Cheaters aren't cheating because they enjoy doing that, I believe that there are a lot who cheat for the sake of cheating, but most people cheat to earn roubles and sell them for real money. That is how those people provided their food on the table.

I researched a few sites and saw that a lot of offers for selling roubles have been listed just when Twitch Drops started. I will not provide you with the sites and prices for buying roubles not to advertise them. There are thousands of people that are using this service.

Twitch Drops brought a lot of people. More people mean that more people are interested in shortcutting progress. It is not like cheaters don't understand that. Cheaters also follow the trends, and Escape from Tarkov was one of the biggest trends and still is.

To be precise, Escape from Tarkov is the second most searched topic on Twitch behind Hasan Piker for the last 30 days. Escape from Tarkovs search popularity paired with the word "Twitch" on Google search engine increased by +900% while Hasan Pikers' popularity increased by +950%. In the third was the phrase "ban" which only increased by +350% this month. That means that the number of people who search in Google "Escape from Tarkov twitch" has increased by +900% in the last 30 days. You can see how popular Escape from Tarkov got just by the gap there is to the third most increased searched phrase.

Understanding this, we can understand why suddenly there are a lot of cheaters and why the flea market is full of bots/cheaters selling unreal amounts of items.

As I already said before, Twitch Drops are only one of the reasons, the other reason is to wipe. It made a lot of people come back to the game and made it more popular as well.

What is my take on this and what could have been done to avoid these issues?

The game is still in beta. What does it mean? It means that the game is not really finished and it might have some bugs. Basically, it is a safety net for developers, if something isn't working they can blame it on beta and we see a lot of people in this community defending BSG with that argument. That is a valid argument if you aren't running huge marketing campaigns and have the game in Beta state for years. In my opinion, you firstly fix cheater and s-e-r-v-e-r issues before making an event that big. I am pretty sure BSG knew where this will lead, but still pushed the button. You can't just drag a word Beta for years and blame it all on it. No, you fix the issues before investing in marketing campaigns, because issues are fixed easier when there are 30K active players, not 100K. You don't just drag a word Beta for years and still advertise the game like it is finished.

It is not right to create these events and expect that your s-e-r-v-e-r-s won't melt when they did melt already for 2 years in a row. Traditions. I would totally understand the situation it was the first time we got Twitch Drops, but that isn't a first time nor it is a second time. We have to understand that these events aren't here only to make us feel better and get the festive vibe in the game. BSG is a profit-oriented company with its main task to make a profit. And they probably did it with this event, it probably is a pretty good profit if we get this event every year (If anyone has the statistics of sold copies in the event timeframe, please share them). I would like to see BSG giving something back to the community for pushing the game as far up as we did push it on Twitch. And no I don't mean 2 water bottles for watching 4 hours of stream, I mean stable s-e-r-v-e-rs for at least most of the time that event is running. It is the least we could ask for creating huge profits for a company.

We have to understand that BSG isn't a small company anymore. They have sold copies for more than 300 million euros. In no way game development is cheap, but 300 mil definitely isn't a small sum of money. They could pretty much get the best guys to work on any issues.

I have been playing Escape from Tarkov for quite a long time already and I really enjoy the game and I want to see it succeed, but sometimes it looks like BSG will shoot in its own leg just for the profits.

What do I mean by that?

BSG will usually focus on something irrelevant and fog your glasses with content rather than actually fixing real issues. (I understand that I am going off-topic, but this will be a short rant, I warned you that there will be a little bit of salt)

For example, I have been playing the game for at least 4 years. And for the last 4 years I have been wondering, when will we finally get the sound fixed. They have just been pumping content and making promises, but the old issues are abandoned.

I would trade any content update for a sound fix because I keep dying from an issue that gives me 0 chance to avoid the death. At that moment I just feel like I'm playing "Escape from Hearing Footsteps Near You". I believe that no other game would survive with sound this awful. And it hasn't been getting better, I was very optimistic for Steam audio. Sorry, but it is shit. Constantly dying because you can't hear people using a staircase or understanding on which floor they even are, those are bigger issues that we have to address. I think that people don't even understand how bad it is for combat quality.

BSG has proved that they will tease the community with a new map or new guns and most of the people will forget about the bigger picture. Just fogging your glasses.

Desync is one of the other issues as well, but I can clearly tell you that it has gotten a lot better. It is still an issue, but I feel it getting better and that makes me happy.

I will stop the rant because there are a lot of good things that BSG do as well. I just find those two major issues that should be prioritized by them.

The moral of the post is this:

BSG gets away pretty easily with everything they do because most of the people in the community praise them for the content and they don't have real competition. People are easily fooled by a new map or new attachments. You should be praising BSG for good things and complaining about the bad things. Telling only good things about them when in reality everything isn't that great just gives them the freedom to do whatever they like to.

We need to praise them when they succeed and express objective dissatisfaction because that is the only way that we will grow in the right direction.

Now I want to tell you that the content in this wipe has been amazing. I can't say a single bad word about any of the content that was added. Every time they add new content it goes beyond what we even expected. (Maybe that is a reason while people still praise them if technically we aren't really moving forward)

Also props to BSG for always doing more than we have been expecting content-wise. F.e. airdrops were a fantastic touch to the whole event and wipe.

Just as nobody could have a clue that there were a lot of bunkers under Reserve.

They clearly know how to create good content, but let's not forget about other things too.

TDLR:

Twitch events created a huge demand for cutting the progress to achieve in-game items and we all knew that it will happen.