I happened to recently read an old thread on AT that provides a helpful example. In that round, alliance A broke a pact and did a very early FS on alliance B. Alliance B obviously got crushed. A few people from alliance A posted on the boards and said that they would have preferred to have a proper fight later in the set (presumably without pact breaking) but leadership decided that they would FS early. As a player, the pact breaking offended me so I suicided alliance A a few times that set.

Who should be punished in that scenario? I'm sure that some of the members of alliance B felt like they were the victims of griefing. Should the leaders of A be punished? What about the rank and file members of alliance A who went along with it and simply followed orders? Or maybe I should have been punished because I played untagged and suicided them? I felt like I had a very legitimate grievance against Alliance A, but every suicider claims that, right?

I would say that no one should be punished by the game staff. If the people on that server disapprove of pact breaking or blindside FSes then they can sanction alliance A themselves. As far as I know, we've always let players decide what is right and what is wrong on the clan servers. We didn't delete tags in the early days of Team if they worked together even though it was contrary to what we felt was the spirit and purpose of the server, because it's up to the players.

Clan-based servers have always been dirty places. Some players infiltrate and spy on other clans. Some clan leaders break pacts and back stab their allies. Some players join a clan just to cause trouble. All of that is acceptable behavior in my eyes, as long as people aren't cheating by creating multiple game accounts.

Game mechanics should be used to add limits when needed to clan servers. For example, someone could argue that clan based servers are for clan-based play, so untagged countries should have some kind of penalty applied to them. If we decide to go in that direction then we can code that into the game. I don't see a place for something like military sanctions on clan servers. Military sanctions was a last resort solution for the non-clan servers because I could not think of a game mechanics solution that prevented some of the harmful behavior that occurred round after round.