Confirmed, Hackers banned for 3-10 days. [Statement from Smed]

[Roy Awesome]

Updated OP:

Originally Posted by Smed

I wanted to briefly explain how we approach banning and clear up some misconceptions out there.

First off. If we have clear evidence of a person cheating we ban them. We search for any other accounts they have and we ban those too. We have very good hacking detection algorithms. They aren't perfect though. There are some things that are very hard to detect. There is no "7 day ban". That's a myth. Sometimes we suspend someone for 7 days. This is typically someone who is breaking a rule but it doesn't warrant banning. Sometimes we suspend people for something while we actually suspect them of cheating. We'll watch them when they come back and the GM's are able to watch people while they play to make sure we're satisfied they are cheating.

Sometimes people say "But this guy is an obvious aimbotter". That may be true. It may not be. There are a lot of really good people in this game. There are also aimbotting scumbags. Telling the difference can be tough for our players sometimes but it's not for us. However we are careful about who we ban. We don't just ban because some player reports and says person X is an aimbotter. We actually put in the time to confirm this.

Also please don't use the new player site as "proof" that someone is cheating. I said when we launched it that it's still beta and we're still working out some data issues.

Also please realize the fight against cheaters is not a war we will ever be finished with. We make new detection and anti-hack code, they spend time and try and work around it. It's a constant effort. We just want you to know we hate them just as much as you do and we're busting our asses to get them out of the game. Do we do it as fast as you might like? Not all the time no. But we also don't want to falsely accuse people without solid proof.

I hope this helps clear this up at least a little. I'm sure there will be people that don't think we're doing enough. After having personally viewed some of the major cheat sites I can tell you I'm blown away by how sophisticated some of these operations are. They are making money on this. We're working on that from another angle too that I'm not going to go into just yet (hint. it involves lawyers) . But we have the resources to fight this fight and we will keep doing it.
Smed

http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/c...ingsuspension/

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This is a cross post from Reddit, posted by ArcFault (who doesn't have an account here). The original thread is here: http://redd.it/194qqy

We don't need to cross reference anything. Use it.. we'll find you. we'll find your family. we'll hunt you down.

-John Smedley on Hackers via Twitter


So this post is about SOE's policy regarding hackers, not technical aspects of it which is a different issue and not one we're going to address here.

I think it's completely unacceptable that hackers are given a free pass like this in this game. I understand there is a business aspect to this, I do, and if someone who was hacking decides they want to play legit then great! But they should start over with a new character. Their old character should have it stats reset and that character should be explicitly labeled "Hacker" on their stats in huge, red, comic sans letters.

If I had it my way, the person who reported them for hacking with proof would get the hacker's character name mounted on their in-game profile like a taxidermed moose-head. Players who follow the rules and support the game should have the ability to know if the person that beats them consistently is the real deal or not.

The hacker paranoia has taken hold within the community. I've seen hackers that I am 100% sure about make it all the way to ~BR30. I have a list of people whom I suspect, but am not sure about, whose BRs are well into 50+ and beyond. It must be really nice to be able to give yourself a little handicap over legitimate players without fear of repercussions. Also, since money=station cash=weapons=certs it must be nice to steal your way through the game.

How do I know this and where's my proof?

Well funny enough, I got to talk to someone who made a hacker account to counter-hack (LOL) one of Mattherson's more well-known long term and ridiculously obvious hackers - VanuSerpentor(BR29) (And heshe's TR alt LordSerpentor). Here's a sample of LordSerpentor in a mossie: here . I have multiple videos of this scumbag who was reported multiple times by multiple people. Anyways, the hacker named their character VenuSerpentor and then proceeded to counter-hack the shit out of VanuSerpentor in some attempt to bring cosmic balance to Auraxis. It was pretty funny. Now VenuSerpentor also hacked everyone else ridiculous amounts and got a stern 7 day ban. That's it.

Here's the email and here's their stats prior to having the ban lifted:

E-mail: http://i.imgur.com/uCozY6n.png

Stats: http://imgur.com/I1layDq,qfjk0pF#1

Here's their stat page after the ban is lifted:

Post ban stats: http://imgur.com/I1layDq,qfjk0pF#0

Yep, everything is still there on the character, the hacker confirmed that all his unlocks were available, and he got some nice passive cert gain!

This is not a one-time thing. I have multiple confirmations from different hackers at different BR levels (one at BR40). I'm keeping some of it to myself for now because I want to see what happens to these people. I wouldn't be surprised if nothing does.

This sure as hell isn't the hard-line against cheaters Smedley was proclaiming a few months ago. You may never be able to completely rid online games of cheaters but when your policy is to just give them a free pass - that's completely unacceptable to me and probably a lot of you in the community. If I ever stop playing this game, as one of the paying customers, it will be for shit like this. Apologies for making this a public ordeal but this discussion has been private long enough with very little change in direction.