Over the last two months Battlestate Games, the developers of Escape From Tarkov, have banned over 33,000 cheaters from the game.
The news comes as the names of all the cheaters banned since January 12 2024 have been released by Battlestate Games, and the list is long with over 33,000 accounts detailed on it. Released as a massive table of names, it’s difficult to sort through but the sheer volume is impressive, and shows that despite what many fans think a lot of work is being done to combat cheaters.
In a post on X from the official Escape From Tarkov account, it was revealed that these bans all happened in the last two months, between January 12 and today, March 15. This follows 11,000 cheaters being banned between December 27 2023 and January 11 2024, bringing the total number of players banned this wipe to 44,000.
In recent weeks community sentiment towards cheaters in Tarkov has seemed to take a turn, with the game’s subreddit being filled with posts complaining about cheaters in the game. While not unusual, the number of complaints seems to be dominating the conversation around the game despite Tarkov being in one of the best states it ever has been.
The addition, in the last wipe, of being able to view the profile and stats of a player that killed you has led to more cheaters being identified by regular players, giving the community a little more clarity on how many cheaters there are in Tarkov. This is likely the reason there has been so much conversation around cheaters recently, although as the wipe progresses we do usually see an increase in complaints about cheaters as the player base starts to drop.
Banning so many cheaters is obviously a good step in the right direction, but Tarkov is still missing key features that could help control the cheating issue. Having a phone verified match making system like many competitive games have would surely help the problem by forcing each account to be tied to a real-world phone number.
Of course, the war against cheaters will never be over, especially in a game like Tarkov where they can be hard to detect for normal players, which makes manual reports difficult to manage. However, big ban waves like this are no doubt a positive and should go some way to reducing the number of unfair deaths you have in Tarkov.
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