The maximum ban length for all offenses will now run 30 days. Those caught cheating repeatedly or those found attempting to evade, however, will be banned permanently by a selected group of senior staff and added to a special list, which will be copied to future games and systems. This measure is an attempt to allow a significant amount of users who may have been wrongly banned in the past, due to staff negligence in following standard procedure, technical problems with the reporting tool, or simple bad judgment, to play again. It will also reintroduce a lot of previously banned users into the player pool, the vast majority of which probably did cheat. For those users, consider this opportunity a rare second chance, now that you are aware that you can be caught and restricted from gameplay.
The list will be pruned tonight once our database manager comes online, after which the list will be pruned of mature bans once every week (as a result, bans can potentially last as much as 37 days).
If things run smoothly, we will be keeping this system until another replaces it; if not, I am prepared to have all bans replaced to the previous state. If you cheated before, think about playing fairly this time.