[Bakha]

More or less retired mudder and former staff member of Armageddon weighing in here:

I think what tends to rankle the RPI crowd is that for a long time the RPI world was this little unpopular niche of the mudding community. For years, it was a self-referential term really only used among the players of certain games. Then, as the MMORPGs came along, more and more muds started trying to specialize in roleplaying, as it was something that text muds actually could do better than MMORPGs. First you saw the rise of roleplay enforced. Then you saw the rise of roleplay required. In the constant battle to gain players and one-up each other, other games started saying, "We're RPI" because that was seen as one step further than RPE. The RPI crowd (or at least those that care enough to actually engage in such debates) felt these interlopers were trying to steal their thunder (albeit, it's some pretty quiet thunder).

Anyway, that whole thing has been debated ad nauseum. It doesn't really matter to me, but I do think that some of the muds who are now claiming RPI are some of the same muds who check every feature box on their ads, because they're taking the "throw enough poo on the wall and see what sticks" approach to gaining players. And those same muds are the ones who make it almost impossible to have any sort of objective standards for categorizing muds.