Slurs, encouraging suicide, and threats should be a non-appealable permanent ban on first offense.

As far as I'm aware, these things are already bannable offenses, but the problem with making something like that "non-appealable" is that zero tolerance policies rarely work out in the ways they are intended to work out.

Example: A streamer called me the n-word while they were livestreaming a game I played in the other day (and, I suspect, also used it in the in-game chat, although I couldn't see it because some of the words were blocked).

Without context, that sounds pretty bad, but the streamer was African-American, and it was clearly being used in a casual, conversational context, not intended as a racial slur. But let's say that I, for whatever reason, decided to report them to BHVR, accused them of calling me "the n-word" (without context), included the audio and the chatlogs in my report, and then sent it off to BHVR. And then let's say that whoever read my report was apathetic or just wasn't paying close attention, skimmed through the chatlogs, saw the word, and hit the permaban button, with no way for said streamer to appeal. Would that be fair?

Homophobic slurs can be even more of an issue, simply because the most popular one isn't used in a homophobic context in 90% of its internet gaming community appearances. You can argue that its status as a slur puts it on a higher level than most obscenities even when not used in a homophobic context, but I still think there's a clear difference between using it as a synonym for "idiot" and using it to intentionally target LGBT people. I think the latter is deserving of a permaban, while the former should be a shorter ban or not bannable at all (like any other swear word, assuming you didn't try to get around the chat filter and the word ended up being edited out of the conversation).

I've been autobanned by Facebook's system for using that word in perfectly benign, self-referential contexts, and when I appealed the ban, whoever was reading the appeal clearly didn't understand that I was quoting something or that I'm not straight myself and didn't intend it as a slur. I didn't break Facebook's policies at all, but if whoever's reading my appeal doesn't understand the context, what recourse do I have?

In other cases, I've gotten 30-day bans for calling someone a "cow" (in a context where we were joking about eating grass) or saying "girls are weird" (in a comment that should have been perfectly clear that I was mocking an ignorant point of view). But whoever read the reports - if anyone - didn't understand that, and I got a popup saying that they didn't have enough people to double-check the report due to COVID when I tried to appeal, resulting in multiple 30-day bans for no sane reason.

If Facebook can't make this stuff work right, what makes you think BHVR has the resources to investigate these things properly? And unlike Facebook, people are actually paying to play DBD.

As far as suicide goading goes, there's a lot of potential for discussions about suiciding on hook, etc. to be misunderstood by an automated system or even careless human employees. As far as I'm aware, this is also already bannable, but you're more likely to get a temp ban for it (I've never done this or been banned from DBD, myself).

Context is more important than the use of individual words or phrases themselves. Clear hate speech should be bannable, yes, but there should be a working appeal mechanism in place with multiple tiers of appeal if they did decide to crack down on this stuff more, because it would result in false positives.