We (Accidentally) Destroyed Tarkov

I don't care about Tarkov. Never got into it. But because of Luke's explanation of what the video was and describing the story and Journey g0at went on, I went and watched the 40 minute video

You'r not killing EFT
You'r helping the whole industry of gaming
Tarkov is an amazing game dyuing out of the cheating tech in whole

The problem with Tarkov is its SO TIME CONSUMING. You didn't "destroy" Tarkov. You helped people realize dumping hours on hours into a very difficult / time consuming game that's plagued with cheaters is a terrible idea. I was almost about to get back into Tarkov too before all of this. Not anymore, BSG needs to do their part and fix the issue...

2k+ hours in the game. Cheaters have gotten extremely worse and obvious in the last two wipes. I was not super hype for his video at first but after watching it all the way through and his interview on the Pogcast it was clearly a perfect storm and he said what needed to be heard for all the players. It needed to happen the the LMG pickup was crucial imo. I didn’t even know Luke played before recently so it’s cool to see he is as passionate about it as a lot of us are.

I love that their response to being censored, was basically to blitzkrieg the information onto the sub faster than it could be deleted lmao the way Luke phrased it is great "they were trying to SHOVE it in there while the mods tried to stop it"

Whoa. A single video exposing cheaters ended up becoming a whole investigation and outrage over the cheating conspiracy. I didn't know games could be this realistic to even bring in conspiracies and corruption within the community.

Nobody from this channel destroyed anything. BSG destroyed Tarkov by allowing this to happen.

I've been playing Tarkov since 2018 and this cheaters issue just got worse over the years to the point that it's unplayable now. We tried to tell BSG but they didn't cared, they destroyed their own game because they didn't wanted to stop the cash income flow from the cheating problem.

Had contemplated getting into tarkov over the past month with some friends. This video couldn’t have come out at a better time, saved me from wasting my time and money so big thanks to goat for that lol

I think we’re all so frustrated on the level of cheating across all games not just Tarkov. We know it’s happening but didn’t have the way to expose it like Luke did. Even if there were servers dedicated to cheaters where anything goes, the cheaters wouldn’t want to play on those servers. They want to have a secret advantage in a server meanwhile a significant number of people want to play legitimately

I respect how careful Linus and Luke are about topics. They phrase things in a thoughtful way and think about what they have to say.
Its very mature and quite different from a usual PLclip behaviour. I respect that. Keep it up

I really liked your idea of being able to see the accurate results of gameplay sessions to disambiguate what happened as a kind of built in cheat resistance or notification. If player names are connected with actions this will place some needed teeth in it.

if a moderator is deleting videos that are calling out a problem but deleting content due to a technicality, it makes me believe they are part of the problem.
If you're a creator and try to downplay a problem, you are part of the problem. How could you EVER defend cheating.

I reassure you, you helped the community more than you think. They are still cheaters out there, but thing is that we can already feel the game working better.... and i love it so much :D

i have 600 hours and climbing in tarkov i joined kinda late to the party so i knew what i was getting into with it it’s pretty hard to miss the technically assisted players especially on certain maps

It was a good video. I never heard of Tarkov until this situation, but it was very enlightening.

I was gonna give it another shot after many multiple endgame, filthy rich and lvl 60+ wipes, but thanks to this I realized it has to be abandoned by all the legit players to such an extent where there is only cheaters left and they are forced to actually deal with it. So grateful this turned out the way it did and I won't touch the game until I see improvement. I encourage everyone else to do the same!

The issue with tarkov cheating is I have absolutely no way of knowing if it was a mistake that I made, or if the dude was staring at me through a wall 10 minutes before an engagement even happened. End of match spectate mode would eliminate most of the issues for me.

I was a very dedicated Tarkov player, and I put in hundreds of hours per wipe, but since learning that there are cheaters in more than 60% of games and possibly even more than that, I quit Tarkov altogether until something is done. Anticheat in the game right now is just an absolute joke. Tarkov takes a lot of dedication and time to make any progress. Dying can legitimately set you back several more hours for just a single death. Death matters in that game. Its not as simple as die and respawn. You're risking gear and precious time and resources. I'm not willing to risk my time playing a game where I have to question every raid whether or not I got killed by a cheater.

As someone who had played tarkov nonstop through collage and up until today I'm a little sad at how things have become in terms of the cheating epidemic. Cheating was always there but it wasn't as big as it is today. I uninstalled the game after 4 years of playing and I've loved every second of it. I'm glad that the cheating problem had been brought to the forefront by goat and others trying to shed light on how the game has become.

You guys should discuss the ongoing bot crisis and lack of response from Valve on Team Fortress 2. I was shocked when Luke mentioned it at all without any kind of acknowledgement of what we’ve been going through since right before the pandemic started.

I care a lot about Tarkov. It has brought a lot to me, positivity, especially through the past few years. Maybe it's an age thing but I just wish for a proper progression-based single player version. Where did it become so expected for us all to play in a collaborative world? I just want to play computer games, on my own, against increasingly advanced AI technology. A return to this, even just as an option, would surely increase player numbers.

I have put at least 500 hours in tarkov which isn't a huge amount but way before goats video I quit playing it because of the obvious cheating problem. I love that goats video actually brought a lot of the issues to the surface. Now maybe companies will push harder to remove a lot of cheaters.

Just reminding… yes he cheated but he only observed and didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t spoil anyone’s fun. Not even the cheaters 😊

Love how Linus just ends the podcast when he damn well pleases

So, you will occasionally get equipment from "the system" for lack of a better term, there was a point where matches were crashing on completion a few years back and people would loose their gear and loot upon finishing a raid and I remember that they gave out a package with a few weapons, armor and some cash attached to a message that said "sorry, here's some help" or something to that effect, so the packs (to my knowledge) were intended to help with the rough game state at the time. I have gotten one or two recently when I started playing after this story broke, and it's just been some mid tier loot, an ak and some body armor, etc,...

on the topic of Defending the game,
I love the game. its become one of my most played game in recent years, but seeing the video and understanding how bad it actually is, it opened my eyes to how bad i was defending it myself. "cheating is not as bad as they say it is" "i just got unlucky" "I really suck this wipe"
it was hard for me to admit it and to finally step away from the game in its current state. I really hope it can turn itself around with how bad it is

Retrospectives about different old tech would actually be really cool if they made it

Very glad the video was released, I hope more people realize the regular player is the content for the hackers and BSG is making more off of the hackers.

Cheaters have made me let go of all competitive multiplayer shooters over the past few years, including tarkov. It's really quite a shame, but I'm at a point in my life where I'd rather just hang out and chat with my friends while we all play our own interests.

The problem with a reporting system based on replays is that those will have to be manually reviewed. Games like League of Legends and Overwatch show how many people just falsly accuse people of cheating or just spam report people for no reason other then being mad they lost. I don't think as long as people can access game files or make 3rd party tools access game files the cheating problem will get better, especially for ftp titles, because cheaters have nothing to lose in that case.

Tarkov was by far my most favorite game ever made into existence. Its a game some people either really love, or REALLY hate. DIdn't like it at first because of its complexity but then LOVED IT because of its complexity....and having a group of friends get into the game so youre not raiding by yourself makes it even more fun. One of my friends is a Tarkov beast. When you got into a gun fight? You wanted him around you. YOu wanted him to command who should be where and how to go about fighting this group. But there were way too many times our entire squad was wiped out, alot of times by a single player, to include my friend. My friend would be able to point out exactly how we died and why, and what we need to do next time to avoid it - but there were times he just had zero understanding of how we died. There was no way we were seen. There was no way they heard or saw us move locations and yet grenades were following us and landing by us like they could see through the walls. Well, I guess it was because they were seeing us through the walls. If my friend ever said "that dude was cheating" - believe it. They probably were. IF we ever called out someone was cheating but our friend could point out where they werent with reason? Then they werent - we just sucked lol. But it started to feel a bit too overwhelming that many, many, many raids started to feel like I had no way out. I started to go from having a decent amount of extractions to almost none at all. I started to think because of how long the game has been out, that people just got really "pro" at the game - but I have been playing since it came out. I played it every day. and about 6-7 months ago? I said "I am done with this game". And so did the rest of us. We moved onto games like Ready or Not where its not even PvP, SQUAD which IS and is probably the most realistic war game I played in my life, and some other games too. We havent touched Tarkov in more than half a year becausee we felt there really was cheating/hacking on a MASSIVE scale after a while. Well, G0ATs video proved it. Its bad - and worse than WE even thought. And we played this game EVERY...SINGLE...DAY. Hours on end, lost sleep over raids and doing challenges/quests and finding items for them. We loved the game so much. But this? This is how you ruin a game. We had speculations BSG would not implement any hardware bans or anything like that because the more a cheater was caught? The more copies of a game was sold. And it made a TON of sense to us. I thought "If I was a business man, would I do the same thing?" Hell yea I would - but I dont make games, so I wouldn't do that. Im just putting myself in the developers shoes. Maybe well let this go on for a while until weve made more money to improve the game even more, then eventually implement a good anti-cheat system and the game is good! Well if that was BSGs business model, G0AT destroyed that in less than 1 hour. Because thats what we really felt their business model at BSG was. Let the cheaters keep cheating, theyll just buy the game again, makes us more money, more money means more developlement for a better game, THEN we address cheating. The cheaters are in-turn helping make this a better game. No, it destroyed the game. It backfired. Ill be off Tarkov for a while.
As far as cheating goes - maybe somoene can school me on how "hacking/cheating" works. But can't game developers just AES encrypt game files and servers? That way you have literally no way of cracking any encryption of the game and how it works to hack/cheat? IDK, just a thought of mine. I dont know how it works. Maybe someone can school me on it

Specifically with Tarkovsky, I think the best anti cheat is dedicated staff using tools in actual matches to quickly spot cheaters.

The news about the perks some folks get from BSG is the story they're willing to take heat on as a means to try and prevent folks from pushing on the subject of them sponsoring actual cheater streamers to make money.

If you guys like had the people/production/whatever capabilities that you did with that “framerate with pros vs casuals”, and wanted to bring some groundswell to the multiplayer cheating problem, a video like like “how many cheats do you need to have to beat a pro player” or like “how much do cheats help” could be an interesting topic.

Linus throwing Luke under a giant bus.

I’ve been meaning to get Tarkov after I upgraded my gaming setup, but I guess I’ll put this on the back burners cause of the massive number of cheaters

Same for me, I have never played tarkov at all, but I'd been interested in the genre and some spinoffs and I'd been debating trying out the original game. Wan shot got me to watch the entire g0at video, and g0at's video has guaranteed I will not touch tarkov any time soon. Unfortunately though, this is a very common problem in modern online multiplayer games :c
Valorant seems to be the industry leader in anti cheat, and while theirs isn't perfect is certainly seems to be much more effective. However, the separate-computer running a radar cheat over the network is something that I don't believe any anti-cheat program could ever detect, and it will be a plague on competitive multiplayer games for forever now. The most that devs can do is use proper information controls between servers and clients so that client computers are never even passed any information about objects which are out of sight / out of distance. Then there'd be nothing to sniff off of the network until it's at least much closer to the player.
I wish the broader gaming community would drop games which didn't have developers who cared about and competently tackled anti-cheating measures. Cheat makers and game devs are locked in this eternal arms race, and any game which doesn't have sufficient fuel constantly poured into fighting the good fight will eventually become a place where legitimate players are left with doubts about many of their opponent's behaviors and abilities, and where the playerbase is slowly being taken over by "scum of the earth" cheaters.

Man so many people in the community thought i was crazy/gaslit me for quitting because of rampant hackers, now this video comes out and they all look goofy 😂

I've been considering buying EFT for a while and was seriously looking into it until I saw the video. Now I'm really glad I didn't waste the 60 dollars.

the cheater compensation thing that luke is talking about, is what The Cycle did to help the cheater issue, while they were heavily working on resolving the main cheater issue. So it can be done

If you do decide to do a laser disc retrospective, you should do it with a visit from Technology Connections.
Not only does he have all the stuff you would need to make the video, he is also hugely well informed on the history and workings of Laser Disc throughout its life.

Yes please a laserdisc retrospective. Very interested to know more about

The best idea for a reply system, is to have the reply returned to you at insurance point so it can't be used to affect a live raid

Thx this gives me a lot of content to talk about while it also takes a bit away what I also wanted to talk about on my main channel . Wanted to make a series about not just cheating but also about fake items and the future about this,

Also consider the game devs can sell the cheats, because it's not unusual for a hacker to try and hide their ident so all the game company has todo is make a shell company that looks like a hacker.

also on the cheating thing in other video games, they often have much stronger anticheat and also community servers that are independently moderated. You brought up TF2, and while Valve official servers are overrun by cheaters there's also vote to kick for cheaters and then community servers that have no cheaters because of the active moderation team that handles cheaters

Never would have heard of G0at or this all happening if it wasn't for the"leak". Super glad to hear about both. Not glad it is happening, but this is important to get out there because it is happening.

You guys helped his video spread massively so no need to blame anyone for an early leak.

What about PVE multi-player? I feel like that's a really lovely middle ground cause it combines the cool aspects of PvP and story games

I have definitely been shifting to single player and PVE experiences lately because of the cheating in mp games.

to be fair, your talk brought awareness to me (not been a tarkov player since shit launch) to then not only watch goat's video but share it with other known tarkov players.
You created more awareness and marketing: for free.
What is the issue here if it only leads to more people outside of GOAT's audience finding it and potentially even subscribing?
This is how legends are born sometimes online!

The channel People Make Games did an excellent video on the Valve skin selling situation, would strongly recommend it as a watch if you're interested in this stuff. Great channel, too, lots of good quality journalism over there

Luke really blessed us with some Saucy G0at content.

I stopped playin tarkov 2 years ago but still watch and track news for it. This year I started playing SPT (modded single player Tarkov) which I love!

Also replay system post game is needed. And then gear restoration if you're killed by a cheater or desync issues.

Question for LTT and the community that knows more about this stuff than me, is it harder to cheat or impossible to cheat if some or many or all of the game is rendered server side? As we move more toward the viability of cloud based games maybe ALL competitive online games need to be all cloud based. Nothing running natively. I get we're not there now, but would/could it be a viable solution. This would level the playing field of hardware based advantages too, everyone locked at the same frame rates, etc.

dev kits and streamer loot used to be a bigger thing a few years ago when the game was still new-ish.
there IS the new years EOD pacakage from the account menu on the site.

I'm a vet and was super into Tarkov when it first dropped for multiple wipes. A friend of mine began cheating on labs, being banned daily and just would buy new accounts. It was pretty cool to watch his streams. I never played Tarkov again after watching the last one, that was some 3-4years ago.

I think that the combination of more multiplayer cheating and more compettive play type has made gameing less fun.

I need to see this video. Never cared about the game, but cheating as a more general topic is interesting.

Tarkov was my favorite game for 3 years.
I have more then 3k hours in it.
The last 1 and a half year except for early wipe it was awful to play especially after midnight.
Thank you Luke for ending our all suffering and creating hope for a better tarkov in the future.

Fun thing, I missed that WAN show and had no clue about any of it.
I'm guessing thanks to the big number of LTT viewers going to watch that video, it just randomly showed up in my suggested feed (great video, btw, did in fact watch the whole thing).

For a lot of folks who were on the fence it just confirmed our worst suspicions. " how did he know I was here??" how did they know??" That after it just broke my confidence in the game. Haven't played since 😕. Might hop on next wipe

you guys have a point there. One solar flare and all youtubers and many more are out of a job. This is not a question of IF, but when.

As someone that was a server operator (glorified term for head admin) for a large FPS game I've spent a lot of time watching and trying to identify cheaters. With the number of ways you can get around anti-cheat software it cannot be the only line of defense, no matter how good it is. You will need the classic form we have now that tries to detect cheat software, then you will need machine learning identifying suspicious behavior, like the waldo project. After those two you will need community policing.
Many games include programs for dedicated players to aid in development and receive rewards, for example I am in a program that tests new content under NDA prior to release to help understand its game balance. If a game offered a similar program to experienced and vetted players to review reports of hacking it would take a lot of workload off the developer. There will still be false positives the developer has to review but those are minimal.
The current strategy of just having cheat detecting software and minimal developer intervention is like locking your car and then leaving the window rolled all the way down and expecting nobody to get in and if they do you expect a cop to be coincidentally walking by at that moment to stop them.

One of the best games i have ever played, but stopped playing months ago because of the cheating issue.

Replay system should be possible AFTER the raid has finished. The replay should show the whole raid, you can see all players, top down view and can zoom in etc. so you can see everyones movements, their aiming, who killed who etc. And the replay wouldn't impact anyone else in the raid (if you're in a squad, having replay available instantly would give the rest of the squad the information of where that enemy was/may still be rather than the killer being a sneaky guy.)
It would also allow people to create cool videos of Tarkov as more footage would be possible and get some cool positions for video footage / screenshots. (I guess similar to spectating on CSGO)
It would need more resources by Battlestate Games Servers and functionality but it would be a huge thing.
You would get a notification of when the replay of that raid on DD/MM HH:MM:SS until HH:MM:SS - available for say 24 hours. Then the replay would be deleted from the system. A report system can be implemented within the replay so you can report multiple users which the replay and details would be issued to Battle State Games to review.

the only community ive personally seen that went on fire to such an extent was the Railroads Online discord and community as a whole. it was so bad that the fire was extinguished, then later on another fire lit up because one person on the team threw another under the bus for something that wasnt even the 2nd persons fault, then the bus ran him over, and other unrelated things kept fueling that fire. it was the definition of a fustercluck.

Back in the day we worked with a cheating group to create an image with an extra payload that your UT client would download from our server when you joined it. That extra bit of code would cause your UT client to dump all your key bindings to the server... If you had keys bound for a bot, you were hit. We had to resort to this because none of the anti-cheats could stop these guys and honestly we didn't care if people cheated, but if you were competing in what was supposed to be a legit match, we did...

Oh man, i loved tarkov and put so many hours into the game..

They need to have a raid replay system. But you can only watch the replay AFTER the raid timer has ended. That way you can't watch it right away and tell your team the enemies location. So its fair.

I've had tarkov since release, good to know I finally have closure on this situation. good to know that I was right in alot of these situations.
People just "got good" out of nowhere and my stats started plummeting, as of a result of this situation.. I am not playing Tarkov for a single minute more until they fix this. this is why I'm starting to get back into only playing single player games as its so rampant you can even tell if someone is a legit player or a bozo cheater.

maybe they're laying low but so far the past few days have been relatively cheater free in my experience. they removed barter trades from the flea, thereby killing almost all the RMT avenues aside from full blown raid by raid carries. theyre still there, but they arent as prevalent and seem to want to "scare us off" rather than just instantly head-eyes

I just play the SPT mod, have for a couple years. It’s easily the best decision I ever made with that game cuz I’ve absolutely gotten my moneys worth by being able to play alone. It’s a much better game when you’re not getting head;eyes from across the map by some dude named BubbleButt while sitting in D2…

BSG let this happen and its really a shame, ive been playing since "release" and this last wipe between the cracked AI and cheaters made me fully uninstall.... god what a shame.

Personally, I feel like I've been gravitating much more towards single player, local multiplayer, or online multiplayer with known friends lately much more than online with random players. I'm just not finding as much enjoyment anymore from playing against random people with no communication.

9:12 SO in terms of very high level players having direct access to the developers in order to try and encourage changes, this generally *sounds* like a reall good idea, listen to the community, make changes people want to see. HOWEVER, generally, it actually is a particularly piss poor way to get community feed back and make the game better for any one but the top maybe 5% of players. Players who spend a LOT of time playing the game (and I assume a Tarkov creators probably made playing the game his career) are going to be having a VASTLY different experience from the other 95% of players who play maybe 1-2 hours a week night and 8-9 hours each weekend. A lot of indie devs have ruined their games by listening ONLY to the feed back of the loudest, most vocal tryhard players, and not the majority of the audience. This usually lead to: over tuning difficulty, Creating newer content instead of refining older content, and creating grind to slow those tryhards down.

I've always thought that the day people heard about cheating, online competitive gaming was ruined, to a large degree. Any time you play a pvp game, there is always that seed of doubt in the back of your mind when you are killed by a good player. It's almost unavoidable, as you can basically never know for sure.
I've played with people who I later found out were cheating and it really sucks to know. Hell, I've played a coop game with a friend where I guessed that he cheated to get items and was correct and now I question it whenever I play with that friend "Is he spawning items?", "Is he using other cheats?". Sad.

As someone who plays every day, once goats video came out, I have gotten more PMC kills than I ever have and died less. So it could just be me but I think there are less hackers. But still not convinced this issue has been addressed. We need more aggressive measures for anti cheat.

22:40 my biggest issue with this is how do you know you have taken stuff that is from a cheater? if they get the loot from killing people with wall hacks and other stuff then can just drop it to you later without you knowing, you have effectively just killed a form a player interaction in the game wholesale.

Hopefully there will be more incentive that someone will finally develop better anti cheat tech and not be greedy about it.

I always assumed people who claimed cheaters where just skeptical but now i'm not too sure.

I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately, re: creators protecting their honey pots and throwbacks from companies. I'm glad you guys brought it up for discussion.

One big question is, is there a way to do better with anti-cheat without compromising your consumers PCs (Ring 0 Anti-cheat)?

Not trying to sound like a schmuck, but the whole wiggle video made me feel amazing about myself lol. I have known hacking was an issue like this for a while. While simultaneously I’ve had 22raid survival streaks, this wipe alone. I’m further in the wipe than what I’ve ever been before. And this is my 6th wipe.

Honestly, I'm glad g0at landed this video.
I'm not a Tarkov player, but if we get a GOOD anti-cheat movement out of all of this, I'd be elated.
I'm in the top 10 of a lot of rounds in Battlefield games, and I'd love to see where I sit when everyone has to play fair.
I have no idea how good 2042's anti cheat is, but I 100% have experienced situations where the reaction to my covered position was too fast and perfect to have been, "Oh, I saw you prone behind loads of cover, aimed my crosshairs on your head and unloaded"
I'll take a death where someone outsmarts me in stride, but cheaters are basically playing at my expense. They're talentless annoying little insects you have to deal with when trying to unwind.

Haven't played any FPS in over a decade. PLclip recommended the video to me. Cheaters can make you quit any game, no matter how great the concept is, and how much you like it. It must be frustrating for the honest Tarkov players.

Replay systems are very storage intensive, but these days that means less than it used to. It solves a lot of problems.

I have ~2400 hours in tarkov and put upwards of 1000 hours in a single 6 months into the game at my most hooked. I quit tarkov earlier this wipe before his video since the problem was so bad and it was so obvious. I messaged and talked with someone who cheats and they said that 70% of their raids had a cheater. The issue is insane

Tarkov is my favorite shooter. By a huge margin. I didn't play this patch though and I guess I'm glad I skipped it. I just really hope bsg redeems themselves with proper ways to fight these cheats. I love the game and plan to play next wipe. This certainly should shake things up.

1600 hours in Tarkov.
Still love this game regardless of anything, there's nothing like it and I'll stick with it through thick and thin. I'm ass at the game though so if I died to cheaters I just thought they were cracked and I'm unlucky.

BSG the type of company to do a ban wave and then immediately put the game on sale.

I quit the game last month. I'm so happy to see that this problem escalate more and more.

Tarkov is one of the most realistic games I have played, I have a defibrillator implant and thought it went off after I got shot. I literally had to go to the hospital to get checked but it did not go off. but i have ran into to many cheaters and stopped playing. in 2019 most cheaters where in labs and woods so staying in reserves I usually would have fair games but lately all maps have been bad.

I learned everything I needed to know about how Linus plays games after watching him play Star Citizen with Luke and Morph 😂

Looks like today we're watching "The Tarkov hackers strike back".

The problem with recognizing cheating in Tarkov comes from that as you say that some cheats can show all the time positions of other players and where are they looking. This way cheating person will stalk his targets and ambush them with his own skills. Which makes cheating impossible to be recognised

Haven't played, but I think the best way to implement replay would be post-match, not kill-cam replays like some people may be thinking.

3:25 *that is a hilariously large water bottle*
It looks like you've shorted the FOV on your camera and its actually much closer than it is 🔍😄