Nikita, the COO of Battlestate Games, recently participated in a Q&A on Reddit, answering a range of questions from players about Escape From Tarkov. Among the topics discussed were the game’s anti-RMT measures and cheating, concerns about the flea market, the amount of server information relayed to clients, and other vital parts of the game that the developer is focusing on.
One player asked if they could be banned for bringing a friend’s kit back in the next raid after they died, and Nikita responded that it was not a bannable offense as long as the gear was purchased with their own money. Another player asked why the game was designed with anti-RMT measures, and Nikita explained that they were necessary to combat cheating and protect the game’s economy.
There were also concerns about the flea market, with one player asking if removing it would help to eliminate RMT and cheating. Nikita didn’t address this directly but did explain that the flea market was a valuable part of the game’s economy and that they were constantly monitoring it for suspicious activity. From personal experience, judging by a discussion I’ve had with the PR manager, he said that the FLEA won’t be removed, ever.
Another player suggested that the game show less information to players in order to combat cheating, and Nikita acknowledged that this was a possibility but that it would come with sacrifices to gameplay. Overall, the Q&A with Nikita provided some insight into the game’s anti-RMT measures and how the developer is working to combat cheating in Escape From Tarkov. You can find the complete Q&A below:
Escape From Tarkov Q&A with Nikita
Q: Can we be banned for bringing a friend’s kit back in the next raid after they died? A kit they purchased with their own money?
Q: Why do you keep designing the game with anti RMT measures? It punishes normal players and RMT and cheaters are still a thing? FIR, lvl 15 flea, no dropping of keys, etc etc.
Q: Where is the line of RMT drawn? Should I be worried of being flagged if I bring my friend’s gear back after he dies? Is it an automatic ban or do you get flagged and checked manually for any other suspicious behaviour?
N: The principle is simple – if you will give millions of roubles, pricey items and will do it often – you will get banned. if you want to just return gear from time to time – it’s ok.
Q: Is it an automatic ban or do you get flagged and checked manually for any other suspicious behaviour?
N: This exact ban right now is not automated
Q: Can you explain how often the flea market suspicious offer reports are reviewed?
It’s really bloody annoying having people lob grenades at you in pitch black when you’ve been silent and are unseen for 10 minutes on Shoreline because they’ve got ESP, but it’s arguably even worse to go look at the flea market and see someone with 150+ flea rating selling a 50-pack of LEDxs, 150 GPUs and 20 marked room keys.
N: Right now they are being reviewed constantly.
Q: Do you think that removing the flea market from the game would help when it comes to eliminating RMT and cheating in general?
Q: Can you guys work out a way for the server to show less information to the client? It’s gonna be hard and there’s gonna be sacrifices to gameplay, but that’s the only way this game will go from a critical mass of cheaters down to what players are used to in other fps.
N: Yes! We can do it and we are working on it.
Q: Are you going to do anything to reassure those individuals who feel as if there are cheaters in ever lobby they spawn into? Also, are you going to outsource an anti-cheat as per a solution?
N: It all needs time. We continue to work further.
Q: Would you consider using a different anti-cheat than BattleEye?
N: No, we will still have a thing to do with all of the AC systems.
Q: Why exactly have you not implemented 2FA?
N: It’s implemented in the Asia region. Most likely will be added everywhere.
Q: Do you have a long term plan to deal with the cheat providers?
N: Yes, we want to start to pursue them legally.
Q: What is difficult about implementing basic checks for movement? Such as if a player if moving faster than max skills + no weight allows them to, why is that not bannable?
Q: Couldn’t you use a system that bans anyone over say 200 flea rep?
Q: There other ways beyond reports that we can help with the problem? I cant play the game properly right now as its too painful but I’m willing to put in some hours to be a honey pot but the reporting system is so obscure it feels like a waste of my time. I’m not sure making videos of the cheaters is the right approach but I’m up for helping if it makes a difference.
N: Reports are the best you can do right now.
Q: You answered earlier that hundreds of thousands play every day. Could you give us an average number for, say the month of January? Then could you give is the number of bans in the month of January?
N: I don’t have this info at my hand. but it’s really low amount comparing to overall players. something like half of percent or even lower.
Q: How has cheating become so prevalent an issue under BSG?
N: It wasn’t. You don’t know the history of EFT. It pops from time to time, usually after big updates. New cheats being released
Q: What is the truth behind the rumored ‘report abuser section’? I am hesitant to report ‘sus’ because it’s hard to differentiate cheats and desync.
N: Report it anyway if you feel that it was a cheater
Q: Is cheating/anti cheating currently your guys’ number 1 priority?
N: One of the top and always was.
Q: What do you think about the valorant anti cheat system?
N: It was written around a game. Not like it some plug and play solution
Q: What is your opinion on making the game harder just attracts more cheaters?
I personally feel a lot of the changes to battle RMT has just pushed more people into using RMT.
N: It’s true. The harder the game, the harder to be successful in the game – it brings the hesitation to turn on the black side
Q: What will you do about the people that have been falsely banned in the past, are you looking into better support methods in which they can contact and appeal?
N: You can appeal to BattlEye.
Q: Is it possible to obfuscate the K/D ratio so cheaters can’t actually see it?
N: We will remove a lot of unneeded info from the client with future updates.
Q: Is there anything being done with the raider/boss/rogue AI bug that kills you instantly? The post raid screen will show any number of bullets/hits (usually thorax 3-8 rounds depending on ammo type and your armor) when in reality you get shot once in a raid and die.
N: Yes we still try to replicate this bug.
Q: Any updates on sound fixing?
N: We did a bunch of good fixes in the last patch, more to come.
Q: When can I play Tarkov without desync, cheaters, stutters, bugs and glitches of all sorts, fps drops, broken sound, invisible players and 5+ minutes waiting for every raid? Watin’ since 2018.
N: Even when the game will be clean from that by 100% you will still write such type of comments.
Q: Is there any sort of lighting overhaul actually in the works? Interchange lighting is actually disgusting. But it’s not just that map. You can look at Woods and despite having the sun right overhead you can’t see shit if it’s under a tree. Visibility is just pretty poor right now in general.
N: Yes.
Q: What about the optics overhaul part 2? A lot of the longer range scopes are completely unusuable due to awful oversized reticles with either fixed or niche zoom levels. Also, I weep every time I see an ACOG in-game.
N: We want to make them better for the release
Q: Base flaw in Unity netcode. Old Tarkov ran an even worse set of netcode.
Custom netcode is REQUIRED for an FPS of this size on Unity.
My case and point is Rust. Rust development ENTIRELY REWROTE the netcode. Unity has since implemented better base code. BSG has improved that base code. It’s still flawed at the core however.
N: Rust is not even remotely complicated as EFT.
Q: Is a netcode refactor in the plan? I assume desync is bc of lack of experience of developers. N: No, dsync is not the lack of experience at the first place.
N: The reasons could be:
- networking failures on the line
- hardware hiccups
- client errors and issues
- traffic issues
- game server application errors (they are minimized at this point)
- game server overloading issues (pretty rare too)
- other issues
Q: I personally want to see some more QOL things after the cheating stuff(hopefully…) gets fixed or worked on. Mostly related to how many clicks it takes to sell multiple things on the flea market and to multiple traders. It just eats up a lot of time. Streamlining that would help improve the game a lot.
N: A lot of QoL features planned.
Q: Do you think bosses’ spawn rates are fine right now?
N: Spawn chances will be increased with time.
Q: What’s your take on Interchange illumination/fog situation?
N: It’s bad. Needs to be done differently.
Q: Since Reserve D2 extract expansion there’s not much action on the surface, are there any changes planned?
N: Probably.
Q: Please try to make quests and progression less grindy / a chore, it’s my 5th wipe and me and my friends get so discouraged when we get to the whole Shoreline Punisher questline, too big of a map with few points of interest
N: Yes.
Q: Will we ever be able to see how many players are playing at any given moment, for example like you can see it on Steam?
N: Maybe after the release.
Q: Are there plans to optimize the game further so the game can run decently on regular pc’s?
N: It’s always a priority. For example moving to the next versions of engine gives such abilities to optimize more.
Q: Using recoil as an example, the playerbase as a whole said this thing in the game feels bad to play and is bad on a technical level. Why did it require a video essay from a streamer for the dev team to make changes?
N: I don’t agree that it’s BAD. It could be done better and we will do it.
Q: Why there’s no “Lock sort” feature in stash? Such as select and drag multiple items at once. We need some of those QoL in order to spend less time in stash.
N: Planned.
Q: Why does it feel like actions are continually taken to make the game harder for casuals? It feels like a lot of changes (around item restrictions / quest gating / key usage limits usually) don’t actually add difficulty, only increase the grind time when our time can already be stretched thin by long queue times, untimely deaths etc?
N: EFT was never for casuals. All of the changes you described were done not for hardening casuals life – some of them were anti-RMT features, some were done to slow the progress in some points.
Q: What are your thoughts on co-op PvE only mode? It would allow people to play tarkov without being affected by cheaters.
N: We have coop PvE. It will not have an ability to save progression.
Q: Can you consider starting the huge recoil after the second shot when shooting full-auto (right now, recoil is huge after the first shot)? This way, it would be possible to single fire more accurately by tapping. But spraying would still be difficult because of the large recoil after the second shot.
N: Recoil will be reworked.
Q: Any update on Arenas soon?
N: Yes, soon.
Q: One reason you didn’t implement a replay system is that it would add a lot of additional stress to the already overburdened servers. The current network architecture must be problematic, are there any plans for an Operation Health update for Tarkov? Aside from addressing cheaters, it feels like the game could benefit from quality control of its current features. How likely is it that we will see a network overhaul and tick rate update in the future, let’s say by the end of 2023?
N: All of this is being done for Arena.
Q: Are there any plans to roll out more streamlined methods of communication? Timeframes, progress updates, periodic ban totals?
N: Yes. We will prepare a roadmap. I will answer questions.
Q: Any plans to start hiring developers away from Russia? It’s no longer feasible to hire developers and make them move to Russia considering the circumstances.
N: We have been hiring ppl all around the world since covid.
Q: Why is the game too grindy? Yes, you claimed you made changes to make it less grindy but it still feels extremely grindy for casual players. Nobody should be forced to kill 3 players each map to complete a quest.
N: EFT was not made for casuals
Q: On average, how many players are playing EFT at any given time?
N: Hundreds of thousands every day.
Q: Yeah though keep in mind he said “every day” meaning he probably isn’t talking about people online at one exact moment (which is what the OP asked)
N: Online varies from 70 to 120k lately.
Q: Is the population growing?
N: it always grows. don’t listen to those who keep saying that it’s over
Q: Is it even possible to make a raid replay system even if we had to download the replay on our end?
N: It’s possible.
Q: So why don’t you do it? it would save a LOT of unrequested reports, help detect cheaters, help people understand how and why they died a sus death + help them improve. The replay system will only bring positive things to the game
N: It requires netcode changes that we do rn for arena
Q: What changes BSG is planning to make in the future? Are you thinking about changing development directions? Did your short/mid/long term goals change?
N: We want to finalize everything and release the game.
Q: How is the progress on loadout presets for gear and stuff we bring into raid? Is it even in progress yet?
N: It’s planned and ready to be worked on.
Q: Why can’t use maps in pmcs special slot?…Players are resorting to using online third party maps (i.e. , tarkovbook(DOT)com, tarkov.help, etc)
N: Maps need to be refined.
Q: Labs coloured keycards have been unaffordable for the past 2 years. I’m talking red etc.
N: They are rare.
Q: When will we see new Lightkeeper content?
N: Next patches.
Q: Do you play the game at all? I feel like if you were to play the game the way we do much of these points in this thread will already be very obvious to you. For instance the invisible bug should have been obvious if any internal testing was done with groups as this was impacting almost every raid.
N: Yes I play the game and I struggle too. This is what EFT is about. Start to play, get rekt, repeat, become better.
Q: If the time between being ready to go in raid and actually starting the raid will be reduced to shorter time because i found out if you would be faster in game again after you die it would be waaay less frustrating and enjoyable to play another raid again than wait 15 minutes to play the tame again
N: I agree.
Q: Are you interested in doing a charity event of you or other BSG employees playing to reach lvl15 ? It’s not JUST to see you suffer like we do, lol, BSG not playing their own game is a huge source of frustration and confusion towards development. I feel that it would influence some decisions regarding balance.
N: BSG plays a LOT.
Q: Can Geneburn music be used for Tarkov’s content creation without worrying about copyright?
N: Yes you can
Q: Will there be any further dev time focused on reducing the loading time to get into raid. EU servers can still take 2-5 minutes (occasionally longer). This is one deciding factor when playing with friends. If we’re short on time (a couple of hours say), we’ll play something we can jump into quickly.
N: Yes
Q: Do you think you’ll need to rewrite the game on a clean foundation sooner or later ? I’m not only talking about cheating but also performance wise. It feels like you cornered yourself in a spaghetti mess and while I know how much time and money it would cost, at least it would be done once and for all.
Plus a clean code is easier to maintain and expand. I don’t know the code itself obviously but having invisible players and so many client side checks/infos is kinda telling.
N: No, it’s impossible to rewrite the game
Q: Are you still motivated with everything reddit is chucking at you at the moment?
N: Ofc
Q: How soon will we be able to change the email for our account?
N: We plan to bring it back
Q: Free roam mode is still planned?
N: Yes but there is a chance that it will be too hard to do with all of the detalisation
Q: There have been some fairly impactful events impacting you and your team over the past few years. Has that had an effect on hiring and sustainable growth of the teams?
N: Slightly. It became harder and we started working harder.
Q: Hello, any chance we get some kind of statistics on the raid end. Something like list of players, number of kills per player (scav and pmc kills). Maybe a map with routes every player took or something in that direction?
N: Something like this is planned
Q: Has BSG considered reaching out to the SPT community? I feel like there are untapped resources and man power in the modding community that BSG could utilize.
N: We are strongly against SPT. It’s bannable and most of it – a totally illegal product done without our permission. We will do some actions later
Q: Can we remove camera recoil 100%?
N: No
Q: Plans to remove weird shading (or thats what I think it is) from certain sunglasses which make them really stick out in fog through scopes? I’d want to rock them to make my PMC look better, but the disadvantage is too massive.
N: Yes, it bothers me for a long time. Eventually it will be fixed
Q: Can you consider adding a separate single player/co-op locally saved profile instance? I’m sure you’re already aware of the add-on that does one of those, and if you don’t plan on adding it yourself, can you consider supporting it in an official capacity?
N: Not now. Maybe later after release and some DLCs after
Q: Can you consider removing turn speed modifiers from equipment?
N: It will be removed but for now – lowered by 2 times
Q: Will shoulder swapping your weapon ever be implemented?
N: Yes.
Q: Is it at all possible to have one map like labs (maybe a new map) that is a pve raid only, solo or as a team? Like a regular MMO raid, that can have a curated story / atmosphere experience. Just one map, the rest will remain normal pvp. It can have a limited entry like labs.
N: There will be an initial first map available only for those who are below 10 lvl.
Q: Is there a plan for mantling animation? Tired of jumping over tiny objects that I should be able to walk over.
N: Yes.
Q: Would you consider making it so people can’t aim down any sights while using nvgs? That’s realistic, and would make the IR laser actually useful.
N: Yes.
Q: Any chance Killa could spawn in more predictable places?
N: We increased Killa spawn chance.
Q: Are there any changes coming to random number generated loot spawns? I find better loot in duffle bags than previously known hotspots for loot.
N: It’s a balancing question.
Q: If you are right-side peeking and walk out around a corner, there have been tests done, that, on average, the player peaking as a 200ms(!!!) advantage over the person being peaked.
N: We are optimizing networking and delay speeds but it will not go away totally unfortunately.
Q: I know that you said that major features aren’t coming to the game until release, but can you share any Stash/inventory management planned features? Kit selection, better filter tools, faster ways to sell loot to traders/flea, etc., if any?
N: Yes. there will be gear presets and other QoL features.
Q: Can we lower the ridiculous flea market level requirements please? i have never met someone who can have even 3 items on the flea market at a time.
N: Yes.
Q: AK12 when?
N: ASAP.
Q: Will animations for loading bullets into our mags be implemented before release?
N: Yes.
Q: “Remember me” button in the launcher login doesn’t work for him, and he has to log in every time. Then, If password wrong once and gets locked out for 1 hour. Any ideas on fixes (either to get remember me to work or to not get locked out for an hour on the first mistake)?
N: Noted.
Q: Is it realistic to slow down or stop new features, to allow you to finish or improve what you have? Btw it means a lot to see you engaging the community again. Hopefully it is mostly constructive / positive.
N: There will be no more big features until release
Q: Nikita I noticed you said “no more big features planned until after release”. Does that mean custom rigs and armor hit zones have been scrapped? Or are they just coming way later?
N: New armor hitzones and armor plates are planned.
Q: How about an option to lock cases in place in the stash? I would love to be able to auto sort without having to re-organize them
N: Planned.
Q: Would you say the game is moving towards your vision of what it should be at a satisfying rate? What would you say is the biggest issue standing in the way of acheiving that vision apart from RGB gamers?
N: Yes it moves in the right direction. There are no actual issues which slow or block the progress.
