Escape from Tarkov takes its bans one step further by naming everyone who reportedly cheated

Escape from Tarkov is an extraction shooter from Battlestate Games that has lived in early access for years, and at this rate, will probably stay there. That said, it’s a thrilling game, although I’m not sure the 4,000 players recently banned from the game will agree.

In a recent bid to put players off turning on the cheats, Battlestate Games banned over 4,000 alleged cheaters from Escape from Tarkov. Rather than simply telling players of the development, Battlestate took things one step further; it shared the usernames of every alleged cheater it had banned in a Google Spreadsheet on Twitter.

“We have decided to resume the practice of sharing the information about large ban waves done with the support of BattleEye anticheat. Throughout the weekend, over 4,000 cheaters were banned in Escape from Tarkov,” the tweet reads, with a link to the spreadsheet of supposed cheaters.

Talking with TechCrunch about the situation just yesterday, Battlestate Games’ Dmitri Ogorodnikov stated, “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.”

As also noted by TechCrunch, many other developers will declare news of bans, but never share the information of those it has banned. Escape from Tarkov, like other live-service titles, has a persistent issue with cheaters that it’s trying to curb.

While I wholly agree with banning players that are proven to be allegedly cheating, I’m not sure that I can get behind sharing the personal information of players. While I feel a tiny bit sorry for any of those users with ‘TTV’ in their names, implying they may be streamers, it comes as no surprise that some of these accounts are perhaps throwaways, or just have meaningless usernames.

That said, the list itself being published feels quite redundant. Escape from Tarkov claims this is its way of showing honest players that “justice has been served,” but who actually gives a shit about the names of the offending players? Chances are, you don’t even remember the name of the Scav that clearly killed you using cheats three raids ago. Even then, if they’re in this list, they’ve been banned, so what’s it matter?

Ultimately, players of Tarkov, myself included, just want better security and privacy options in their games. That’s what Battlestate Games should be aiming to provide for its players, rather than Google Spreadsheet of usernames like ‘creamtea’, ‘hotwheelsboy’, and ‘demonke’ (which I think is quite a creative handle, actually).