Excellent write up vjek. Reminded me of an issue I had a few years ago with a website/service that the place I worked at hosted. We kept being hit with, thankfully unsuccessful, breaches. Always from Ukraine. After that, we decided to Geo fence access to a specific few countries.
Maybe not the most practical approach for an MMO but hey.
If I was in charge. hehehe
If Pantheon was going to be a buy to play or free to play game I would agree with most of these other comments. Ban them all! IP bans, hardware bans, credit card bans, phone # bans. But from what we have been told Pantheon will be neither of these. Pantheon will have a subscription and with the knowledge and experience I have I know that a substantial portion of human beings are almost incapable of canceling a subscription on time. So I would use bans rarely and in only very extreme cases.
Now to keep this simple I am going to group all of these things into Violations of the Terms of Service. If a player blatantly violates the ToS in one of these ways or any other way I would prefer to leave their subsciption active and punish them in the game world. I have free reign to get creative inside the game world. Some examples of this would be changing the players title to Gold Seller/Buyer, Bot, Spammer, Cheater, Duper, Scammer and removing their ability to change said title. I have the ability to delete their items and replace them with punishing items ex. Dunce Cap (-10 to all stats, Player is unable to use all chat functions), Ring of the Felonius Money Launderer (coin weight increased by 2000%, player loses access to banking/trading/auctions). I would have the ability to set the length of time for these punishments which would have to be served while logged into the game and any attempt to abuse the afk system to stay logged in would also be a violation of the ToS garnering further punishments.
Now I would always want to keep the ability to ban people on the table so I would flag all offenders accounts, IP, hardware, credit card, phone# but again only using bans in extreme cases. Allowing these offenders to make the choice if they want to cancel their subscription or try and redeem themselves.
Back to lurking.