Basjefar, I agree with you. But if you just don't have the manpower or dont care to fend off a take-over, this is the way to go. Shooting at where the most trouble is coming from.
I also agree that there is a lot of colateral damage, but I think they weighted both and found the colateral worth it.
Mind you, I am not saying the same will happen on AW/HW. We don't believe in clan liability and take more pains to ensure that offenders that repeatedly get on our nerves stay away from us.
But that is just us.
As for keeping the player-base happy... that certainly is as double-edged theme .)
In our case we did not put the server up for the community, we placed it for our members that wanted one and we have no trouble with it, if it get's less popular. (remember, we have just 3 rules... a) English only b) no foul language / no insults c) common sense)
If enforcing these 3 rules make the server unattractive to others, we have no quarrel with those that can't / will not abide, as we have no desire to play with/against ppl that a) speak in a laguage we don't understand b) keep on swearing or c) have no common sense.
Face it, those that try to stick to our rules are the ones we like to play with (not necessarily only on our server) and we found some new friends while sticking out for what we believe to be a solid base to get a game going.
And if somebody absolutely has to curse to speak his mind freely, I will not stand by and listen to him/her. If he has not been taught to speak properly w/o offending others I can not see him/her becoming a friend or having fun with him/her playing against. And if I/we have no fun playing on our own server, there just is no use keeping the server up, is there?
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Quick statistic, just for today:
AW has now 39 perm-bans,
3 were from before today,
2 were issued after "Fuck off, I speak like I want to"
4 were deconner,
that leaves 30 others clients that were banned because they ignored 2 times "cp ^3stick to English here", ignored the following !mute.
And while I was writing this the next "kurva kurva" has been muted.
That shows that a) satgnu did work as a filter for those ignorants and b) that I now understand the pressure satgnu was under even better.