Recently the population of people actually playing the minecraft server has diminished, I think in part because factions allows you to reach a point where nobody can do anything to you, and also because limiting the creative aspect of this game is extremely detrimental to the amount of time people are willing to put in. There is no reason to continue logging on day after day when an obsidian box is the only building you can sink time into making without worrying about it being destroyed. I say this from experience, I generally only play this game to like build a nice house and stuff, so it really affects how much I want to play the game when I have to weigh whether building something others can just destroy with very little effort is worth the time.
(So here's a story if you care, otherwise you can just skip to the end)
I've contributed to around 3 total (what I would call "pleasant"-looking) houses, and two out of the three are just gone, but even then building them wasn't much of a challenge because I knew prior to making them they would probably just be blown up at some point, and hence I didn't really spend a lot of time trying to make them look all too nice, it's like wasted potential. Compare that to the old towny server, where I probably sank a couple days or more into building and expanding every aspect of building on my land. It was also really cool seeing what other people would do, you know, performing the whole second part of the name in this "mine-craft" game. With factions everyone's shit looks the same because tactically the best thing to build is just an obsidian box in a hard to reach location, and then to just cover it in water, and not only is it a fucking eyesore, it's boring as hell.
Our group's town used to look nice in the beginning, it had some character, I actually really liked the goblin-hovel we had, but we all knew it wasn't going to last, so we built a second base, a giant obsidian box to move to, and sure enough while it was nearing completion, goblin-hovel was lost. We retained all our shit but most of kuntykween's members actually grew so fucking bored with standing on a 20x20 obsidian box in the sky not doing anything that I assume they just lost interest like I did and were eventually auto-kicked from the faction for not logging on for weeks (which is a thing because idk, it doesn't make sense to me that you'd have a mode all about sitting in an obsidian fortress that nobody can do anything to and then you'd punish people for not joining once they realize literally nothing's going to happen). We didn't even finish our fortress we got so bored. I tried to make it look as nice as possible but there's only so much you can do with a fucking obsidian box.
So anyway, weeks later vaporeon just blows up the actual base because literally no-one has cared to log on for weeks and nobody cared to finish it, I'm no longer in the faction anymore at this point so what do I care? I grab shit from the cache I have near spawn and go build the final, third little building I'll ever put the most minimal amount of effort into, and here we are.
The end.
Anyway, I just wanted to illustrate how factions really dissuades you from putting effort or time into anything. The idea of guaranteed combat and being able to blow up people's bases is fun for maybe like the first couple days or so, before people reach that state of practical invincibility, and after that, until they eventually stop caring and raiding shit isn't much of a challenge because nobody else is on the server. If we really wanted to keep factions, I would suggest that we frequently reset the server to keep people in the state of actually having to fight each other and not just turtling behind unbreakable walls. I know rust servers reset pretty frequently to keep things interesting.
Otherwise I'd like to return to building really cool shit, but either way, I think factions is having some demonstrably poor effects on the server that reach beyond my personal opinion.