Just out of curiosity, how much warning do you get for pirating?
Warning levels for a rule infraction are on the moderator's discretion; we don't have hard numbers for specific rules. A number of factors go into this, such as what rule was broken, whether it was broken out of maliciousness or stupidity or just not caring, the member's attitude, and even which moderator got to it first, because some of us are stricter than others.
With piracy, we tend to be a little more lenient with the warning levels (for first strikes, anyway. Repeat infractions get bans), since the primary punishment the user gets is the pirate usergroup/avatar. This avatar indicates to other members that this person is a pirate, and can still engage in social conversation (General Discussion, Completely Unrelated) but is not to be given any support for the game or mods. A person can have that avatar removed by purchasing the game and proving to a staff member that they've done so (such as a photo containing both the physical disc and their forum username).
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=11578.0
Warning levels are at the bottom.
Read that a bit closer, it just says what effect each warning level has, not how we determine what level to assign.