Is boosting really that bad?

EDIT: Title should've been: Is boosting between two legitimate players that bad?

In light of the recent changes I have seen a fair bit of comments which were happy that people’s ability to “boost” was impacted. However, I don’t really understand why this is a big deal in Tarkov to begin with. Cheaters will cheat for many reasons, and I think the argument that item drop changes reduce boosting as a positive is pretty unsound.

I think there’s two different types of boosting: dropping friends items, and being assisted by a cheater to get items/xp/wipe the lobby.

Boosting really only seems to be an actual issue in ranked competitive games, e.g., CSGO. Someone gets boosted to a rank they don’t deserve to be in, handicapping their team and ruining the game. However, Tarkov is not a ranked team game. The best you can get is weapons or attachments out of your level range. Someone using better kit than they have access to shouldn’t be an issue. If they are worse than you, you get easy high value loot. If they are better, they likely would’ve beaten you anyway. Moreover, dropping friends keys for quests or items for hideout upgrades does not impact other players. I will not win a fight because I now am running a generator with my new dropped spark plug.

However, boosting via cheaters is bad because they hack and impact the entire lobby’s experience. But this would be the case regardless of their services: someone cheating and sucking up loot or wall hacking happens for a myriad of reasons. Maybe they are trying to engage in RMT, or being paid to wipe lobbies so Timmy can quest in peace, or stealth cheating, or rage hacking.

So while I’m glad that BSG is attempting to stop RMTing and therefore cheating, I think the comments I’ve seen that are thrown out in defence of these sweeping and poorly thought out changes are pretty weak when they rejoice in players being unable to boost their friends. It’s not an issue, and thinking that this will stop a large amount of cheaters from boosting others is simply not the case; your game will still be affected by their actions, they will just be cheating for different reasons.