Perhaps taking a cue from Blizzard, Daybreak Game Company President John Smedley recently revealed on Twitter than nearly 25,000 H1Z1 players have been clobbered with the banhammer for cheating. He then went a little beyond what normally comes out of such announcements, referring to the site supplying the cheats as "cockroaches" who need to be put out of business.

After tweeting yesterday that "24,837 have been banned for cheating," Smedley followed up today with an unexpected, and obviously unserious, exhortation to cheaters to continue doing their thing. "Please keep using and supporting TMCHEATS," he wrote. "We aren't banning users who use it at all."

But when users questioned his apparent support of the TMCheats site, and the wisdom of provoking people who use it, he took a much less lighthearted approach. "You don't think we know these cockroaches? We do. We are going to be relentless and public. Screw not provoking them," he warned. "As a proud PC gamer that site and others like it disgust me and we collectively need to put them out of business."

He was equally unequivocal when someone pointed out that the number of banned players added up to nearly $500,000 in revenue, replying, "I'm saying we don't want their damn money. We don't want them back."

Smedley didn't specify which cheats in particular had led to the bans, but the TMCheats site offers a number of H1Z1 hacks and cheats including aimbots, instant-kill weapons, the ability to shoot through walls, eliminate weapon recoil, and avoid falling damage, and of course various anti-cheating countermeasures. Not the sorts of thing, in other words, that are likely to make a game about surviving in a zombie-infested wasteland a whole lot of fun for other players.

We spoke with Smedley earlier this month about Daybreak Game Company, H1Z1, and what the future without Sony might look like. Read it here.