PlanetSide 2 cheats can expect cruel and unusual punishment, vows SOE president

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SOE president John Smedley has been outspoken about his hatred of cheats, and in an interview with us (to be published in full later today) he promised that he will do his best to embarrass those who flout and circumvent the rules of PlanetSide 2.

“Finding the ability to virtually tar and feather cheaters in game is quite entertaining for us, and we want to make an example of them in a big way. We want people to be genuinely embarrassed by it, but you can't go to such extremes that it becomes a badge of honour for them. So we're looking at doing some different things that will really piss the cheaters off.

“I won't mince words: I hate cheaters. I don't like people who ruin the experience for everyone else, and – quite frankly – we see cheats as a threat to our game and a threat to our livelihood. So we take it very seriously, and we're not passive about it. The idea of someone ruining someone else's fun by cheating is something that really gets under my skin. It's something we're focusing a lot of resources on. We know cheaters are always going to be there, so it's our job to find them, root them out, and remove them from our game. And we do that every single day.”

Even last night he took to Twitter to lambast the ne'erdowells disrupting epic MMO shooter PlanetSide 2, joyously announcing that 307 accounts had been banned over the last weekend, and going so far as to attempt to interrogate a self-confessed cheat over Skype.

“I wish there was a mathematical way to represent cheaters tears of sadness when they are banned as XP for the whole server,” Tweeted Smedley.

Keep an eye out for the full transcript of our interview later today. It's really quite exciting!