Battlestate Games, the developers of the wildly popular Tarkov game, have decided to take a proactive approach to deal with cheaters going forward and have taken a bold stance to do so. While cheating in games is hardly a new thing, Battlestate is no longer turning a blind eye to those who choose to use aimbots or wallhacks.
Over the last week, the studio banned over 6,700 cheaters from Tarkov but then they did something completely unprecedented: they published a spreadsheet containing the nicknames of every single one of them.
According to Battlestate the decision to publically shame cheaters in this way is so that the rest of the community can see that Battlestate is taking action as well as showing future cheaters that this behavior won’t be tolerated moving forward.
“We want honest players to see the nicknames of cheaters in order to know that justice has been served.”
Battlestate has also said that this isn’t a one-time deal. Instead, this is something that the studio intends to do on an ongoing basis moving forward and these spreadsheets will be shared with the community via the Tarkov Twitter account.
Last week Nikita Buyanov of Battlestate took to Reddit to call hackers and cheaters “the scum of the earth” and encouraged players not to keep their mouths shut and report anyone they believed was fooling the system. So far the community on Twitter has reacted in one of two ways: by revelling in this public display of justice and praising the studio or with scepticism that this type of reaction would lead to anything positive.
What do you think about Tarkov’s somewhat radicle response? Let us know in the comments.