The EFT subreddit r/EscapefromTarkov has gradually turned into a place of constant state of internal strife, one side complaining that the casuals are demanding too much in a hardcore FPS and the other accusing the rest of blindly supporting the devs gameplay changes. The popularity of EFT on twitch with steamers like Klean, Pestily, and LVNDMARK and the subsequent influx of players during March 2020 is often brought up as a turning point for the community. With every update there's waves of posts praising or trashing the game. Developers at BSG have been gradually reducing their interactions with the subreddit after increasing criticism of the game over networking, cheating, and balance issues.

• Cheating in-game has a financial incentive:

Because the game is centered around accumulating in-game items there is a large informal economy of users buying items with real money. Unlike other games like Runescape or CS:GO these items can only be sourced through killing other players or looting them from maps before other players. They generally enter a game together, the cheater flies around headshotting the other 10 players around the map and the customer gets all of their loot. Other times they can just fly around the map hoovering up rare items. There's no in-game killcam so accusations carry little weight unless people are blatantly cheating. Posts like these generally devolve into endless arguments about whether the other player was actually cheating or not, if it's network issues, or they just need to become a better player. In extreme cases there have been recorded instances of cheaters taking items directly from players' inventories while they're playing.

On December 3rd user survaeld made a post on the EFT subreddit claiming he got banned after killing 2 people on developer accounts, identified by their blue usernames. He posted footage and screenshots of them fighting in-game and the subsequent ban messages minutes later.

Player responses are as predicted:

Holy shit imagine dropping over $100 on EOD only to get banned by a pathetic Dev with next to no recourse because BSG's customer support is effectively non-existent and having to post this on Reddit in order to get a response. Abhorrent.

Holy shit bsg. I get killed by blatant cheaters. I report it both in-game, via launcher report, and to your devs on discord, with video proof. And that cheater is still leveling his account. A legit player kills a dev and you act like fucking children and ban him. Pathetic.

Lol christ. Imagine if he banned you because desync made it look like you were cheating. Holy fuck the irony.

A developer account responded in the comments, denying it was a manual ban and that it was a false alarm related to the anticheat system:

Can’t imagine such thing could happen, will have a look, thanks for sharing this case

Btw the guy has been unbanned and situation is solved, false alarm triggered, no one has banned him intentionally

Sorry, can’t tell you cause it’s part of anti cheat system, hope you understand

EFT implements battleye anti-cheat, popular third-party software used in other games such as Arma 2, Dayz, Rainbow Six Siege, and PUBG. The game has had false banwaves before including LVNDMARK, the massive twitch streamer as mentioned before, but the timing of survaeld's ban raised eyebrows. Automatic anti-cheat bans are also done in waves and there was no uptick in cheat forums reporting one at this time. 2 days later they edit their post to say their ban was overturned but without any further explanation by support and all progress on their account wiped. The opacity of the Escape from Tarkov's bans paired with the high price ($50~100USD) and financial incentives for cheating ensures it will remain an issue for the game.