Want To Cheat At Planetside 2? Sony Have Some News For You

It’s something of a forgone conclusion these days in gaming. If you play online games, shooters especially, you will run in to people who cheat. Now let’s make one thing clear right off the bat. They aren’t hackers, I would imagine the vast majority wouldn’t have the first clue how to alter code to make an aimbot, or a wallhack, but then nor would most of us. So let’s not give them the satisfaction of giving them that title, they are cheaters, people who buy a service from a website so that they can make up for their lack of skill by cheating. Some do it for the simple pleasure of making others gaming experience miserable.

It’s something I have never personally understood. I don’t know why you would want to cheat, it’s like playing a single player game with the difficulty right down and god mode enabled. I just don’t see how that’s fun to people. I agree in a single player game it can be fun using cheat codes, if you have already finished the game and want to mess around, I get that. But playing a competitive game and cheating? I would rather play fair and lose, than cheat and win. I don’t think I would ever get satisfaction out of it.

Some companies are taking an interesting approach to dealing with said people. With the release of Dark Souls, From Software released a Black Phantom in to the game of anyone playing it before the release date. The Black Phantom would be super high level boasting insurmountable stats, Edge had the details.

For Planetside 2 Sony Online Entertainment’s John Smedley has a similar set of ideas to go along with the usual banhammer as found out by PC Gamer.

“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.”

This is great to hear, because let’s face it, cheaters should feel embarrassed by their actions and we should be able to point and laugh. Smedley also went on to say.

“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.”

All good news to my ears, I don’t think you can find an argument for using hacks. Certainly not one that involves anything other than someone ranting in 1337 speak about how the rest of us are “n00bs”.

I do love to see this attitude from developers about this kind of thing, too often you see big companies (naming no names) take a very lacklustre position to their anti-cheat system, usually claiming it to be more advanced than before, only to find it making literally no difference. Hearing this kind of thing from SOE reminds us that some developers are gamers too, and they genuinely do care about our gaming experience. I am very much looking forward to hearing more about this. I hope it sets a standard with developers everywhere, this sort of thing shouldn’t be tolerated and needs to be stepped on quickly.