yeah, I would also guess that gaming companies only care about sales. In the same way, I don't care about their sales, but I do occasionally like playing games (cheat-free).
I do at last grasp your methods, I think. If you connect with a key/serial which other people may have, but haven't cheated with yet, you don't get auto banned... right?
and, you're not permanently banned it's just a timewaster/semi-ban meaning you have to apply for 'case review' etc. ..too, right?
It would be ironic if someone's keys were 'stolen' and they got one of these semi-bans for "cheating" by their own server... Is that possible?
I guess it's just "tough luck" to everyone who has a key used by someone else to cheat.. as for me, I can't even remember the names or IPs of the servers I tried to connect to and got banned from..
p.s. if the cheaters do use these keys to cheat but keep their own ones to play normally (we presume), then wouldn't it be better to have an IP-ban system or something as a punishment ?
p.p.s. cute drawing benway, and your link didn't work. The point of the graphs was that nobody can know how many people who use public keys want to just play the game, and how many want to cheat. If this site was an anti-piracy site it would make more sense having the auto-ban over auto-kick, but it's an anti-cheater site, i presume? I played a pirate cod2 for a while before buying it (not very relevant, but yeah, a bit about me, as they say).