Personally some level of trash talking and saltiness is fine like last tournament Van being savage and explaining how to quit the game when he wins is savage and even can be quite entertaining and fun to be honest I had a good laugh.
The line to not cross I guess if I had to name it would be direct, targeted and uncensored racist/homophobic insults after games in the channels. I literally had to scroll up so my stream would not have the time to read all that crap. That was too much and I am pretty sure we all know the difference.
I mean I am pretty sure anyone can see the difference between being unfriendly, savage and salty versus promoting racial hate, antisemitic insults or homophobic violence even if it is for fun the problem is new players they do not see that, they do not know you, they first see you and all they might take the time to see about you could be just that.
Igognito is right I do not want to ban Van for saying these things I want him and these players to understand the difference and to try to not cross the line as much as possible.
Because I am pretty sure in the end we have a common goal everyone wants to have more people on the server.
Now I don't know what is easy to do I was proposing short bans but yeah it is as useless as it sounds and maybe hard to do. The thing is at least we put it out there and from all of these imagined solutions maybe one can be applied.
So in the best of the worlds I would see a soft punishment like the following:
One cool way would be if we could like mute a player by default
Say a player X is muted for having crossed the line then to talk with him by default you would have to unmute him manually until the mute duration is passed. its not a ban and would be more directly targeted and honestly I find it quite fun too
Seemed to me like a harder thing to do even if seems like a better and more targeted solution but lets put it out here we never know maybe it helps finding a suitable and more doable solution...
Or/and preventive solutions:
One of the non-punishing preventive solutions would be to have filters like some games do by default and players can remove them if they want. (you know the good old stars ****)
That usually takes care of most of the big bad words and stuff people do not want their kid to see.
IDK this to me also seem like one of the hard to implement solutions but hey, lets put it on the table too we never know and it does not hurt to have a look at it.