R&P has always been a contentious forum, both among users and among moderators. When I was moderating last year, most moderators had given up on trying to enforce rules for anything but the most extreme infractions (death threats, porn, malware linking etc.) because the idea that R&P operated on its own laxer set of rules was pretty ingrained and a lot of people there would pick a fight anytime someone got a warning. It took a lot of extra work to keep R&P to the standards of the rest of the Escapist, mostly because a rather large subset of R&Ps population actively resented any moderation that fell on people they agreed with. As another comparison there was maybe 2 or 3 people in Gaming Discussion and Off-Topic that would actively insult other users repeatedly, for the first few months of me moderating the same number was around 10 in R&P.
I like to think that R&P was a better place when I stopped being a mod, partially because I tried my best to get it actively moderated again and partially because the revival of the Escapist meant that it got both a sense of a future and that someone was actively watching again. With that being said, it was till a contentious forum and the archaic infrastructure of Escapist v1 can cause all kinds of trouble, so I wouldn't be surprised if this is a move to make it easier or even possible to acquiesce a move to a new forum infrastructure.
