Escape From Tarkov is in a dire situation at present, with some players claiming that there are more cheaters on the platform than ever before. It’s a claim that is mixed in amongst disappointing changes, awkward updates to looting mechanics, and general instability that is fast leaving a sour taste in the mouths of too many players.
On YouTube, one creator and player, g0at, took it upon himself to expose Tarkov cheaters by installing his own cheats and jumping into a series of ‘raids’ to investigate exactly how many cheaters are causing chaos throughout Escape From Tarkov.
His video is insightful, but it has caused backlash from a portion of the community that sees it as nothing more than a beautiful advertisement of just how easy it is to succeed as a cheater in Escape From Tarkov.
‘More Afraid of the Cheat Developers’
Escape From Tarkov launched in 2016, and in a way, it has pioneered the extraction shooter genre. It’s a hardcore, hyper-realistic shooter that sees players deploy into a fictional region split up into several small maps with the key objective of looting, surviving, completing tasks, and successfully leaving the map again.
In what is the most controversial video to surface in the space for a while, YouTube creator g0at has taken extreme steps to expose Tarkov cheaters by installing one of the most popular cheat packages and jumping into a series of raids.
Using ESP (Extra-Sensory Perception) cheats, g0at embarked on a journey of discovery, attempting to see how many players in his raids were also cheating. With these cheats, players can see everything they need to know about their opponents, including their position, health, kill-death ratio, loadout, and even the direction that they’re looking in.
His investigation ultimately revealed some troubling information, which admittedly, nobody was all that surprised to hear:
There were obvious cheaters in about sixty percent of my raids … One night, I ran into cheaters five raids in a row.
Breaking it down further, g0at confirmed that, in 125 raids running ESP, he:
- Never ran into a fly hacker (a cheater that can fly around the map)
- Had zero raids with the stinky leg invincibility hack (a strange cheat that gives a player invulnerability in exchange for an odd posture)
- Never ran into a speed hacker (cheats that give a player unnaturally fast movement abilities)
- Was almost never aimbot or rage-hacked (meaning he wasn’t killed by cheaters using aimbot or actively, maliciously, and aggressively targeting players)
In his early attempts to gather information on cheaters, he partnered up with a known hacker, but following a damning revelation, that plan fell through:
Even though I vowed to keep him anonymous, he knew that the cheat devs could figure out if he was the one who leaked the footage. Evoker was more worried about getting caught by the cheat developer than the game developer.
So, how exactly did g0at figure out who was hacking?
It’s All in the Wiggle
In Escape From Tarkov, ‘wiggling’ is a universal language. It’s an indication that you’ve noticed another player and that you’re (almost always) intending to be friendly. It’s quite literally carried out by using the lean function to ‘wiggle’ left and right.
However, for g0at, it became a tool – he’d wiggle while hidden and looking towards a player he suspected to be cheating through his ESP software, and if they wiggled back, then it was a confirmation of sorts – they too were cheating.
Regardless of how he managed to acquire the data, and whether he’s put himself in a negative position by deploying cheats, the fact stands that Escape From Tarkov is quite literally riddled with them. He also explained that there are more cheaters active at night (in real-time) and that, sadly, the cheat developers are ‘more careful and restrictive with their software than the game developer‘.
Now, the community is divided. There’s one side damning g0at and his seemingly blatant advertising of cheats and how easy it is to obtain them, while the other side is praising his efforts at exposing a plague sitting at the heart of Tarkov.
It isn’t known if anything is really going to change anytime soon – or if anything can change. It has been a ‘fact of life’ for years now that Escape From Tarkov has a cheater problem, but it is becoming worse over time, and it may have hit the point of no return.
It has worked out for g0at, though – he has gained 10,000 new subscribers on YouTube since uploading the video a day ago.
We’ve reached out to Battlestate Games, the developer, for more information and for comments on g0at’s investigation.
For more Insider Gaming news, check out our coverage of Starfield’s next showcase.
