Escape from Tarkov cheaters now have an in-game bounty on their heads
Battlestate GamesDeveloper Battlestate Games will reward Escape from Tarkov players if they report cheaters who get banned.
Like countless other online games, hackers and cheaters have run rampant in Battlestate Games’ extraction shooter for quite some time.
Escape from Tarkov’s developers have worked tirelessly to alleviate these problems. In March 2023, for example, 6,000 cheaters were banned and exposed, and another 11,000 were ousted in January 2024.
However, the fight isn’t over yet, evidenced by the latest effort from the crew at Battlestate Games. Patch notes for Update 0.14.9.5 mention that users can now receive “compensation for reporting players who violated game rules.”
According to the changelog, the game will reward players with in-game currency if their report of a cheater culminates in a ban.
The notes further explain, “Compensation comes with an in-game message informing of a successful report. Compensation for several successful reports will be combined.”
Battlestate GamesIt’s worth noting the specifics of how this process will work presently remain scant. For one, there is no word on how much currency players will receive for successfully reporting bad actors.
Battlestate’s message says nothing of how it will manage the same cheater being reported by multiple players, either. But such a tactic could go a long way in cracking down on Escape from Tarkov’s ongoing problem with cheaters.
It’s not a wholly original idea, considering the “cheater victim compensation” system present in Yager Development’s now-dead extraction shooter, The Cycle: Frontier. The difference is that The Cycle’s developers found exploiters, and then compensated players who were unfairly killed by them in matches.
How well Escape from Tarkov’s newly introduced compensation system will work out long-term is not yet known. At present, the user base can only hope the effort marks a step in the right direction.