Ever fired up a multiplayer game and thought "hey, I wish these people were less social"? Me neither. Catering to the lowest-common denominator of people and "muh feelings" isn't exactly a recent trend. It's been going on ever since the rules expanded from the golden rule one of nerd.nu into the long, sprawling labyrinth of corner cases and "staff discretion" that you have now. Some of the rules were actually required because the golden rule, for whatever reason, wasn't cutting it. Despite some proponents of the nu nerd order claiming that it's just staff abusing their right to kick / ban / mute without oversight, the apparently vexing problem of putting aside your unwarranted self-importance for a few moments to consider that maybe a comment about race / religion / sexual orientation wasn't actually a targeted backhand remark is pretty much the core cause of the entire issue. Sometimes people say something deliberately venomous (in the heat of the moment or not) and should most certainly be forced to take a time-out from the community, but discussing anything that isn't deliberately inciteful, targeted, or containing malicious undertones should not be censored. I could go on about some amendment or other that is potentially tangentially relevant, but the actual problem this causes is more directly related to the servers. Generally, "multiplayer" indicates that you'll be playing the game with other people. Those people, like most other mammals, are social. They talk. They talk about a lot of things, from what they had for breakfast to their interpretation of Luke 24. You know what the biggest and best indicator of a game server's size is? How active it is. Ever since some genius discovered the previously considered-impossible fact that you could forge the player stats on just about any game server, it's come down to people jumping on to check it out. New players cannot even approach caring about "clan chat, whatever that is". They just want to see if the server is going to be right for them. This just in: Nobody really plays multiplayer wanting silence. That's what singleplayer is for. If you want to play with people but without chat, here's an idea: Disable the chat. Alternatively, use the ignore list like a capable human being. Segregating the life out of any and all chat doesn't just make the server look dead, it actually makes it really inconvenient for players in more than one channel. For the record, that's basically anyone who doesn't roleplay living in a city that has a clanchat. You can't just tab between channels like you can with some IRC clients or Facebook Messenger. You actually have to type some ridiculous slash-command in order to switch your "target", then talk into that channel. Many people have been around for years and even they still couldn't care less about clanchat. It was an average fix for the non-problem of groups of friends communicating out-of-band on the survival server. Last I checked, that's what Mumble, Skype, and every other communications software under the Sun was for. It's actually fewer keystrokes to alt-tab out of Minecraft and into Mumble, type a reply, and alt-tab back in than it is to switch clanchat channels, type your message, then (maybe) switch back. I'd rather just use general chat to be honest, or Mumble, because I like hearing the sound of my own voice. It's the best. You should hear it. The lack of social awareness demonstrated by anyone suggesting that you should squirrel away individual chats into little pockets is palpable. If you want your server to look like it's a bunch of wannabe secret societies pretending not to play a video game on the same box, go right ahead. The staff shouldn't be making wild stabs in the dark about the future of a discussion, they should be watching it if they're worried it'll go off course. Yes, watching it. How revolutionary; the community janitors have to sometimes act as community janitors. Don't want to monitor trouble? Quit, play on another account, or disclaim liability for upset players because you're busy building a tower.