Yeah honestly, I bought Tarkov second-hand for $8 and even then I felt like I was getting ripped off.

It’s probably not news to anyone but the game has extremely lax anti-cheat controls, to almost no anti-cheat controls.

As for why people would cheat in an online game, always seems obvious, but the cheats for Tarkov are so egregious they’re like full blown developer offline DEBUG TOOLS.

I don’t mean “oh no, aim assistance, and they can see you through walls” – the cheat tools are hooking into features of the GAME ENGINE ITSELF, allowing players to see:

PlayerName, Current HP, Current Level, Full inventory contents, currently equipped weapon, position, heading, estimated value of inventory, estimated value of your account, age of account creation, and so on.

They can also: Teleport, FLY, increase or decrease their run speed, jump height, and so on.

The cheaters are basically running around with admin privileges in the game, and the developers don’t give a flying fuck. It’s like GTA5 levels of cheating.

Why would anyone play such a game, much less pay $150 for it? You can pay to be abused by people for a lot less than that.

Whats sad is that people keep wanting more client-side anticheat to fix this, when the real answer is server-side anticheat and changing the engine to stop being so leaky with that much information.

It’s easy to just handwaive and say “Server side will fix it” but here’s a major issue:

You have to render people in before they appear. How do you do that without the client knowing where people are?

I don’t know game development but uh do you? What are you rendering when the player can’t see them? I might legitimately just not get what you mean

You constantly have to render people in when they can’t be seen but will soon be seen. Which also means instead of keeping track of just locations the server needs to render the scene in sufficient detail as to determine sightlines.

Usually games just do this by sending info to clients of where everyone is and letting the clients render people in when the client determines that the sightline isn’t interrupted.

Some games will just not send the positions until they’re within a certain range of each other, but I’m a realistic game like tark you’d need several kilometers of info in case someone scoped in.

If you don’t do this correctly it leads to characters popping into existence from thin air

You could use things like ray tracing to determine if one player can be seen by another on the serverside and only send packages when they can see.

But to resource heavy to do that.

You do see why that’s a serious issue right? Before the Server did nothing more than maintain a list of x,y,z coordinates of player positions. Now it’s rendering the entire game space and doing 3d calculations.

That’s several orders of magnitude more complex and costly.