We received complaints and testimonies from a diverse group of TSPers. In general, individual complaints and testimonies won't be shared publicly, because those people deserve and reasonably expect a level of anonymity. The admins aren't going to do anything that will just give Tim and Escade ammo from wherever they plant their feet after TSP. Despite addressing the horrible behavior in TSP, NationStates is a very... porous and networked game, and it's the unfortunate case that they can continue attacking from afar, with plenty of regions that will gleefully offer them the platform to do so.

There isn't one single event that led to these bans, though there were some significant incidents over the past several months. It's a behavioral problem overall, not a flame that happened on this day or a troll that happened on that day. Trying to provide a litany of quotes would likely lack the context that many in TSP already know. "Death by a thousand cuts" is the apt metaphor-- each individual cut doesn't seem that serious, but combined together it's deadly. As Tsu's OP says, the bans are in response to several months' worth of behavior problems, fighting, personal attacks, targeted bullying, a general (OOC/person-behind-the-nation) hostility that goes well beyond what the community is willing to put up with. People can fight and dislike each other in our open community, but there's a line. Is it clearly defined? I'm not sure that's possible, and part of our job as a community is to really talk about that moving forward, but the number of people who filed complaints speaks to the line.

Warnings were indeed given many times, both formally and informally. First, though it wasn't given by any admins, the motion of no confidence was the original "warning," but being an inherently political IC act, it wasn't treated with the level of seriousness it deserved. That was a pretty in-depth look at the start of the behavioral issues. There were many private conversations between forum/Discord admins and private players, all that failed to result in any change. On the Discord side, there was a 48-hour posting ban (called a "timeout") that was applied to everybody involved in the specific argument that occurred at the time, but was issued broadly addressing the long-term problems. That didn't work very long, clearly. Both Tim and Escade were given the opportunity to apologize for their behavior and alter their courses, and in return avoid hard consequences, but they both declined. Escade sent back a long response essentially saying she was justified. Tim feigned ignorance, saying he didn't know what problems we were even talking about. They were originally given 3 days to respond, but ended up getting 5. The ban was issued on the 5th day.