As for me, GMs did what they should in this scenario. Let's look on this scenario from various points of view. Not just "I hate GMs!" or "I dislike this GM and seeking for any reason to blame GM for actions".
If you happen to administer any large server populated by many users (just as I did being an administrative staff in IRC network with thousands users some time ago), you will figure out soon that there is no matter which rules you're writing and inventing, someone will figure out "workaround" soon. Then it's possible to cause a reasonable damage and disruption to normal server operations while formally everything remains within rules. You can't write rules for all possible kinds of humans actions, this is doomed to fail.
Server staff then haves hard time. If they about to violate their own rules, they about to be blamed. If they're about to ignore condition and it persists, server would turn into a desert. Because users will leave it as useless or will get disconnected due to technical problems. Then attacker could celebrate a victory because it has almost eliminated server in question. Does someone wants to play on
empty TMW server?
Then you can set up your own eAthena on localhost and get what you want without eliminating all users on this one
.
Good staff usually politely asks to stop doing bad things which are causing problems (trying to resolve technical issues ASAP in same time, if possible). Good people who does not haves bad purposes to harm servers will understand this, respect this and stop doing bad things causing issues. Bad people (who want to harm servers, users, etc) will rather stick to bad behaviour to cause even more damage, being happy you've confirmed that there is issues. At this point you have bad choice - you can violate own rules and keep other users of your server happy. But this will give a reasons to blame you and surely you WILL get blamed sooner or later. Or you can obey your rules. But then most users will suffer from technical problems and they will be forced to abandon your server, so while formally all fine, actually, staff in general have failed to achieve their goal and purpose. Which is to keep servers stable, running and serving for it's primary purpose (be it IRC chat or gameplay or whatever else...). Actually if you're administrative staff you can't be totally victorious in such scenario at all. No matter what you will decide, there is some loss so normal practice is to choose "least evil" resolution and take consequences. Good server staff will also prefer to keep resource up and running even if this means some personal attacks later.
In IRC in such lousy scenarios when someone manages to disrupt normal operations of many clients at once by finding bug in servers or popular clients, we're usually were in emergency conditions, trying to fix things ASAP. By both server-side countermeasures and by removing offenders, if needed - just to keep servers up and running and non-evil users able to use them without major issues. If it was not possible to fix in a timely manner and attacks continued, we had to shut down problematic feature (some IRC servers and services are fairly modular so you can shut down just failing part without shutting down whole thing, losing only some feature rather than everything). This causes users frustration but sometimes necessary to prevent complete destruction of project in total. So removing problematic magic is an option but this will make some users unhappy and dev's and GMs will be blamed for this as well
.
Bottom line? As for me, semi-emergency situation has been resolved using least possible evil, even no bans, etc. Furthermore looks like affected user seems to be a known evildoer. Hence, looks like a good trouble resolution. Even if this formally violates something, that was to keep users of server happy and to maintain stability under somewhat emergency conditions (which are actually can be classified as "hacker attack using known bugs"). Saying this I can also notice that looks like root cause of this issue is not eliminated so condition can re-appear. If I was in dev's skin, I would probably temporarily shut down failing feature until it fixed to prevent further attacks. So I can understand if rain magic will be temporarily disabled in Hurnscald or even globally until it fixed.
P.S. some hint to dev's: you may also want to add very simple rule, smth like this: "if user causes clients or server stability issues or attempts to hack users or causes too much annoyance to multiple users and refuses to stop harmful actions upon staff request, administrative staff can deal with issue at their own discretion, using all available methods and actions". This does not means GMs should ban everyone who will find any bugs or issues or whatever. But this means that GMs should have "legal" option to ban those who're using in-game bugs or any other means to intentionally cause serious troubles or annoyances to many users at once. Causing issues to multiple clients at once is evil and should not be tolerated if this is a regular practice rather than unintentional behaviour.
Not productive.
(nerd angst)
