u/SilentPrecognition

Bought into Tarkov a couple weeks back knowing full well it would kick my teeth in, and it has, thoroughly. Nobody quite prepares you for how brutal it is completely solo as a fresh player. I'm not even talking about the fights yet, I'm talking about basic survival. Half my deaths are just me squinting at a map trying to work out where an extract even is, I keep getting shot while I’m fiddling with the map or my inventory. And the weird part is that I’m actually enjoying it, the ruthlessness of the game just makes it really exciting, no matter if I’m just dying most of the time.

Really I just want a consistent duo partner to learn the ropes with, someone to figure out routes and callouts alongside, I’m not looking to get carried. The trouble is the obvious solution feels closed off to me. 

Whenever I look at the big LFG Discords they're intimidating and I feel out of my depth (most people are really experienced). They're filled with people who clearly expect you to already be a chad who knows every callout and the meta loot route on every map. That definitely doesn’t describe me. I also added Tarkov to my Gameram profile, maybe someone matches on there. It’s where I met my Dota 2 teammates so I know it can be really useful, but not sure if EFT is big on there, so far I had a few matches so far but they were all really experienced players.

Hence me asking here, where does a new player actually go to find their people. I've seen the official Sherpa program floated, and I'm eyeing smaller streamer Discords or somewhere like r/EFT_LFG as maybe friendlier places to look. Maybe there's a place where newer players hang out that I don’t know about. Which of those has actually worked for you?

It always sounds so good in theory. On one hand when I get an amazing drop that my build can't even use, the idea of trading it away for gear I actually need should feel great. But in practice for me it always just feels weird.

Instead of being hyped about the drop I just start stressing over how much it is worth on the market. I end up overthinking the price every time. And then when I finally sell enough stuff to buy the exact upgrade I need for my build it somehow feels hollow. Hitting a massive power spike because I bought an item from some random guy just doesn't feel like I actually earned it. Makes me wish I had somehow crafted it myself for some reason (I know there's no difference really but somehow it feels like that for me). 

I have always found those people who play the market really well and just trade all day completely fascinating. Like the guys who sit in town flipping stuff and ending up with these insane near perfect items that are worth more than my whole stash. Part of me really wishes I could do that and just enjoy the economy for what it is. Every time I’ve tried to engage more with the trading it just felt horribly stressful for me, I always feel like I’m doing something wrong.

That is usually why I end up playing SSF or gravitating towards single player games lately. I started playing Grim Dawn again a few weeks ago in preparation for the dlc and it has been so relaxing to just kill monsters and equip the stuff that drops without thinking about an economy at all. 

After I’m done with that, I'm probably gonna try No Rest for The Wicked, and then The Dark West when it comes out, really hyped for that one, I love playing around with guns in these games. I still keep a few ARPGs on rotation so I will be returning to my Last Epoch and PoE SSF characters from time to time when I’m bored, feels good to make a bit of progress sometimes on an old character, but I’ve pretty much abandoned all my trade league characters due to these weird anxieties I get over trading.

Am I the only one who gets in their own head about trading this much? If you guys play trade leagues how do you stop yourselves from taking it so seriously? I’ve pretty much fully switched to SSF and single player ARPGs but I want to enjoy the regular leagues too, without feeling like I am just buying my character's progression.

Every time I read posts about AI outbound agents, it feels like everyone trusts their agents to work alone. People talk about setting up these agents and letting them rip at scale within thirty minutes like there is zero risk involved. For me it's fine to experiment with AI lead generation but for actually sending messages (for both cold outreach and warm leads/replies) maybe I am just more paranoid than most, but I feel like I have to verify the outputs pretty rigorously before I trust an agent to work on its own.

Whenever we plug in a new agent or even just change the prompts on an existing one, we run it in a manual review mode for a full calibration week. The agent writes every message into a review queue and one of us has to read each one before it ever hits a prospect. It sounds slow, but that first week is always where the embarrassing stuff gets caught. Just in the last few days, I flagged several things that would have been a disaster to send. I caught one wrong industry pitch because the data enrichment was stale and the prospect had moved from fintech to healthcare months ago. It also generated an opener that completely misread a German LinkedIn bio and used a tone that was way too familiar for that market. And there was even a duplicate sequence that almost went to the same person twice on the same day because they were sitting in two different campaigns.

Right now I am reviewing the messages and manually piping the good ones into Expandi as custom variables for my LinkedIn sequences. It is a bit more manual work upfront, but I use that review process as a feedback loop to refine the AI. If a draft is off, I adjust the prompts and let the agent try again. I usually do this for a full week until the results start hitting the quality bar I want. 

Only once I am really satisfied do I let the agent start working autonomously, and even then I will still spend the following week reviewing what it sends. In my niche the cost of a bad first impression can be pretty high, so I would rather take some time to set things up than risk sending something that makes us look like a generic spam bot or worse.

Is anyone else actually putting their agents through a proper draft mode like this, or are you guys just letting it loose after a few test sequences or messages? I cant tell if im being too paranoid or people arent really telling us the full story and leaving these details out when they write about this.

Every time I read posts about AI outbound agents, it feels like everyone trusts their agents to work alone. People talk about setting up these agents and letting them rip at scale within thirty minutes like there is zero risk involved. Maybe I am just more paranoid than most, but I feel like I have to verify the outputs pretty rigorously before I trust an agent to work on its own.

Whenever we plug in a new agent or even just change the prompts on an existing one, we run it in a manual review mode for a full calibration week. The agent writes every message into a review queue and one of us has to read each one before it ever hits a prospect. It sounds slow, but that first week is always where the embarrassing stuff gets caught. Just in the last few days, I flagged several things that would have been a disaster to send. I caught one wrong industry pitch because the data enrichment was stale and the prospect had moved from fintech to healthcare months ago. It also generated an opener that completely misread a German LinkedIn bio and used a tone that was way too familiar for that market. And there was even a duplicate sequence that almost went to the same person twice on the same day because they were sitting in two different campaigns.

Right now I am reviewing the messages and manually piping the good ones into Expandi as custom variables for my LinkedIn sequences. It is a bit more manual work upfront, but I use that review process as a feedback loop to refine the AI. If a draft is off, I adjust the prompts and let the agent try again. I usually do this for a full week until the results start hitting the quality bar I want. Only once I am really satisfied do I let the agent start working autonomously, and even then I will still spend the following week reviewing what it sends. In my niche the cost of a bad first impression can be pretty high, so I would rather take some time to set things up than risk sending something that makes us look like a generic spam bot or worse.

Am I the only one putting their agents through a proper testing period like this, or are people just letting them loose after a few test sequences or messages? I cant tell if im being too paranoid or people arent really telling us the full story and leaving these details out when they write about this.