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counting cheaters part 3

Update: I check this every two months. My latest (June 2022) can be found here: https://itarkovpoorly.blogspot.com/2022/06/counting-cheater-part-4.html


How to estimate the number of people cheating in Escape from Tarkov?  I have discussed this twice before (here and here) .  The last time there was a ban wave I went through all my raids in 12.12 and gathered up the names of all the people who had killed me. Then I went to try to look them up in the Chat/Friends tool in EFT.   I had been killed by 14 people before the February ban wave, and 4 of them could no longer be found in the Chat/Friends tool.  

Another ban wave was announced this week.  So I went and checked again, re-auditing all my killers (where two more were discovered no longer in the Chat system).  It's not a lot of data, and I'm reluctant to draw conclusions from it. But it's some data. 

PMC Who Have Killed Me

  • since the last time I checked, I have been killed 10 more times by other players. And 4 of those players are no longer reachable in the Chat tool, suggesting they have either changed their name or been banned.
  • Across all of wipe 12.12 I have run 114 PMC raids. I have survived 55 of those, had two run throughs, and have died 57 times.  (Survival rate of 48%).
  • Across all of wipe 12.12 I have been killed 34 times by some other PMC.
  • Out of those 34 killers, 24 remain in the chat tool today
  • Out of those 34 killers, 10 are no longer discoverable with the chat tool.
  • For what it is worth, I exclusively play on west coast servers (Seattle and Vancouver) and when I play it's usually later in the evenings (10PM Pacific Time or later)
Make of that what you will. 

PMC I have killed

  • since the start of the wipe 12.12 I have killed 17 PMCs.  I've successfully gotten 15 of those dog tags.
  • I've also found two other dog tags of PMCs who were killed by scavs. For a total of 17 dog tags in my collection right now.
  • I looked up each of those tags in the chat tool, and every one of them is still there. Not a single one has been banned or changed their account names.
  • every tag I looked up has continued to advance since I took their tag. Some only by one level, but most by several or more.

Conclusions

It's very difficult to estimate how many players are cheating. For starters, Player Scavs don't have tags or names that I can look up, so they are omitted from the count. Further, there are plenty of players who I encounter in raids but neither kill or am killed by them. Also, it's expected that cheaters will have an outsized role. Of the 15 PMCs I've killed (and tracked) none of them have been banned, which strongly suggests that not only am I a terrible player, but I haven't yet killed a cheater. Conversely, nearly a third of the people who have killed me this wipe are no longer in the chat system, suggesting they have been banned for cheating. One third. One out of three of my deaths at the hand of a PMC, one out of six of my failed raids (because I have been dying too much to scavs of late), one out of eleven of all my raids. 

As I discussed in my very first post on this topic, if I'm encountering a cheater in one out of eleven raids, that doesn't mean that there is only a cheater in every eleventh raid. You have to count by the number of encounters, and a cheater encounter every eleven raids for medium populated raids is most likely only possible if there is someone cheating in every raid. Though, maybe that calculation doesn't account for the cheater's outsized role - which my killers vs. kills strongly indicates.
  
I find this very discouraging. Lately I've been playing offline a lot. In part, it's because my window to play has gotten shorter and later and it's just easier to screw around offline. And, in part, it's because I've been trying to chase down Punisher 4 and am just not encountering anyone on Shoreline right now - it's so boring and hard to stay motivated. But also, having done these calculations, what's the point?

I guess it's a new game: trying to encounter and fight other real players before being encountered by a cheater. And, I will say this, in Wipe 12.12 I have only had a few sus deaths where I suspected someone was cheating.  I did not suspect most of my killers of cheating and was surprised when I couldn't find them in the chat tool. 

There are streamers who play hours every day, and its entirely possible that someone could go through and gather the names of the killed and killers and try looking them up in the chat tool. That'd be a substantial chunk of data, much better than my little 114 raids of data.





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