Please don't ban Aimbotters and Cheaters.

Dedicating special game mechanics to give cheaters recognition is a terrible idea IMO. They will only embrace it as a badge and keep at it. The screen should go black, game should exit, and accounts banned. End of story.

Game gets reinstalled, hack gets reinstalled, new account gets created, ad infinitum.

Making the hackers feel inferior because they hack is what will keep them from hacking. As soon as they start seeing things (the "ghosts" I suggested somewhere that wallhacks and aimbots would pick up, but are in fact bots that don't interact in any way with the game) and have the hacks give them a disadvantage (they ambush empty spaces and shoot ghosts that don't have collision detection enabled on the server instead of real enemies), they may even uninstall the hacks.
The feeling of frustration will make them give up, just like they gave up on following the rules because they couldn't get the scores they want.

Another thing is that I know of 3 companies that develop hacks for PS 2. If they have to pay SOE a few million each due to a court verdict, any smaller companies will also quit advertising for fear of Sony lawyers.

If I ever get into player behaviour in a games company - or am involved in developing any sort of game, I will take by your methods in dealing with hackers etc. (which will never happen xD)

I was an administrator in a few communities with such powers, now I wish I ****** around with the hackers more :'(.

Every time a flagged hacker kills someone, he takes 100% of damage dealt and also dies. The person he killed receives 200 XP for a hacker kill.

just change the scorpion to this
https://twitter.com/j_smedley/status/276518205160300544/photo/1/large
and ofc target the flagged hackers

I think that if SOE created an option to buy the opportunity to do this, they'd make back all the losses of 2012 in a month...

Or, give the cheaters and aimbotters a glowing orange camo and just turn off friendly fire warnings when you shoot one of the cheaters so noone will get any penalties for killing them.

Ha ha ha.

I like this.
Trolling the cheater.

Leave the cheater high lighted for a certain amount of time before getting banned.

Haha It would have been a sight to behold indeed. I'd love to see it, but it's kinda flawed since they're trying to get serious Awesome ideas, sucks to know it'll never happen

That would be hilarious. Everyone would kill the highlighted players even their own teammates. Hahaha oh man I can already see so much fun with that like planting C4 on the butt of my aim botter friendlies.

None of this is realistic because SOE do not currently have an easy way to find these client side cheats. If they did, they would be banning them. Their primary method for catching aimbotters is to literally spawn an invincible enemy player, run around a battle in which a cheater has been /report-ed and wait for the aimbotter to get stuck on them. They have inexplicably created a free to play game in which their only tool is to physically find and see the cheater using his cheaters - its stone age technology and pretty sad to see.

Ouch

would be more fun to let that person flounder around for a while without knowing they have been caught with lower damage and horrible bloom. Easy kills for all the people they killed before.

After a while they will notice they have been caught and create a new account, but at least it won't be immediate like when they are banned.

If they stick around and still keep using cheats on that account then just keep lowering their damage.

I like your ideas, but I'd like to add one for those who think they can code around it. Create a hacker jail in the middle of the continent. Spawn with only a knife (special class, Traitor). Make them a 4th empire so they can't use any terminals to get new gear just in case they find a way to wall hack out of it. Die, and respawn back at the jail.

Will give us somewhere to vent while we wait for instant action buttons to refresh, or at least an interesting stand-off between different factions where they just decide to attack the traitors rather than each other.

eventually this will get annoying for even the most devout hacker.

This however would violate SOEs repulsion to naming hackers, but meh.

On second though, why waste the bandwidth and server resources on this scum. Ban them.

Yeah....
Would probably be considered as unnecessary effort for PS2 Operatives.

A shame really.

should create the feared and no solution error "error .exe" xD

Give 100 certs to anyone that reports a hacker that is banned within the next 24 hours.
Within days the community will grab it's torches and pitchforks and the hunt will be on for real.
Everyone wants certs. Give them what they want, and they will find the hackers for you...
If the GMs can sort through all of the bogus and fake claims that are made when someone spams
"report <insert name here> he/she is hacking" in the global chat over and over again.

It would at least force the aimbotters to go covert, and tone their programs down to humanlike performance levels.

really hope this is not true and damn that would be freaking sad and yes stone age -_-

Wow man, just wow. I dunno if this is the solution, but I definitely like where you are going with the idea. Eff with players so they don't know they've been flagged for cheating by being banned. My one worry is that people who live with a cheater will spam the forums and customer support with videos of weird nonsense bugs, because they don't know they would have been banned to suspicion of being a cheater's alternate account.

This is silly - SOE's problem is finding the cheaters and keeping them from spending 3 minutes to make a new account. The problem is not knowing what to do with them. Until SOE develops a fast, automated system, cheating is going to be at least a moderate problem.