A new Tarkov patch is coming tomorrow.
Battlestate Games has announced that a major new patch will arrive for both Escape From Tarkov and Escape From Tarkov Arena tomorrow, with the update likely to include the account linking between the two games.
In a post on X the official Escape From Tarkov account revealed that patch 0.14.9 will arrive tomorrow, with the patch installation beginning at 8:00 am BST/3:00 am EDT and expected to last six hours. It was also announced that Escape From Tarkov Arena will also receive a patch at the same time, being updated to 0.1.8. As always, the servers will go down and the game will not be playable while the patches are installed, and the expected six hour downtime could be extended further.
With both games being updated at the same time it is very likely that this will be the patch that finally links the main Tarkov game with Arena, and allows you to use the same character in both. This will not only mean that your skills will transfer across, but that you can also move money and select other items between the games.
In the recent TarkovTV stream, game director Nikita Buyanov detailed an update that was due for early June for both games. The update will include character linking, a new trader for both games called Ref and new containers. Ref, the expected new trader who could launch in the patch tomorrow, will sell you items for GP Coins, giving them more of a use than they currently have and will give you unique quests.
Perhaps the biggest part of the link between the two games will be the ability to move money between them, meaning you could theoretically make some serious cash in Arena and then transfer it to the main game to keep up your expensive habit of dying.
Hopefully the patch tomorrow and linking the two games will see a big increase in players for Arena, as many appear to have dropped away from the game since launch. Despite a lot of the big issues it had early on being fixed, it has failed to find a significant audience and the stats that we can see do not paint a pretty picture. While player numbers are not public, Arena has had almost no viewers on Twitch for months now, while the main Tarkov game continues to bring in hundreds of thousands.