I just watched video by g0at on Escape from Tarkov cheating issue, The Wiggle That Killed Tarkov. I haven’t played Tarkov myself, but it seems that it’s the perfect game for cheating: you don’t need to kill anybody to progress or if you want to kill somebody, you can do it easily without being suspected as a cheater. Also I guess it’s running on C# on mono backend, so reverse engineering the data structs and pulling out data for ESP or aimbot seems very easy, so there is probably a plenty of cheats available for Tarkov. The Tarkov developers don’t seem to be bothered with cheaters as the client knows everyone’s location even though they wouldn’t be rendered. That would also ease out the networking bandwidth and improve the Tarkov’s “netcode” overall if they would just bother to cull the players server side.
I don’t think cheating in multiplayer games is justifiable in any condition but think there a many reasons to cheat:
- Want to be better than everybody else.
- Monetary gain for winning or selling looted items.
- Notoriety.
- More fun (for the cheater).
- It takes away the feeling of anxiety of dying or getting wrecked.
Seems that cheat makers make a good money. It’s quite mind boggling to me that someone is ready to pay a hefty monthly fee often more expensive than the game for a cheat. So cheat market is thriving, I think better than ever. I just shudder to think about running an .exe from cheat maker on my local machine. For cheat maker it’s probably quite fun to crack open the game and pull out the data. Reverse engineering is always a thrill!
I think there is one solution for cheating, allow and embrace it. But would that make a game fun anymore? Probably not and that would be a match between the best cheat makers.