The new massivecraft factions versino 2.0+ is definitely getting bad reviews on my server and i dont like it much either. I can't find any previous versions on the massivecraft github nor google can anyone please give me an older version preferrably 1.9.6 ?
http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/factions/files/ Looks like the most recent (Pre 2.0+) version of Factions is version 1.8.2. Anyways, it can be downloaded using the link above. Note that it might not be compatible with 1.6.2...