Sony President John Smedley took to Reddit to clarify some misconceptions about PlanetSide 2's banning and suspension policies after the recent spate of bans.
He wrote that the company is diligent when it comes to cheating accusations on its free-to-play MMO. If a player is accused by another player of being an aimbot — a auto-aim program to assist players — an investigation is launched to confirm if the accusation is founded. What may seem like an aimbotter to a player could be just a very good player, Smedley pointed out.
"Telling the difference can be tough for our players sometimes but it's not for us. However we are careful about who we ban," he wrote.
The game has good hacking detection algorithms, but according to Smedley it isn't perfect and "there are some things that are very hard to detect." .
An account will be temporarily suspended if it is suspected of cheating. If proven guilty, the account and all other accounts owned by the user are banned. The myth of the "seven day ban" was also blown away — there are only account suspensions that last seven days if a player is found breaking the rules.
Smedley also noted that the fight against cheaters is an ongoing one, whatever new defenses the company puts in place, cheaters will always find a way around it. He went on to say that the company hates cheaters as much as the players do and it's "busting our asses to get them out of the game."
Smedley said that that he was blown away by how sophisticated some of the cheating operations are after viewing some of the major cheat sites for himself. Sony is working on fighting those operations on the legal level.
"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)," he wrote. "But we have the resources to fight this fight and we will keep doing it."
The banning clarifications come a month after Smedley tweeted that "Our CS guys are banning the crap out of a whole bunch of idiots."