It looks like a moderator closed this one last night so I’m not going to reopen it, but I did want to provide what clarifications I could.
You should have received an email about a chat violation, Mortisxamor. Based on what I can see, this chat isn’t really what I think a lot of people would consider banter. Seems more like comments specifically intended to get a rise out of people, to cause strife.
Something we have been focusing on is toxic behavior.
Yes and no. Yes, it sometimes took some doing to earn a silence for a chat violation, but that was mostly based on community reports. Some communities simply do not report when they should, so some behavior goes mostly unreported.
That has changed somewhat since we introduced the “social contract”, which just is our standard Code of Conduct, but reminding people that it exists has in some way reminded them to report behavior that they believe goes against those policies.
It is also important to touch on the silence vs suspension. We used to silence for social policy violations, allowing you to continue playing with only impacting your ability to impact others. That has changed because we found that it wasn’t a very effective deterrent and that really is the point of penalties, to discourage people from violating policy.
It would be if it were the first penalty the account has received, or even the second, but there is a fairly extensive history here.
For clarification. The policy is that if the violation is verified, which it had in this case, the only way we would overturned that verified action would be if we found that the account was compromised at the time of the violation. Meaning, while ultimately the registered user on the account is responsible for all activity that takes place on it, we try not to punish someone for activities that may have taken place when they were not in control of their account.
As with everything else, it depends on the violation. Botting and other means of more severe exploitation often receive a 6 month suspension or account closure. There are lesser penalties that usually depend on the circumstances.
For perspective though, our silence penalties would usually double. If the penalty system were the same, and didn’t reset when we started adding suspensions to the mix, your current penalty would have been over 12,000 hours.
As it stands, the new penalties still stack, and you are a few deep. I would highly recommend you avoid participating in the same “banter” as you have been going forward.