Escape From Tarkov just named 4,000 banned players

Cheating in online games remains a problem, and though developers will try to crack down, it's not as effective as the attempts of others. We're looking at you, Warzone.

It's something that simply comes with multiplayer games at this stage, especially in competitive titles, and it's drawing an awful lot of focus from developers who would much rather be spending their time improving their games.

But it looks like one dev team has had enough, and they've chosen the nuclear option.

Escape From Tarkov names and shames its cheaters

Escape From Tarkov isn't messing about.

A new tweet from the team behind the shooter title has revealed that rather than just banning players and leaving it at that, they'll be revealing exactly who has been caught cheating in the game.

"We have decided to resume the practice of sharing the information about large ban waves done with the support of BattleEye anticheat," reads the new tweet from the official Tarkov Twitter account. "Throughout the weekend over 4,000 cheaters were banned in Escape From Tarkov."

Sticking to their word, they've linked a full Google Sheets document packed with usernames of players that appear to have been caught by BattleEye, and are being blasted on Twitter for all to see. Blimey.

Is outing cheaters the future of stopping them?

This is a pretty extreme way to look at cheating at large in video games, but there's every chance that it could work. Ethics aside, it seems as though the chance to be publicly shamed for cheating could actually help to prevent cheating in the future. Either that, or Tarkov has spent all that time in Google Sheets for nothing. There's no way to guarantee its effectiveness until we see it in the numbers - but there's every chance that this is the future of keeping cheaters at bay.