kanem wrote:If you think there is some nefarious enterprise going on where Nost is getting bankrolled by the Chinese they sure wouldn't have risked all this by unbanning 12 accounts. They wouldn't have banned them in first place, and if they had they definitely wouldn't have unbanned a meager 12 accounts afterwards.
Why not? It's the best setup for plausible deniability. Taking no action whatsoever despite being provided with mountains of evidence would've been pretty bad (possibly safe for the time being, but Nost has a history of being studiously negligible when it comes to player-staff communication; enough of this shit and there would be backlash, and PvPers are generally quite vocal...)
Banning the culprits and then unbanning all of them would've been even more blatant.
Banning and keeping them banned would've been the optimal clean up (for Nost at least) but I reckon the business didn't allow that, so they got some accounts back and written off as "not enough proof". This works well enough for the general public, as they won't bother reading through dozens of flamewar threads to make their own judgement on how much proof there is.