[brytta]

Sasca, your frustrations sound like mine a few years ago. In fact, they sound like my frustrations when I tried out EVE.

I'm an Armageddon player, and it (and probably the others mentioned) sounds like a good fit for what you're looking for...a purely in-character game with a decent playerbase. You might also look up Shadows of Isildur.

The one thing I'd suggest differently from Newworlds' guide is that you do consider player base. But ignore the figure reported by the MUD admins; judge the number of players by voting rank. You don't want to play a well-populated MUD that's a bad fit for you, but you do want a well-populated MUD. That's especially true if you're looking for roleplay. (If I were looking for a new MUD, I'd go through the top 20-30 listings.)

Two points on which you may need to temper your expectations:

Unless you're playing one of those top-five-vote-gettin' pay-to-perk MUDs with a really enormous playerbase, you will encounter slow times. A MUD drawing 70 players on weekday evenings may have only a handful online in the wee hours, US-time. Learning where and when PCs congregate (heh, and even recognizing PCs from NPCs, in Arm/SoI) and how to plug into steady interaction is one of the early tricks to enjoying yourself, I find... as is finding out the ways of having fun on your own.

On several of the serious roleplay MUDs, you'll, well...be partially satisfied and partially dissatisfied with this. No public channels and no tells means no big, coherent OOC cliques. But obviously, lacking these out-of-character communication channels, you won't get greeted when you log on, either. :^)