Really 343? It’s not enough to force people to spend significant percentages of their lives grinding in your video games? You have to extend it to your forum? Do you really have to blackmail people into being active on here?
It’s not really about blackmailing people into being active, it’s more about keeping the forums clean. Allowing signatures at low post requirements, at least on any forum I’ve ever been on or had to moderate, just results in the posting screen being filled up with crap (another reason I am glad that embedded images aren’t allowed here).
The point of a forum really is to engage with other, discuss and debate. Having a signature at the end is more of a gift or privilege - ‘thanks for contributing so much to the community’. I honestly haven’t minded the grind to get mine, though I wouldn’t really call it a grind, I generally don’t take notice of post count.
The other factor is here is enforcement, it becomes something else that the moderators have to actively look at and monitor. Moderating signatures was always my least favourite thing to do. The way it works on Waypoint means that users who have signatures have been around long enough to understand the rules of what’s cool and what’s not.
One of the things I actually love about this site is its minimalism, very clean and organised 
Blackmail people? Really? Both over dramatic and not blackmail.