The facts just don't square up. Further, there're only 4 days left in the ban. Were this a very long-term ban I think a greater conversation about it could happen, but as the facts stand, it simply doesn't line up.
I want to be very clear that the reason for the ban was use of an alt account with emphasis on the word use. We are aware of the existence of Sigma's brother, just as we're aware of many other players' siblings. The fact that Sigma has a sibling and "has been heard before on VC", is irrelevant to the punishment here. Supa logging in later to do duels against Sigma doesn't suddenly change the fact that Sigma was using the Supa account and doesn't suddenly make it okay just because they played separately other times.
Further, there are a lot of complaints these days that "X player did Y before and was warned, not banned, etc". Thing is, we are human and thus we're allowed to make changes to how we evaluate rule violations. We have been a lot more strict of late because we feel that we have been giving out far too many warnings which clearly aren't working. People who know better or clearly don't heed warnings will be punished and this will never change.
About alting as a whole, we always want to try to find a way to implement a feature that allows us to remove or lighten-up on rules. We're in discussions at this very moment about how we want to handle Alting in a more automatic way, as clearly the desire to move continents for Conquest without losing your home-town is desired. But until such time as we come up with changes, the rule still exists.
Lastly, the issue of "Cov Bias" is clearly thrown around a lot, but what I continue to fail to understand is why we would want to be biased towards one side. It's a pretty objective truth that everybody agrees that Loka and Conquest are a lot more fun when there are big exciting wars going on. To have those wars requires people on two sides. There is quite simply no logical reason to go banning and punishing "the other side" as it would be pretty clear to everyone if we chose a side. Consider that marblesack and Mrpisquallie were both just tempbanned for 1w for attempting a dupe glitch. There was no discussion as to "whether or not to ban" with that situation, it was a near-automatic no-brainer.
Those who violate the rules we have will be punished, and we don't care what side you are on. If punishments appear to lean against a certain group of players, that is evidence of their inability or unwillingness to respect our rules. We want as many people on Loka playing and fighting against Cov as possible (it's literally better for everyone). Choosing to ban off players from another side is practically server-suicide, and I would hope people don't think we're out to destroy our own server as that would be a pretty significant mega-thonk from me, dawg.
-Crypt
