in the sense that some hobbies are genuinely satisfying to participants and indistinguishable from torture to onlookers, Type 3 fun to be specific) is that death turns out to be effective pedagogy. And not only for the people writing the obituary. You absorb caution and prudence almost involuntarily, and your gut, given enough thousands of hours, becomes something pretty close to a calibrated instrument. You look at a dozen doors, a hundred bushes, and a few broken windows, and you just know that something ain't quite right.
There's also a gameplay premium on what military types call violence-of-action. Once the rounds are close enough to part your hair, you discover that holding still is functionally identical to dying. The best fights play out like choreography: two people of roughly comparable skill trying to outshoot and outguess each other in the span of about eight seconds.
And the decision tree branches forever. Is your magazine still good for another burst, or did you spend most of it on the last guy? Do you loot the body now, or wait in case his teammates are about to round the corner? Do you chuck a grenade into the room where you're pretty sure somebody is camping? Do you, in the immortal words, feel lucky, punk?
Then there's the social layer, and like most things, the game is better with friends, or with acquaintances who rapidly end up becoming your friend. Do you trust the new player you've been mentoring to actually watch your six? Do you accept, in advance, that he probably won't, and forgive him in advance because you remember being him? Do you risk your own kit recovering your dead teammate's gear so the insurance payout works out in his favor? There is no single right answer to any of these. The game just keeps teaching you that some answers are better than others, and you'd better figure out which is which, fast.
And then sometimes you do everything correctly and you still get domed by some guy in a bush three hundred meters away. War is, as the saying goes, heck. I don't play Tarkov anymore, although the reason has more to do with BSG's ongoing mismanagement of the property than with the underlying design, which is still genuinely unlike anything else on the market (except maybe Gray Zone Warfare, which I'm trying to get into). Whatever else you can say about it, nobody else is making this game. It's a shame BSG is unmaking their game. One step forward, two steps back, toes inside their own ass. I'm too old to deal with that nonsense.
Well, not fast. The game is way too slow for any such learning to reasonably occur; it's not going to be immediately obvious if you lost on turn 1, and if I have to wait for several hours to get back to turn 1, then I'm going to shut the game off and return to browsing YouTube (which, ironically, is full of just the high points of many, many games).
Apex Legends, for a while, had a "problem" with a certain type of player whose strategy would be- and quite reasonably, I might add- "drop, play, die, instantly disconnect". There's zero chance you'll discover any of the winning strategies organically, especially because menuing (which you have to do in fights to win them) is so inherently clunky that doing it quickly is itself its own skill.
They never fixed that, of course, because having a bunch of people who do this is actually good for the game simply because it ensures action happens early.
The games I have the most life time spent in are Call of Duty 4 (with 32 or 64 player servers)/Titanfall and Payday 2 for this reason; there's so much of this, or the potential for so much of this, that you actually can reasonably learn by dying a bunch of times to figure out what works and what doesn't, or actually have fun by using meme strategies.
Playing Tarkov for the first time without watching half a dozen new player guides and keeping a map open on your phone is masochism. The game is ridiculously obtuse about its mechanics. That's not a good thing, but once upon a time, the payoff to all that hard work felt very good. I went from a survival rate of 30% to 60% over 5 wipes, and a KD of 2 to 7, I think. Albeit that includes PVE kills too. I was only above average as a PVP player, perhaps just average when adjusting for playtime.
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