Stats look pretty good out of 500 players on avg 200 per day. That seems like A lot of players. Also most game companies lie about their player base./ even websites to look better. Example of some people who do that. IGN, AoC, CoD, WoW, Counterstrike etc
Those companies have a monatery interest behind those statistics. A mod team which doesn't earn any money except of voluntary donations and has to run a server from it doesn't need neither tweaked statistics nor tens of thousands of players, who would pay for the servers?
Let's keep it as simple as possible:
- New players are expected to read the rules before connecting, even if they only "try out" a game
- Admins can't tell whether you are new or not, and even if they could, there is no difference
- teamkilling someone on purpose doesn't neccessarily need a ban, but a ban isn't too harsh either. It's a question of personal evaluation of the admin.
- if players teamkill on purpose, get banned and GTX, it's no loss for the community
I understand that in this moment you didn't know what to do, and it was a reflex to kill the attacker, but on the other hand you must understand that you still have to get punished. because if there was an exception made for you, other people would want exceptions, too, and personal investigation of every teamkill by the admin, making effective administration of the servers impossible. There is no way to prove you don't know something, but if not knowing the rules would be a valid argument, you could break any rule you want and say you didn't know about it, because nobody can verify or falsify that. That's where "Ignorance is no excuse in law." origins from.
I understand the situation was... unlucky... for you... but can I expect the same empathy from you, to understand that the admin had to punish you in a way?
Seriously, if you had read the rules you would have spent a short time here in the forum and the rest of the evening ingame. Now you spent a short time ingame and the rest of the evening in the forum. Decide yourself, which is the better option. I seriously hope you learn something from it, because that little patience really pays. In CoD for exaple it's often forbidden to use the grenade launcher. If you do so and get punished, do you have the right to complain, although the rules were listed when logging in?
I go even so far and check the options before I start a new game, just to see which keys are assignet to what, and if I see some known commands like "reload" not being on my favourite reload key (r), I change it. That way, when I start a new game, I don't need to pause it constantly to change the controls. Patience rocks