Friendly competition with and against thousands of other people is like a higher purpose, but it's more pragmatic, easier to find, and probably more fulfilling than a game with a higher purpose but no community.
Friendly competition with and against thousands of other people is like a higher purpose, but it's more pragmatic, easier to find, and probably more fulfilling than a game with a higher purpose but no community.
The massive battles are pretty much unlike anything else I've experienced in online games. The scale makes it different.
It's quite something to be a part of a 40-man platoon doing a Max-crash on a base to retake the points with just a few seconds to spare. Even better when this gives your team the overall victory on the continent.
My impression of Rust and Tarkov is that they manufacture meaningful competition well, but they don't create friendships as quickly, and they especially don't create friendly rivalries and working relationships between people on the same team.
From my experience it’s got a great community, thousands of players working toward the same goal, participating in little excursions, fighting the front lines, supporting the bases ect.
That's the player side. The other faith you'll lose is in the developers to fix your pet peeve bug, because while they make large gains and fix many things, other small things tend to be left for a long time that drive people crazy.
I've not played Rust, but from what I've seen of it and what people have commented, Tarkov is like Rust but more extreme and more realistic. Depending on why you liked Rust, you might downright love Tarkov, and it's already highly addictive, so maybe don't install it? It often feels like Dark Souls the looter FPS edition, because it's so, so rough sometimes.
My killer game idea right now is EFT built by a competent developer with more interesting quests than "kill N bad guys" and "collect N items".
Sometimes that results in the players wondering "what could possibly thought this was okay to submit? Did they even check it at all?" just like every QA department since the beginning probably has occasionally.
The real question will be whether they actually change that when they release 1.0, which is supposedly in a year or so.