Oh no, it’s completely free to play. What I meant was that when a game is over, the winning player gains rating points and the losing player loses rating points, proportional to the rating difference between them.

Since I had lost that game, I lost rating (elo) points. But, since the system recognized that it was against a cheater, which isn’t fair, it gave me the points back when they banned him so that my rating would be unaffected.