"Second of all, please define for us exactly what constitutes "spreading rumors", "posting threats" and "defamation". Understand that such faction smack-talk is a perfectly normal, healthy and essential part of faction relations, interactions and warfare. I personally don't like having to censor and regulate every thing I say when I post in another faction's thread or my own just because it may potentially "offend" others in some abstract or otherwise not-basically-blatant way.
Factions spread rumors all the time. For example, rumors have been spreading lately that MichaelSeph's Galaxy Rangers faction is returning to the game. That's a rumor. By the guidelines posted in that sticky, anyone who "spreads" this rumor in a faction thread where said faction is an arch-enemy of Galaxy Rangers (like my faction, Arstotzkan Federation), is liable to be punished in the form of a ban or some other way. That is absolutely unfair.
Threats are one of the biggest things factions do to both protect their interests and ward off potential war. For example, if one faction feels threatened by another, they may post in that other faction's thread and warn them "If you come to our base, we WILL shoot you down and kill you". According to this sticky, giving warnings or threats to another faction like that will result in people getting banned. Again, absolutely ridiculous. We are people in factions that make war on each other. If war talk is not allowed, we might as well not have wars, or factions for that matter, at all.
Defamation... What is defamation? That big fancy word means "The act of damaging the good reputation of someone; slander or libel". So what does this mean? It means warring factions are not able to turn a few heads by getting the other faction's members to doubt their leadership or to attack their faction's morale. This is detrimental to faction warfare on many levels. Lies and slander are a part of what makes faction warfare FUN. Besides the fact that in most cases it's very easy to deny and dissassemble such rumors and lies when they show up, plus being able to polarize the faction parties on both sides of the argument, so they become even more angry and eager to go to war, resulting in better and more intense battles and great StarMade memories. I remember arguing and smack-talking MichaelSeph with Comr4de's help in the Galaxy Rangers thread last year when we warred with them, and those were some of the best moments of my gameplay and forum experience here.
All in all, please lighten up with these ridiculous restrictions. I can understand basic no-thinking-needed type rules like factions not spamming the board with multiple hate threads or excessive profanity or drawing genitals on an enemy faction's ship screenshots then posting it in their thread, but these rules are simply so ambiguous that a wide wide WIDE variety of things people say in faction threads logically follow as now being forbidden, and my fear is that these rules are bound to get a good deal of passionate faction people banned unfairly, while also driving down even further the activity on the faction board as people are discouraged to post for the sake not "not flaming". I encourage the mods to reconsider this."
-Planr
These are extremely good points and I would like to see them answered to because honestly this forums is so restrictive I would consider it more of a news website where people just look at ships and read patch notes rather then actually participate in drama which is honestly almost as entertaining as the game itself.
