First of, what is respect ? It is feeling of appreciative, often polite,regard.
At least dictionary say so. In online games it's ought to be recognized as significance of the other people who are also playing the game.
It is important to the health of the game ? That's one question is tricky. I think it's important, i'll try to explain below why and how.
There are multiple layers of interaction between players in mount&blade and it'a mods (even more in c-rpg).
First, and most important one is gameplay. There are multiple behaviours that spoil the fun for other players and those players have no direct control over it. Leching, prolonging the round to force draw, cheating, teamhitting and teamkilling, preventing teammates from attacking in normal manner, gate opening, glitching and others.
Second is poll spamining, which distract most player still fighing, and in this case also those players have no direct answer to the threat.
Third is voice chat spamming, which also distract players nearby.
Fourth type of disrespecting is qml abooze, that serve the purpose of distracting target player to gain unfair advantage.
And ultimately fifth type of possible disrespecting is chat trolling or insulting. Unlike those four types of offence, this one is easy to deal with. You can just press escape, press mute and choose a player you don't want to hear. Moreover, you can just ignore the chat text as it's note really eye-catching.
There are many types of chat abusing like chat spamming, permanent caps lock, insulting. We will consider insulting first and foremost. There are many types of insulting. Elements can be be mixed and matched - calling names, racism (very rare, mostly confused with next offence), national bigotry, insulting one person or it's relatives, insulting group of persons like for example clan or class, using offensive terms and other. Very few people get banned for insults even if it's most common type of breaking the rules. Guess why? People are used to insults over the chat, and strict enforcing would ban half of the playerbase.
In c-rpg, people break one or more of those, and people responsible for the ban duty strike with their might banhammers as they find fair (or fun?). Different admins have different criterias regarding ban duration for each offense, ban duration modifier based on previous ban history or/and clan or/and personal likes and dislikes.
Now ask yourself, do you really get offended on the internet? Which rule breaking is most damaging for the community ?