[Ckg]

Where is this staff discretion used to prevent the player from stacking warns upon warns? It does not seem fair, though, I do agree Ernie had it coming and I'm not justifying his actions.

 It's no doubt that Ernie is pushing boundaries, but these warns cannot be classified as punishments. I think it's unfair to be lenient, trap him into a self-sustained "warn corner" and then punishing him more intensely.

Addressing the bolded parts of your argument, players bring warns upon themself.  We decided to give Ernie the benefit of the doubt multiple times and he continued to break the same rules.  I don't know what you mean by it doesn't seem fair conserving we gave him sufficient warnings, verbal and aware, to change his behavior and he decided not to.  I'd argue actually, that is more fair to give him warnings to stop breaking the rules, as opposed to just banning him outright.  It also pretty unreasonable to ask staff to stop players from breaking the rules and doing actions that would generate warns along with other punishments.  Like if I tell someone "hey stop micspamming" and they ignore me that's on them and not on me for not preventing from stacking up punishments and warns as they continue.  As staff we enforce the rules, if someone wants to cheat, troll, or continuously micspam, we can't really stop them completely except for banning them.

The second argument you make is that warns cannot be classified as punishments.  They are not punishments, but are given alongside punishments (i.e gags, or kicks).  It is more of a way of keeping track of infractions for staff.  Warnings are usually given after the 3rd punishment and coincide with a kick, and then subsequently after that for continuing to break the rules.  We are not "trapping" players in breaking the rules, like I'm genuinely confused to what you even mean by this.  You yourself describe it as "self-sustained" meaning he is one who is keeping the cycle going, not the staff.  You know what he could do to not sustain the cycle? Not break the rules. :o

If he chooses to break the rules how are we trapping him???  It not like we're going "haha let's change the rules to prevent micspam without telling Ernie so he goes and unknowingly breaks them".  Like this argument of us trapping him, by him, independently, choosing to continuously break the rules and not listen to warnings given by staff is utterly non-sensible.  By being lenient we are allowing him more than enough chances to change how he was acting and not have it come to this, because he chose not to he was punished accordingly.