[Kaimetsu]

Hmm. There are two main reasons for banning a person.

Firstly, to act as a deterrent. It sends a message, both to the other players (they see it and realise that they shouldn't break the rules lest they suffer the same fate) and to the bannee himself if the ban is temporary.

The second is to remove the person from the game. They have shown their personality to be disruptive and bad for the community, so they are excluded from playing.

Now, the first requires that a rule be broken, otherwise the reason is inapplicable. The second, however, requires nothing more than knowledge of the player's personality. You can gain that knowledge in a chat room or a private conversation just as much as you can gain it on a Graal server. If you know that a person is a troublemaker then it's not unreasonable to take a proactive approach to dealing with him.

The mistake some people are making is that they're thinking of banning as a punishment. It's not. We're not meting out cosmic justice here, we're simply trying to do what is best for the game. If punishing somebody doesn't help the game then there is no justified reason for doing so. If banning somebody does help the game then there is a justified reason. Of course, this all relies very heavily on personal judgement, which is why the system often fails in reality. People let personal vendettas get in the way of their judgement, or knowingly administer an unwarranted ban. Such people are poor admins and should be replaced, but the same does not apply to everybody who takes action based on knowledge of character. Even Unixmad has banned people ingame based on actions taken outside of Graal, and although I don't have access to the full details, I imagine that the large majority were perfectly reasonable.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting the ban described in this thread. I don't know enough to say whether or not it was a reasonable action. All I am saying is that nobody should assume it was an act of corruption just because the events that provoked it did not take place on a Graal server.