Escape From Tarkov names over 4000 players banned for alleged cheating
Supposedly to show "justice has been served"
Extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov has been battling cheaters for years, with seemingly mixed results. Developers Battlestate Games are stepping up their efforts not only to ban cheaters but to show other players that "justice has been served", by releasing the usernames of thousands of players banned for allegedly cheating.
The Escape From Tarkov Twitter account tweeted out a list of "over 4,000 cheaters" over a week ago. You can see the list for yourself on Google Sheets.
"We want honest players to see the nicknames of cheaters to know that justice has been served and the cheater who killed them in a raid has been punished and banned,” Battlestate Games’ Dmitri Ogorodnikov told TechCrunch yesterday.
I am not wild about companies summarily releasing lists of alleged cheaters without recourse or oversight, although this is probably mostly harmless given the usernames are mostly things like "Z-zzzzzz" and "N0_KILL_ME". Gamer names, in other words, which are throwaway and easily changed. For that same reason, this list is also arguably useless - it's barely a deterrent to actual cheaters, and a list of names doesn't really do anything more to convince me that a cheating problem is being addressed than just knowing the number of bans.
That Battlestate felt this was necessary is indicative of what a big problem cheating remains to multiplayer games. The developers of Overwatch, Apex Legends and Call Of Duty all announce occasional ban figures, and several such as Epic, Bungie and Ubisoft have sued profit-making cheatmakers for large damage payouts.
Troubled by cheaters or not, Escape From Tarkov still makes our list of the best survival games.