SOE's John Smedley on cheaters: "We'll hunt you down"

One-upping his own company's self-proclaimed " extremely aggressive " stance on squelching aimbot programs in PlanetSide 2, SOE President John Smedley seemingly hired a computer-savvy pro wrestler to tweet a warning (via PCGamesN ) to abominable aimbotters across Auraxis, writing, "Use [them]...and we'll find you. We'll find your family. We'll hunt you down."

@ wutzi_bu we don't need to cross reference anything. Use it.. we'll find you. we'll find your family. we'll hunt you down.December 4, 2012

Smedley subsequently blasted out "AND WE'LL SHAVE YOUR CATS!" which is something I totally made up and didn't really happen. He did, however, call out a specific hacker for boneheadedly including a link to an aimbot program in the signature of email addresses used to register three PlanetSide 2 accounts.

"Haruhi at artificialaiming.com was just banned," Smedley wrote. "All three of his accounts. Goodbye, you scumbag. Find a new hobby or get good at the game."

Still, PlanetSide 2's breathtaking immensity yet houses cheaters eluding SOE's net so far, as forum threads of reported hacker sightings have climbed in page count as more players chime in. Anecdotal anomalies certainly exist, as secondary leaderboards keep track of strangely lopsided kill-death ratios emerging from certain soldiers.

"Honestly, I thought hacker stories were a bit over the top on the forums until I played on the EU Miller server today," wrote one player. "Holy smokes. Guys running at 100 KMH shooting everybody while strafing, a Vanu with a shotgun blinking around one-shotting everybody, and similar hilarious hacks. Honestly, I see this game getting a real bad rep real fast if this isn't addressed soon."

Omri Petitte is a former PC Gamer associate editor and long-time freelance writer covering news and reviews. If you spot his name, it probably means you're reading about some kind of first-person shooter. Why yes, he would like to talk to you about Battlefield. Do you have a few days?