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Escape From Tarkov cheats addressed emphatically by Battlestate head

Battlestate COO Nikita Buyanov addresses Escape from Tarkov cheats and hacks in a statement to the community, calling players to “report all these bastards.”

Escape From Tarkov cheats - a figure in a skull mask and military clothing clasps their hands together across their chest

As the discussion around Escape From Tarkov cheats and hackers rears its ugly head once more, the head of developer Battlestate Games makes an emphatic statement declaring the team’s strong stance against hacks and reassuring players that the team is banning “several thousand cheaters a day.” One of the most influential modern FPS games on PC, Tarkov’s success has inspired a rise in other ‘extraction shooters’ such as Call of Duty Warzone 2’s DMZ mode, but it’s struggled with an excess of cheaters in recent wipes.

In a statement posted to the Escape From Tarkov Reddit titled ‘Hackers, cheaters, and other related scum of the Earth,’ Battlestate’s COO Nikita Buyanov publicly addresses the rising community discontent around a perception of rampant Escape From Tarkov cheaters in the game’s latest wipes. Opening with a friendly greeting, Nikita acknowledges the concerns before reassuring players that banning hackers is very much at the top of the team’s priority list.

“Every time for a long time, unfortunately, one way or another, a problem with cheaters pops up,” Nikita says, “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.” He says that, rather than writing a long essay on the topic, he decided to simply break down some key points to hopefully put fans’ minds more at ease that Battlestate does care.

Nikita notes, “the work to catch cheaters is always going on,” and says this usually happens in waves. He adds, “right now we ban several thousand cheaters a day,” and most of these have only played a little before being stopped. He explains that while the team’s Battleye anti-cheat “continues to improve,” so does the technology used by cheaters – making it an endless arms race. “In the last week alone, Battleye has been updated four times.”

Escape From Tarkov cheaters - first-person view of a player holding a gun looking at another armed person, who is standing between several safety fences around some worn-down cars

Battlestate is continuing to improve its own additional detection tools, with a new update coming and plans to implement more automated hacker detection methods to help “improve the overall quality and speed of cheater detection and banning.” Nikita notes that the reporting system now adds notifications if a reported player is subsequently banned, and asks that the community remains vigilant in continuing to report suspicious players.

This discussion has been ongoing for several months, but came to even more of a head this weekend with the release of a video from Tarkov YouTuber ‘g0at’ called “The Wiggle That Killed Tarkov,” which digs deep into the cheating community and even showcases how easy it is to set up cheats – although g0at is careful to lay out ground rules ensuring he won’t hurt any other players or keep any progress made while doing so.

The video showcases Discord groups dedicated to Tarkov cheats that have thousands of users, and g0at claims that he was able to verify that at least 60% of players in raids he was in were using some form of cheat or hack. Perhaps shockingly, he tried to get in contact with a known hacker to help showcase footage, but the person in question refused – with g0at reporting that they were “more worried about getting caught by the cheat developer than the game developer.”

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The discussion around Escape from Tarkov cheats has clearly reached enough of a critical mass that Nikita himself has again felt obliged to make a public statement. Ultimately, actions speak louder than words, but the words he offers in closing are certainly definitive: “Your worries and indignations are 100% clear to us. And always have been. Report all these bastards, we will make the game cleaner together.”

The Streets of Tarkov map was recently released for the survival shooter, and fans are somewhat split on its hotspots. Check our Escape From Tarkov tips to ensure your success, and make sure you’re using the best Escape From Tarkov ammo too. We’ve also got more of the best battle royale games on PC for plenty of high-intensity action.