I agree, and I'll cover what I can below.
For some of the other posters - believe what you will.
This was a genuine mistake made by an individual. And clearly there was a failing in the system that actually allowed them to escalate this directly to a full lockdown of the account contrary to how it should flow.
This was never an issue that warranted an account level ban (which, I have to call out is incredibly rare in any case), but normally this would never go beyond a temp ban of the forums with zero impact to games. Trying to portray this as a purposeful or vengeful act 'just because' is immature, not to mention inconsistent with how we actually operate if you care to observe.
As I mentioned before this is a serious issue that we need to fix - as in properly fix, as you suggest. It is not acceptable that something like this happens accidentally, even once.
The purpose of this system is not to feed our egos and dangle axes over player's heads in some sort of power trip - it is there specifically to protect players. To maintain some structure and order to our communities so they don't degenerate into what many other forums look like, and allow you to have a place where you can have a reasonable discussion, or ask a game related question without a some kind of explicit picture being thrust in your face, and yes - in very extreme cases to distance persistent, deliberately malicious individuals from other players IF necessary as a last resort (or at least until they realize it, cool off and get their act together).
Still, that person is supposed to be able to continue to play offline. The goal is to close off the online features where this extreme measure is needed (again, this should be extremely rare). But what we realized with this incident is that while you can completely keep playing offline with an existing game, you can't register a new game since when you login to register the account comes back as invalid. This is new for us, and not intended.
Anyways, long story short (as its late here) - before we rush in with our torches and pitchforks, we need to properly figure out what happened. That will take some time to sort out.
In the meantime, what I've already heard is that the EADM team is going to start working on a fix for game clients to ensure that players will at least be able to register and play offline, even in these rare extreme scenarios. That won't be an overnight fix, but it's a start.
Again, believe what you will.
F.