I have the logs from his spamming. It wasn't just "lulz". It was long periods of insanity and days of people reporting his behavior and I also experienced it myself while trying to test Entrenchment. It shouldn't take a warning from someone to know that this is unacceptable behavior. What kind of appeal could possibly be made? My cat sat on the keyboard and wouldn't get off? No, it was pure malice.
How is the community supposed to grow when there are people ruining the experience for them as soon as they step into the lobby and try to get a game going?
Entire groups of people ,who also paid for the game, were having their experience marred by a single individual. Should I value the dollars they paid less than his?
If he wasn't satisifed with his purchase he could have dealt with it like a civilized human being, not an ignorant, immature brat with a undeserved sense of entitlement and the kind of boldness than only appears behind the anonymity of the internet. He could have made his case on the forums, support@ironcladgames.com, support@stardock.com or voted against us by not purchasing any of our future products. Which is fine with me because, to be honest, I don't want his money. Now let me explain why - and its not just because he affects the experience of our well behaved customers.
When we decided to relax our DRM policy (a couple examples: no DRM on the DVD and allowing multiple people to play on a LAN with one copy) it was based on the fact that DRM hinders customers people who paid for the game. We were willing to bet that we would gain more by treating them like honest and decent people and that there enough of this type of people to make a satisfactory profit which would allow us to continue to make games. The loss of one or even thousands of dishonest or indecent people won't make me lose any sleep and won't affect Ironclad's bottom line because either A.) they didn't pay for the game in the first place or B.) the majority of our customers don't fall into this category.
So spread the word. If you don't behave like a civilized human being you will banned permanently. I don't have time to be dealing with this kind of behavior so I will simply query your IP and hit the ban button. We have a team of 11 people and I'm sure the majority of you would prefer us to be developing fixes and new content than dealing with this kind of foolishness. So yes, if you want Ironclad to devote more resources to improving online play or anything else, don't behave like this. Now let's move onto a somewhat related topic:
We are also nearly 100% sure that this same individual was also using fake cd numbers to generate multiple accounts which is obviously not condoned by the EULA and is suggestive of illegal behavior that we may find should we investigate further. This could have much more serious repercussions for him than a simple banning. I know how he does it and so do many others but it has not been changed because it only hinders valid customers. This is all in line with our policies on DRM. If this keeps up we'll be forced to increase security measures and bring out the ban stick on a whole lot more people. All it takes is for me to flick a switch and thousands of people will lose their accounts. The only reason I haven't done so so far was because most of them are behaving themselves and helping to keep the multiplayer community at decent levels. I know your dirty little secret and I've known it for a long time because it was a deliberate choice and just because I refuse to act on it now, it doesn't mean I won't in the future. It's my hope that policies like this will help convince some of you to make the right choice in the end.
Don't let me down and don't force my hand on this. Behave.
