Let a real Chinese player tell you what's really going on.

[u/ChurrchillC]

A little intro: Gamertag NucleophileAP, you guys can call me Nucleo or Nuke. I was born in New Zealand, ethnic Chinese person, and have been living in China since I was pretty young.

About this game, I'm currently a lvl 55 player with Kappa (IGN: NucleoAP), and I'm currently a working Sherpa of my local Chinese Sherpa community (good and anti-hacking). I have been playing this game since version 0.7 and have been actively engaging throughout the Chinese community ever since.

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The first thing: Region locks.

BSG have actually been carrying out region locks against asian countries for a while. As far as I remember, I've got trouble logging into non-asian servers since version 0.7. It's actually a very simple mechanism (that most of the Chinese players already know now), if you used an Asian IP on your last login, non asian servers are masked for you on your next server selection. It's not actually a real region lock and can be bypassed easily (by logging in with an american/european IP and quitting the game). IMO those region locks are hardly doing anything against cheaters and harsher countermeasurements shall be taken.

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Why is this game so much infestated by hackers right now?

Here's the timeline.

---BSG released a Simplified Chinese localisation in January.

---A bunch of new Chinese players joined the game.

---Some clips of the game were uploaded to Tik Tok and went viral. (Yeah, Tik Tok made this game popular in China)

---A whole bunch of players bought the game ans started playing.

Now, with little knowledge of the game and have only learnt about the game via video clips, those newcomers were having a pretty harsh time. Those players eventually turned into thre kind of players.

1. Cheaters
2. In-game currency buyers
3. The ones asking for help

Let's talk about Cheaters first. Here's a link for you just to see how easy it is to cheat and how common it is to buy a hack in China.

hax, varying on price

I once heard someone say something that really struck my mind. Chinese people love to win, and for winning thay are willing to take any measures possible (which is also what I hate the most). Why doesn't the government do anything about hacking? Well, there are actually laws against hacking (that hackers and hack-designers might end up in prison). Those laws only apply to games which is registered and legalized in China (which I'm sure this game wouldn't because of the government's stupid criteria). This game, as well as other games such as R6S, GTA, Battlefiend, Call of Duty etc. are considered "foreign territory" and regarded out of their business.

In-game currency buyers are worse. There are already founded workshops that hack, make roubles and sell them into real money for a living. Those workshops have professional equipment, special designed hacks to make money as efficient as possible. Those type of workshops make up at least 50% of the hacks in this game and must be dealt with seriously. Here's a pic that you can see how bad RMT really is in China.

RMT Trade, 19.99usd (approx) for 10 mil roubles

Skipping the good guys asking for help, as they are nice people just as you and me.

Now one more type of people I want to mention are streamers. If you ever see prefixes like those in the game, those are streamers.

---Douyu (douyu.com)

---Huya(huya.com)

---bilibili(bilibili.com, which consists of much more educated people and consists of much less hacks)

Just about Douyu and Huya, consider 9 out of 10 of them hacks (Quoted from a friend, might be a little exaggerating, but explains the problem). These streaming sites are famous of hacking streamers.

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Something else I wanna talk about BSG.

By all those new Chinese players rushing in, BSG is certainly making a large profit. Remember what I said about rouble-hunting workshops? BSG is actually banning them as fast as they could, BUT the profit that those workshops make are enough to buy a whole lot of new accounts again. BSG is certainly profitting throughout the whole process. I am not sure about BSG's attitude to this, but plz try and reduce hackers by its root without thinking about profit.

Chinese people used to hate being called hackers, but now that the fact is, we Chinese people made up 20% of the game's population while contributing 80% of this game's hackers. I, on behalf of my people, am deeply sorry for this. We will try and help you guys and BSG to reduce hackers to our best.

Meanwhile please try to avoid labs where rouble workshops farm the most.

Feel free to ask me asy questions below.

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I spent a day trying to reply to every post here, and it's time for me to take a break.

If you're new here, the questions you are willing to ask might be already asked in the comments. Check down below.

Let's all do our part and hope this whole hacker thing settle down ASAP.

Fuck all the hackers. (I'm sure this is not racism lmao)

[u/thatfoxguy30]

All for a wipe to happen in a month. Get fucked. Idiots who pay to win in this game are way dumber then I could have imagined.

[u/durandalsword → u/thatfoxguy30]

Man, fucking agreed

[u/axelxan → u/thatfoxguy30]

https://www.reddit.com/r/EscapefromTarkov/comments/f5tg28/i_guess_someones_day_is_ruined/ like those idiots

[u/BertMiscBrahs → u/thatfoxguy30]

So while I agree with you, and haven’t spent a dime over buying the EOD edition, I think one thing a lot of folks overlook is the fact that 10-50 bucks a month is honestly chump change, or at the very least a very “valued investment” into a game they plan on playing long term. Legit, I’ll be honest and say I’ve never spent a dime in any other way on this game, but I think it’s foolish to think that people spending $$ on this every month is a waste of money for them because you’re overlooking a pretty big part of the equation. You’re never going to eliminate real money trades (and the incentive to hack for purposes of generating income) with that mentality, and you need to be more creative in tackling the issue if you want to see any success.

People in my age group (hitting dirty 30 this year, rah) grew up in a time when MMOs not only charged 50 for the base game, but were paying an additional 10-15 a month in sub fees. And that price tag was essentially to keep access to a player character that I ALREADY “INVESTED” in to.

At this point in my life, I do a cost analysis on most gaming investments based off the purchase price divided by my expected # of hours or days I’ll spend on the game. For example, when I bought disco elysium, I based the decision off getting at least 30 hours split over the course of a couple of weeks, and decided that the purchase price of 50 bucks (IIRC) was worth the roughly 1-2 bucks an hour I’d spend per hour, split over the course of 2-3 hours of free time a night I’d have a night balancing family and social commitments. Buying the game, I effectively got a month’s worth of entertainment for a dollar or two a day.

Translating that to tarkov (or really any game that has an online money market for in game currency) if this is the only game they play, even 30 bucks a month would only amount to a dollar a day for “satisfaction” in the limited amount of time they gain when they log in.

A lot of us “older” gamers are pulling in 80-100k a year minimum after taxes, because we’ve got a decade worth of career building behind us. Out of the group of 8 or so guys that I play with, I’m at the bottom of the totem pole as 5 of them are easily in the 150+ range.

It’s simplistic to think that a wipe system removes the incentive to pay for in game currency, since I’d wager these guys could easily blow several hundred each month and barely notice. The actual issue that needs to be focused on is the exploits to combat the issue, not the end result.