Nico

We recently had a wave of boosting and hitchiking penalties go out. We've found an issue in how those ranks were snapped down and some of the accounts didn't have their rank follow their MMR, resulting in a small number of players with visible rank of Master/Grandmaster playing in Emerald games. We are in the process of finding the players that didn't get snapped correctly and correcting their ranks. Our current philosophy (and I'm not saying this is 100% right long term) is that we perma ban on 2nd offense. I can understand that people may feel that is too lenient. For us to perma ban on first offense it needs to be blatantly clear the rules everyone is playing by, etc. And I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong, but it also has legal implications in certain countries; was the player adequately warned, did they have reasonable notice, etc. By perma banning on second offense, we can be more sure that the player has been given reasonable notice that what they are doing is against the rules and can warrant a harsh punishment and will abide by regulations. Players like this aren't immediately flagged and banned, because it's similar to the arms race against scripting. Bans/rank reversions like these often happen in waves to prevent boosters from discovering and avoiding our detection methods. This is something that we're continuing to improve in our fight against boosting.