Battlestate Games just confirmed that between March 15 and May 17, it banned more than 30,000 cheaters from Escape from Tarkov, the (decreasingly) popular extraction shooter. This news might come as a wonder to some, but for those familiar with the product, it’s just another day on the job. These ban waves seem to occur once every month or two, and despite BSG kicking out tens of thousands of cheaters every time, the number never seems to meaningfully decrease.
Constant.
Escape from Tarkov has a long-standing issue with cheaters. It’s a plague that has spoiled the game time and again over the years, and it has put off veteran players from continuing their extraction-based adventures and fully prevented some new players from investing in the platform.
Today, Battlestate Games revealed that in a two-month window, some 30,000 cheaters were banned.
But in March 2024, 33,000 cheaters were revealed to have been banned in two months.
And in January 2024, 11,000 cheaters were banned in two weeks.
And in September 2023, 16,600 cheaters were booted off the platform in one month.
It’s great that we’re getting a rolling tally of the number of cheaters banned, but the figure is either growing or fluctuating wildly. It’s no easy thing to stay ahead of today’s hackers and malicious operators, but it’s arguably the number one issue in Escape from Tarkov, and it doesn’t seem to be improving enough to fill players with confidence.
That and the recent controversy surrounding ‘The Unheard Edition’ is enough to make any Tarkov player baulk at the idea of investing a sizeable amount of time in the game.
Once again, Battlestate Games named and shamed the thousands of cheaters, providing a spreadsheet with the name of every cheater banned from the game in this wave. There are some interesting names on the list, and fans typically scour these pages for the names of big streamers – not that they’d be named by Battlestate, of course…
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