Some minor points from me here:
FWIW I quit handling FAF tournaments because of the moderation team issuing a blanket ban on base ctrl+k (specifically my utterly insane rowan base ctrl+k ban) prior to recall being implemented. This was a solution to a problem at high level games back then and moderation team just didn't really care and told us to just deal with it until a dev found a solution because they do not want to have to handle a gray area. I got like a week(?) ban for it too which was even more ridiculous.
I do think a ban on base ctrl+k is fine now, and I even got a ban for it lately. It was a day ban which was a reasonable penalty in my eyes and I had no problem with it. Really I just don't personally trust moderators to handle anything in high level games in general and it's very easy to figure out who actually made a report in lobbies so that person just ends up getting banned from future games for however long feels justified. High level people can police dumb gameplay themselves, really. I remember one time Bully did some completely stupid com bomb in my base when we still had a chance to win and I made a whole stink about it. I'm of course not gonna report him because I can't trust moderation to handle proportionate responses to the offenses at hand.
Which, by the way, the solution to the rowan base ctrl+k ban was just for him to basically be denied into high level games on weekends for several weeks.
How are the rules for civility working out anyway? I'm curious about what the stats on activity in the Discord look like this month compared to 12 months ago.
It's frankly a gigantic problem that moderation "takes into account ban history" because plenty of people that would have been decent high level mods got thrown into the trash. The two that come to my mind are Sladow and Mephi. Funny enough basically every moderator I thought was decent has some history of "moderatable behavior" because on FAF that just requires functioning like a person trying to have a good time. Gieb had about 5 morbillion smurfs. Resistance is a perpetual toxic depression machine. Arch has base ctrl+k'd before.
Some of the mods just seem like dudes completely alien to any actual community culture and it shows in the way moderation has been in the last year. And I unironically think the whole "ban review" thing is a big component of that. You can't actually take part in anything fun to attain the position of moderator so you get a bunch of dudes that barely actually interact with this common, regular, high level in particular (we have all been here for years), community.
It's a bunch of straws that have been breaking my back for a long time because it feels like moderators are just antagonizing people that have been fine for years at this point. The base ctrl+k was a solution, it is no longer needed. It's great that recall exists and it's fine that base ctrl+k is now banned. But that period where it was banned and recall did not exist was basically a middle finger to high level players and one of the major reasons I stopped trusting moderators with any reports.
After that like the dozen or so regular posters in politics in the Discord were basically getting reamed every day for saying something is retarded. My final straw here was when I got like a 2-3 day mute for saying faf has nazi mods and then got to read Index say that nazi is a slur???????? It became such a joke that we just moved off the FAF Discord and now just organize to play games other than FAF with other ppl that are tired of a variety of FAF shit.
The rename thing is another eye roll that fits the same schema.
It doesn't really impact my desire to play FAF much since it's just moderation, but it makes me give way less of a shit in engaging with the FAF community. Whether I want to play FAF is mostly centered around whether the 30ish people I want to play FAF with are playing.