This type of thing doesn't even come as a surprise to me. I don't know Fowl personally, but I know Ruxxter and Ruxxter helped Zodiac a lot in its early development and has told me a little bit about him.

Graal, as a community-developed game, is ridiculously flawed in the way that they expect players to make up the community and the game itself, by developing this servers, with no compensation or reward at all. This leads to things like what happened there probably, which is weird, cliquey corruption and bias.

I've played since somewhere between late '99 and early 2000 and I've broken a lot of rules, hacked (gralats, EP, etc.), but the biggest mistake you can make is not breaking a serious rule but getting on the bad side of a high-ranking staff member. When that happens, you're done with. I've been globally banned since '08 or something and still don't know exactly why. I've paid for over 15 accounts to have them swept under the rug, now Bell and Gabriel are giving them away to players like gifts. Stuff like this happens and no one cares, it's happened forever and only gets exposed when it happens to someone like Fowl.

The PWA has especially been this way since forever. Nemesis was awful and biased, HoudiniMan, Moonie, Tigairius, and now these new guy Gabriel. I don't know where Graal gets off by hiring people who clearly favor certain people or groups over another, but it's an embarrassing way to run a subscription-based game.