[SnowTroll]

I've seen and played both. Generally, most people consider a mud "more RP focused" if people are required or strongly encouraged to sit and take turns, round-robin style, typing very well-thought out, descriptive, 4-6 line poses, and less RP focused if people just spit out one-liners using the "say" and "emote" commands most of us are familiar with from most mud codebases.

The turn taking system ensures that everybody is involved and gets to participate if they want, and gives everybody sufficient time to type out whatever showy descriptive material they want. And it's organized. Nobody gets overlooked that way, and everyone feels a collaborative spirit of having their moment in the spotlight and building a scene together in a very RP focused environment. But you're stuck waiting 45 minutes in a crowded room to finally get your turn to type something, and three quarters of the prose you read doesn't actually advance the scene or communicate all that much. Five lines about how a person moves when he or she walks and his or her facial expression, and one line of actual conversation, that you waited 15 minutes for the other person to post gets unreal. You spent 15 minutes of your real life advancing a fictional mud conversation 30 seconds.

The freeform system is fast, flexible, and lets people focus on content rather than describing everything. It's great for less wordy players who would rather be judged by what their character says, does, and is like than their skills as a writer as they try to describe details that they haven't thought about and don't add all that much to the scene. After all, playing a mud is more like acting in a play than writing a book. You should be playing your role, not writing a story. So thing happen fast, nobody's stuck waiting for their turn, and nobody's stuck reading or writing an entire paragraph of description to speak a sentence. But not everybody feels included when people run in, run out, talk over them, and don't take the time to appreciate their nuances (or write nuances of their own to be appreciated). Very "serious" roleplayers feel like this style glosses over a lot of the opportunities for roleplaying and makes everything feel more like a shallow game and less like a deeply immersive RP experience.

It's a royal pain in the butt in either method to have to immediately drop what you're doing and type something out so some guy who just walked in knows what's taking place. Some muds have a character position/status command that lets you at least set the scene a little bit by changing the text people see when they enter, (e.g., someone entering would see people's names followed by a settable string of text: "Acacia stands at the north end of the street, leaning against the wall of the smithy with his arms folded across his chest, speaking to Snowtroll <next line> Snowtroll squats at the north end of the street in front of the smithy, pooping in front of Acacia , because in serious RP muds, people have to go to the bathroom, and in really serious RP muds, people don't take a break from RP for any reason including pooping")