The developers of Escape from Tarkov at Battlestate Games have announced that they will start taking action against dataminers leaking unreleased information about the game.
The announcement was made on the developer's social media, in which Battlestate explained their stance on the practice, why it damages the game and the community, and how it breaches the terms of service.
They also vowed to take action against personalities and account involved in datamining and sharing information originated from datamining. This goes all the way to banning their accounts.
You can read the full message below (sic).
Official statement from Battlestate Games on illegal datamining of the information
Data mining is defined as extracting information from massive datasets. In other words, it is the illegal infiltration of in-game code and databases in order to extract information that is intentionally hidden from users.
Dataminers decompile and decrypt the code, intercept and analyze traffic between client and server. Datamining tools often unpack and review game files to gather data about the game, mostly during the update season, when players download a lot of new data on their PCs.
One of the examples of datamining would be sharing percentages of a particular boss spawn chance on specific location or sharing the quest conditions and rewards before it is in the game. This does not only remove the "wow-effect" from the game but also makes the game much more predictable which does not align with the development vision.
Throughout the past few years, there was an increase of datamined information circling around various websites as well as accounts on social media. While some players believe that the developers of Escape from Tarkov are not sharing information about various hidden changes of the game, we also would like to remind that any data retrieval without official permission is a direct breach of clauses 4.2.2, 4.2.5, 4.2.11 and 4.3.4 of the license agreement.
We also would like to break down some popular misconception on why datamining is good from players perspective and help you all better understand why further changes are necessary:
1. Understanding what the difference between leaks and teaser is
We at Battlestate Games often ask players to be understanding about the teasers we post as they help us to get you more involved into upcoming updates without leaking too much information. This is in fact a very popular model that helps a lot of gaming companies get community hyped without damaging both the company and consumer.
2. Datamining can give unfair advantage over people who do not support it
By supporting datamining and sharing information in your videos you do not support your content in the long run but in fact support the particular person which is behind retrieving the information from the game. To add on the point above, it's not specifically fair to the part of the development team where a lot of people worked on the feature for a long time to get it revealed by a dataminer on the first day of the update. If you are looking for specific information, there is an official resource supported by Battlestate Games - Wikia - which may not be updated as frequently and in time but it does not use any illegal tools. Wiki is also a fully community-driven project and is always down to receive help from more experienced players to help keeping it up to date.
We will continue to work in the direction of transparency and share the information about the changes and updates with the amount of the information we believe will be enough for players to stay up-to-date with the recent flow of the development.
From the time of this statement being published we will start taking action towards all the personalities sharing the datamined information. This will result in all the in-game accounts involved in datamining and/or sharing data originating from datamining being banned and platforms getting involved receiving warnings and further actions taken afterwards.
We do this for the majority of our community who want to enjoy the events, the game and the development of it as the company intended. We thank you for all your ongoing support and are looking forward to the future of Tarkov and your part in it.
If you're unfamiliar with Escape from Tarkov, it's a popular multiplayer extraction first-person shooter for PC. Despite its availability, it's technically considered still in beta. Battlestate Games is also working on an FPS spin-off titled Escape from Tarkov Arena.
