Bans don't Ban People, Bans Ban Accounts - Should Banners Ban Banning?

I am not a big fan of banning. "The Banned" are (usually) paying customers, an issue I discussed at length recently in The Cost of Punishing Cheaters on Microsoft's Xbox Live. Even if The Banned one is not currently a paying customer, they are sufficiently interested in your product to use it.

My second, and perhaps equally important, reason for being against banning is that you don't ban people in games, you ban accounts.

Online identity is a tenuous thing, at best. IP addresses, device signatures, credit card numbers are all easily copied and altered. Online services never have the chance to "know your customer", so the practical impact of banning someone is that you are not getting to the person.

You can't send an account to prison.

Banning is like jail, exile, and other punishments. It is only as effective as it is credible. Do threats deter criminals?

This is a hard question even in "the real world" when we have ways of identifying the real person for real punishment.

Online, we have to trust our users to even give us their identities.

Banning motivated players encourages even worse fraud. I would argue that the transformation of nuisance gold farmers into much more dangerous and damaging gold frauders was partially the result of banning.

Since we do not have strong "sticks" with which to punish troublesome players, we may want to focus more on "carrots" to strengthen their identity and more deeply link them into the legitimate portions of online game (or other virtual world) services.

As a side note, if we DON'T ban certain troublemakers, we can use the knowledge of their online identity against them indirectly: an identified, unbanned gold farming account can provide great information on the gold farming network and its customers. Customers can be punished (at some date, short of banning), spamming accounts can be silently silenced, or other alternatives to the clumsy "Banhammer".

I do discuss this issue in Chapter 23 - To Ban or Not to Ban? Punishing Wayward Players of my book Protecting Games as well as other articles on this site.