They did mention multiple times though that while it is indeed a goal of the game, it is not the goal of official servers.
Here’s a link to the actual Terms of Conduct for official servers:
As you can see there are a few mentions of these things, though not overly specific, but they do mention that all you’re meant to build there involves grabbing a single spot for your base and pretty much suggests the idea of minimalistic builds to allow as many players on the server as possible.
This is suggested by some of their other posts here and there over the years as well as that landclaim thread I previously linked.
Yea… the thing about that is they don’t actively monitor the servers, when they get a report about somebody specific they investigate that person / clan, so even though others have larger bases, they probably didn’t get reported or their reports weren’t processed yet.
If you want to have larger creative builds that are akin of a Town… a marker or a walled off fortress etc, then it’s really not a compatible playstyle with official servers. For that I recommend private servers where the rules are clear about these types of buildings and they’re allowed.
Many people who got banned from officials in similar circumstances went on to make their own server actually or join another already established one with all their clanmates. (plus private servers will run way better and you won’t have a large majority of the AI glitches and weird bugs) Officials are really the “public transportation” of servers…
In any case, I saw your reddit post, sadly as you can see in that thread I linked above, Funcom does not reimburse any items or anything regardless of how they got lost so whether it was a bug… a ban… it won’t make much of a difference.
Good luck!