Planetside 2: "It's not tough for us" to spot aimbotters, says Smedley

Planetside 2's development team is betetr at identifying cheaters than you, says Sony Online Entertainment boss John Smedley.

Taking to Reddit with a slightly frustrated-sounding post, Smedley addressed the complaints that always plague competitive multiplayer games: the the most successful players are cheating, and that the moderation team don't respond appropiately.

"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," he said.

The executive admitted that the algorithms aren't always perfect, but SoE has other methods of detecting hackers and cheaters.

"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," he said.

"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," he added.

"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."

Smedley asked players not to jump to conclusions based on publicly available data, but to trust in SoE to detect if someone is hacking or if they really are just much better than you.

"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," he said.

"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."

Finally, the executive said he's "blown away" by how sophisticated cheats and hacks are and that individuals are making money off them. He implied that SoE is taking legal action against hackers, which some see as a losing battle.

"But we have the resources to fight this fight and we will keep doing it," he concluded.

Planetside 2 is a free-to-play shooter MMO.