all these restrictions seem to defeat the spirit of the battleground, that is to say: blacraft is a primarily pve server where pvp is only allowed in the battleground.
It is currently only allowed in the BG, but we could easily make another BG region with different rules or, like I suggested, an arena, where those items may be more fun to use compared to where the objective is "capture the flag".
Now it seems that pvp too is banned in the battleground, and you are only allowed a watered-down version of fighting.
PvP is banned in the BG except from the arranged battles. None of the rules I added banned PvP during those battles.
diamond tools and weapons are banned, i'm not sure why. however, the argument that 'poor people' don't have them and will have less incentive to battle makes little sense. First of all, diamond tools and armor are not prohibitively expensive. with the end exp farm, it's almost a joke to enchant them compared to before. secondly, most players already do have these tools, active players like smjjames, yqt, bla, me, etc all have the diamond items and enchantmnets, so it's not a hindrance.
The thing isn't that most people can't afford them - all people can obviously get them with some effort. But it takes a lot more time to get good, enchanted diamond tools and armor compared to simply making iron swords and armor. The enchants don't take that much time anymore, but vary a lot, so the gear you get in the end is rarely what you exactly wanted, so it often takes several tries/diamonds to get the gear you actually want, unless you enchant books to apply those, but that takes a lot of time. If people get a lot of different enchants, they will also have very different stats in the fighting, and will not be as equal compared to if they simply used the same weapons and armor. For simplicity's sake and to reduce the amount of time we need to devote to the battles, I think using unenchanted iron swords and armor is a better option. That way people are still equal in the battle, and the more equal people are in what they have, the more they can battle based on skill, and I think that is the most important thing.
enderpearls are banned because they let you get up close, but i think that banning them is the wrong way to handle the problem. why not instead surround the flag by moats of laval to make enderpearls a bad idea? what about strategically placed glass walls? I'm quite sure enderpearls can be easily defended against.
They still make you able to teleport directly to the flag if you just throw them correctly, even if there are glass walls, by then just tp'ing to them instead and from there to the flag. They're also a pretty cheap way to get across obstacles. You can probably invent some system defending against them, but I think it would be more fun if they were simply banned.
unless you're worried that the tnt will kill the server, i have no idea why you'd want to limit tnt. do we limit the amount of sword strokes?
One reason would be to protect the server, but the main reason would be to make the battles less costly. If people want to battle every week now, or have the "right" to do it, I think we should let the BG also have room for people who don't have time to gather lots of TNT, potions and have enchanted diamond stuff ready for that in the long run. At least, if that would be expected of me, I think I would disband the Red Front and ignore the BG. I could afford some battles definitely, but there's no way I'd be willing to spend that many resources on it - and I don't think the added resources actually would make the battles any more fun.
I could see banning block breaking items, maybe. Banning other items though? If you want perfectly fair battles just ask someone outside of the battleground to fight you in iron everything.
Potions are probably the most overpowered items though, hardly enchanted diamond gear, if you wanted to ban overpowered things.
Remember the BG is all about changing the flag and not simply killing, so the defenders try to make defensive structures. I think the attacker should be able to break these, otherwise I think it will be too hard to get to the flag, even though we could also change the rules so that the flag would have to be reachable or something like that by the attacker.
I didn't say I wanted perfectly fair battles, I'm just saying I think battling with all of those expensive items isn't any more fun than if you used their cheaper and simpler equivalents, and battling for the BG flags is not comparable to some randomly arranged duel in some random location.