The truth is that unless your guild is made up of yourself + 29 of your own alts, you have no way to know if someone is cheating or not. You can trust others in good faith but that doesn’t stop them from doing their own thing, and sometimes people are tempted by the “easy path”, especially when they suspect or hear of other people doing the same thing with no repercussions.
Sometimes just happens.
I’ve seen people who were strong communicators in chat get banned for cheating, so the social aspect of the game doesn’t necessarily prevent it. If someone decides “it’s time” or “maybe just this once”…or makes the decision to let their friend/sibling/relative use their account without realizing that that person uses cheats…they can get banned.
What each of us has is a choice - whether to trust what Salty is telling us about each case being investigated before a ban is applied, or to trust our friend/guildmate who insists they didn’t cheat. At the end of the day, there’s no way for us to definitively verify either case.
The best we can hope for is that the process is in-depth enough where innocent players don’t get caught up in it, and if one does get banned by mistake, that the player is able to recover his/her account in a timely manner. This might require additional Customer Support personnel because it’s well-known that cheaters will also try to get their accounts back, and innocent players should not need to suffer as a result. This is infrastructure that should be built-in when an anti-cheating measure is planned out.
The notion that “appeal requests are just not as important” honestly really bothers me. I’m sure most of us don’t mind the idea of a cheater crying about not being able to recover their lost account, but how would we feel if we ourselves were falsely flagged and slipped through the cracks, and then had Support tell us “sorry, it’s just not that important to review your case, we’ll get to you eventually”?