[obit]

I think [telnet wotmud.org port 2222] Is a great example of a dual-role MUD. It is RP-encouraged, in that quest points are awarded to RPers by guild leaders, Gods, ect depending on what is going on in the game. It is also a heavily PK game with a "Dark" and "Light" side, complete with raids organized by the players, and massive battles, involving 10 to 20 players sometimes. Roleplay is rewarded through "guild-specific" EQ items but that EQ is never the best in the game, ie a "guild" cloak might be pretty dern good, esp for a lower-level guy, but you can still get a better one, by killing a SMOB.

Your second question, I'll answer with a resounding "No." In a loose, encouraged, but not enforced environment, such as wotmud, if someone seems to not care about anything but grinding away, killing NPCs, the RPers will generally ignore that person and carry on with their own business, and the other hand, the H&Sers will just shrug off people that get too RPish for their own tastes. Most are polite to one another, and it really isn't an issue for much debate, in the game or in the forums associated with the game.

3rd one:
A balanced system will get more traffic to a game, but some of the "RP quality" might be sacrificed.

4th question.. Trying hard to resist an opprotunity for another shameless plug, promoting my own MUD(JTrek):

In much the same way that people playing Chess, wouldn't pretend to be an actual "knight" murdering an actual "bishop", in my purely non-RP mud, the emphasis is on combat strategy/tactics involving the game's combat system, and recognition is gained through displaying skill and cunning in a complex PK environment. There's no such thing as "sillynames" and when you talk to another player, you're actually talking to that person. If like-minded RPers were to play the game, they could definitely have fun with it, but the suspension of disbelief would be shattered as soon as one of the long-time players started chatting about the LSU game, so you'd have to have to make up for that with your own imagination, and block incoming messages from non-RPers and global channels. It would be like playing Halo on xbox live and pretending that you are "Master Chief" while everyone is like "wtf is wrong with this dude?" So yeah, I'm pretty much a non-RP, H&S, PK, shoot-em-up kinda guy.