We regularly see the studios behind large competitive games announcing massive ban waves, but we rarely see them publicly outing cheaters by name. This week, the team behind Escape from Tarkov not only banned almost 7,000 players, but it also published a series of spreadsheets to publicly name and shame them. 

Escape from Tarkov is a competitive extraction game, which seems to be the hot new thing for first-person shooter developers across the industry, in large part due to the success of Battlestate Games, the team behind EFT. The developers behind Tarkov recently banned a wave of 6,700 players and then followed that up by publishing several spreadsheets that publicly reveal the online nicknames of all the banned cheaters. You can find the first of these lists in this Google doc.

In a statement sent to TechCrunch, Battlestate Games' Dmitri Ogorodnikov said that the team wants “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”.

Exactly how effective this be remains to be seen. A certain portion of cheaters may use the same online name across games, but many likely use throwaway accounts in an effort to stay anonymous and not compromise their main accounts.

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KitGuru Says: This is rather unexpected news and as far as I can tell, a first in the modern age of online gaming. Do you agree with this approach, or do you see this as a step too far? 

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