Cheating always seems to come as part of the package when playing an online game.  The developers of the reborn urban combat based MMO, APB Reloaded have recently stepped up their attempts to destroy cheaters, people who regularly make games unfun to play or just people who took the "criminal" side of the game a bit too seriously.  An awesome message on their Dev Blog serves as a bold warning to hackers who attempt to permeate their free to play MMO.

They recently launched a patch, Patch 130, which apparently killed almost every single cheater that had cheats installed from one of the three main groups that apparently work to hack the game.  That is awesome news in itself.  But the Devs took it even further.

They watched like predators and finally pounced on their prey, eliminating large swarths of cheaters, permanently banning people left and right.  What is more amusing though, are the cheaters' responses.  The developers seem to have heard every excuse from the books, and they don't really care if your friend gave you his cheating account, you're done on their game if you cheated.

The Devs are not totally without mercy however, and are apparently offering amnesty.  However, with their generocity comes a price to be paid in order to return to the world of APB.  If you've cheated, you must prove you're remorseful, first by uninstalling the cheats (which in some cases were root-kits) and then proceed to play cleanly, then they may (and the Devs stressed MAY) let you back into the game.

I wondered why anyone would cheat in a free to play game, and further, what could the consequences be?  Well the developers have stated that almost 50% of the players banned were paid players, and that some had even spent large amounts of cash or played some around 1500 hours of the game.  This alone raises large amounts of "WHY!? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!?" questions, but, who knows with the mind of a cheater.

Kudos to the developers of APB: Reloaded for taking a hardline stance on cheating and apparently sticking to this.  It seems like it is one of those things you always hear about, but never really see anything done about.  There are some pretty amusing tears shed by the hackers on their forums that the developers have posted on their blog, but I wont repost them here.  Some of them contain some pretty strong language and even stronger tears.