Escape from Tarkov developer Battlestate Games has spoken out about the game’s ongoing issue with cheaters.
Fans have be raising serious concerns regarding the number of Escape from Tarkov cheaters for a long time now. Some players have even gone so far as to controversially install cheats to highlight the problem.
Recently, Battlestate shared a post to the Escape from Tarkov Reddit community addressing the issue.
“Every time for a long time, unfortunately, one way or another, a problem with cheaters pops up,” the post’s introduction reads. “And people immediately start blaming us for not caring. They begin to bury the game, us, and generally say things that are sensitive to us.”
The post goes on to list the work Battlestate is putting into its anti-cheat measures, including highlighting that they “ban several thousand cheaters a day” and that Battleye—Tarkov’s built-in anti-cheat system—“has been updated four times” in the last week.
Battlestate also promises that they will soon “start working on new hacker detection methods to automate it and improve the overall quality and speed of cheater detection and banning.” An update to the reporting system will also see a notification appear when someone you reported received a ban.
“Your worries and indignations are 100% clear to us,” the post concludes. “And always have been. Report all these bastards, we will make the game cleaner together.”
If the responses on Reddit are anything to go by, the statement hasn’t been received all that well. One highly upvoted reply states that they have “a hard time believing” the claims in Battlestate’s message and questions the lack of two-factor authentication.
“It definitely sucks to see one of my favorite games of all time, and a potential game to go down in stardom in video gaming history, just fall apart like this due to lack of care,” the poster states.
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It is important to realize that the legit players have bought this game somewhere in the last six years. They paid a one time fee and have been a loyal playerbase since then.
Cheaters however, earn money by selling ingame items and often use Tarkov as a source of income. For the majority of cheaters, getting banned means they just buy another account, and many of them do this weekly and have several accounts paid and ready to go.
BSG stated that last weekend they banned 4,000 cheaters. Multiply that by 35 euro’s for the cheapest package and you have a 140k revenue stream per weekend. This indicates that keeping the cheating economy alive is BattleStateGames main form of revenue right now.
At no surprise, their response to complaints about cheaters over the last couple of years has always been to ban people to stop the discussion and to claim that they are doing all they can, and that cheating is actually very rare and people are misinterpreting their suspicious deaths. The mentioned video exposing the 60% of games having a cheater count has also received a lot of criticsm from the devs and the official Tarkov Reddit is heavily policed by BSG to reduce the impact on the games shoddy reputation.
Fortunately this video was the straw that broke the camels back and the legit players are now permanently leaving, destroying the ingame economy and putting more cheaters in the same lobby.
Tarkov died by greed on BSG’s part.