Hey Aza, Hao here, a well constructed first post i must say, you totally nailed it.
to people who is lazy to read aza's first post, TLDR;
and you decided to comeback to rescue ror. un-banning people is definetly a good step up; the fact is, people who's perma banned didn't stop playing, you know, vpn's. sad part is, most of them quit the game already. there are several reasons why, no need to go details.
1-For me the main problem of ror is;
team don't know what kind of community they want to build. that causing a lot of problems. current game is not fitting both competitive-casual players. too boring/bad balanced for competitive players, too hardcore for casual players.
if you guys want to have competitive players, you will have:
+ real feedback
+ bug reports
+ gameplay progress
+ solid playerbase
+ campaign progress
if the things goes bad, you will notice some side effects:
-salt
-flak
on the other hand, if you want to build a casual-only community, you will have;
+popularity
+human resource
-disloyalty
-bad gameplay experience
-stalled campaign
it's up to you which one will be better for the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. i simply don't know the answer.
2-Another problem is,
everything is so personal. a random guy from internet have the power to say ;
" it's my server, you need to obey whatever i say, if not, you are not a customer at all. goodbye. "
and he's definetly right, same like the other private-products. it's a side effect of playing in a private server. you have to deal with it or kindly gtfo. but also, it's way too tiresome to be competitive when you know damocle's sword is around.
to sum up, what i learned from ror is, private servers are generaly waste of time [like 30-40 hours in a week

] , if you wanna be competitive. if you are casual and play 1 hour per day, it's ok; it's free, it's kinda working and the most important part is : it's warhammer.
note: good luck with fixing this