[Anaiah]

Southlands - The roleplay is very slow and a bit more formal than in other muds, it can make scenes take a while. The codebase is one of the more interesting ones, if a bit bare bones in some aspects. For instance, all the rooms are save rooms, so your entire world is persistent through reboots, up to and including bits of rubbish or foraged items left on the ground, and I really like that, personally. The last time I played it was still just about all elves, but they were opening up the possibility of playing humans. The staff is awesome, very communicative, and will even send emails to you with ideas for roles you might like after you've been playing a while so they have some idea what sort of roles you enjoy. The movement can be slow at times, and it is exceedingly dangerous to leave a city, depending on where you are going off to. The playerbase seems to be low, but the staff tend to animate a lot and seem to be around/available often if needed.

Black Sands - Currently playing. The game is in beta. It has a vague resemblance to Armageddon that is encompassed mostly in how its magick guilds are referred to, though the practice there is actually completely different. Small but very responsive staff. Animates a lot. Handles issues quickly. The main issue with black sands currently, to me, is that there are still some bugs being worked out in the code and the crafting is currently not implemented (though it is damn near finished, as far as I'm aware). Travel can be slow if you are used to getting around without movement delays, but it is not unbearable. The roleplay is interesting and diverse. Of all the games I have played, it is in Black Sands, where I have found the most 'unique' roles. People that aren't playing that 'I -am- the wilderness' ranger, or that sneaky-sneak assassin, but play out their day jobs which can at times be flavored by their coded skills, or at other times stray wildly from them. The playerbase is low, but the game is designed to encourage players roleplaying together, and there are many small touches that help to make it feel crowded.

Dark Isles - I believe this game is currently down. It had its own very interesting and unique feel with different nobles all over the place and sort of a medieval water-front town vibe. They had their own take on werewolves and vampires which was interesting, but the roleplay was maddeningly slow. It was considered polite in this game in particular to use turn by turn paragraph posting which, I've never played one long enough to know, but I understand is the same sort of way a mush is played. The staff experience seemed hit or miss as to attentiveness and promptness in dealings, though they were always polite and level headed. The playerbase was very low, and the differing factions working as they did did not help to make it feel otherwise.

Armageddon - This game, I actually played for half a decade and spent more than a year on staff there. As you can probably tell by the interaction with Fifi there, I've a bit of a bitter taste left by it. The world is beautifully written, at times the code is fantastic, though other places like the brew skill when it comes to things other than tablets, and wagonmaking are utter failures to implement things uniformly or in ways that are even slightly useful in a decade of them being supposedly worked on. Staff is a very hit or miss thing. Many of them are relatively kind and helpful and pleasant to interact with (Natious, Rahneyvahn), others if you cross them once or disagree with them, your entire career on the game will be **** (Nyr, Adhira). The playerbase fluctuates wildly from sometimes 60-80 at peak times to as few as 2 at other times of day. The game world is vast, and game design encourages it to feel like a ghost town surprisingly often for a game with 50 players on, because everyone is in a private clan hall practicing their skills, rather than doing anything together, or risking bad account notes (and thus never being able to play higher end guilds) by skipping out on their training. It can be a great gaming experience if you keep your illusions about you, but hundreds of people have been wronged enough that they actually created a seperate forum regarding it, complete with logs and emails to document places where they've been egregiously wronged.

Those are the RPI's I've played. I got into a game called Whispers of Times Lost that was RP-enforced, and it was one of my favorites, but unfortunately, as far as I know, it's no longer running, which is a shame. That's really the only non-RPI I played long enough to rate at all. I've tried a couple dozen others, but not typically much beyond character creation if it doesn't seem like it will be appealing.