As someone who spent 400 hours there over it's final months as the only active admin, I feel like I can say a few things. Firstly, and for the most part, none of the bullying/horrific chat was done in world chat or even party chats, so there is no way to regulate it with a "stricter staff team" as it was done through either A) Private messaging or B) on private Skype chats(since all players knew that I could see their party and alliance chats.) Secondly, Factions is SUPPOSED to not be strict, it's supposed to be a place where you can go blow off steam and kill each other, throw out some insults, laugh at eachother and have fun: not play yet another version of Townie with minimal raiding/pvp. At the end of it's life-cycle, it became essentially a competition to see who could stay on top of MCMMO and nothing more, because riaiding was pointless due to the limited amount of things you could do while raiding(i.e. no ender pearls, no golden apples, people would complain if another faction was within 100 blocks, etc, etc, etc.)
Now on to my suggestion - either A) bring it back with fewer PvP rules and more chat rules or B) Wait the year for the fresh playerbase, because all of our serious pvpers have left.
Now on to my suggestion - either A) bring it back with fewer PvP rules and more chat rules or B) Wait the year for the fresh playerbase, because all of our serious pvpers have left.