Escape from Tarkov Shares Interesting Detail About Cheaters

Battlestate Games, the developer working on the infamously complex extraction shooter Escape from Tarkov, has announced that it's going to take a new measure against all detected cheaters, this time exposing them to the public. Though it's a niche title at its core, EFT has come to enjoy a substantial player base since its release, which brought with it an all-new set of problems.

Specifically, the hardcore nature of Escape from Tarkov means that every death is heavily disincentivized through a permanent loss of gear and progression. Combined with the game's janky net code and its reliance on the easily modifiable .json files, this approach to gameplay means that cheaters can relatively easily get the upper hand on regular players, and they have every incentive to do so.

After a recent unofficial Escape from Tarkov cheating investigation revealed that 60% of total played matches end up having a cheater wreaking havoc, Battlestate Games reacted in an unusual and perhaps unconvincing manner. For example, the CEO Nikita Buyanov went on to claim that Battlestate bans "thousands" of cheaters every day, which the player base didn't find believable, considering the scale of the problem at hand. Now, the studio is taking things a step further by publicly disclosing the in-game names of all the discovered cheaters via a simple Google Docs spreadsheet.

We have decided to resume the practice of sharing the information about large ban waves done with the support of BattleEye anticheat. Throughout the weekend over 4,000 cheaters were banned in Escape from Tarkov. https://t.co/c3hp3QGGPd
— Escape from Tarkov (@tarkov) February 27, 2023

This follow-up to the Escape from Tarkov devs' reaction to cheating isn't enough to get players back on Battlestate Games' side, however. Those who have chimed in on the issue remain hesitant to put much stock into the stunt, citing the fact that the spreadsheet in question is remarkably light on information and context. Many believe that the announcement is little more than "posturing and theatrics," rather than a serious attempt at resolving the cheating problem.

The notion that Tarkov has a serious cheating problem has been known for a while now, but the extent of the issue was often a point of contention. Naturally, the aforementioned investigation isn't the sort of be-all-end-all that would outright bury an online title like EFT, but it does seem readily apparent that the problem exists and that it is exceedingly widespread thanks to the game's hardcore nature.

One of the reasons why Tarkov still perseveres, despite the growing number of cheating concerns, is that it's quite unique. While Call of Duty's DMZ mode was supposed to offer an alternative of some sort, it instead ended up delivering an entirely different experience that cannot go toe-to-toe with EFT's depth and complexity: the very same features that make the game so alluring to cheaters.

Escape from Tarkov is now available in open beta on PC.