Have you been playing all along, Saark? What's your favorite class these days if so?
I basically stopped playing about a month after they had to swap to distributing the game through the torrent. I mained Wizard in our team, we typically played Ranger/Wizard/Thief because it was the most fun one to PvP with in HR and could still easily take down bosses. Plus, it handled the barb-meta of the early days pretty well. I've checked in again on this release, but quickly realized that not much had changed. Removing the circle is a very bad change, because the reason I/we played was mainly for the PvP.
We stopped playing back when we did because HR lobbies were filled with game-crashers, speedhackers and other kinds of cheaters that were infuriating to play against. Reporting does very little, and we noticed that even people we submitted reports about with video evidence, were still playing weeks later. Now, don't get me wrong, I understand why people get banned in batches, not individually, but this has been a problem in Tarkov before, and it remains a problem in Dark and Darker, as HR lobbies really are the only fun lobbies if you enjoy the PvP aspect the most, and even most HR lobbies were cakewalks when you had an organized group.
With RMT being a fairly common thing in games like these, cheating becomes a big problem because we would spend days farming multiple gearsets, then lose most of them in a single day to cheaters. With an economic gain behind cheating, not just one of "haha cheating is fun", this issue needed to be addressed in some way a long time ago, and nothing IM posted in the last year on the matter has convinced me that they are capable of doing that. In fact, it seems to be a very small blip on their radar.
The game is still very fun initially, but once you get better gear, meet well-geared groups, and end up watching them all die to the same hackers, or dying to them yourself, the fun stops and it sours the entire experience. While it doesn't happen as often with HR now being locked behind the 30$ purchase, it still does happen. The unfortunate reality for us was that LR lobbies are not as enjoyable, even if there are way less hackers there, because the players there are just not as good or experienced at the game, so any PvP situation ended with us not being challenged at all, and that's what we were playing the game for.
It's a shame, because the game and concept still has great potential. My hope is that a bigger studio picks up the genre and does it well.