[Threshold]

Which accomplishes what? Does it actually eliminate such discussions? Does it even significantly reduce them? OOC discussions are going to happen, and they often happen for very harmless (or even positive) reasons. Sometimes players just get along and want to get to know each other as friends outside their characters. That also happens to be a very valuable thing for your MUD, as it increases "stickiness" and thus the likelihood they will keep playing your game.

I would rather such discussions take place in a controlled environment with social pressures to keep things "appropriate" than have them all happen via third party programs outside the game with no rules, no guidelines, no peer pressure to "be good", etc. Furthermore, once you've forced people to use outside sources of communication for *ANY* OOC stuff they want to talk about, now you got them in the habit of doing so. It is similar to the crazy PC industry obsession with copy protection. They don't stop any pirates, but they motivate legitimate customers to seek out cracked .exe sites so they can play their games without having to keep the disc in the drive (or other copy protection related hassles). But then the customer has learned, for a legitimate reason, how to find cracked .exes. And once they see how easy it is to find such cracks, the little seed of temptation is planted. Now they start to think "wow, if its this easy, why do I even buy games at all?" Well the same temptation applies once you've motivated them to seek external ways to have legitimate OOC discussions with other players.

Here's a similar example. Dark Age of Camelot did not allow players from different "realms" (the 3 sides in their RvR war) to talk to each other. As this was not a role play focussed game, this turned out to be a pretty bad idea. Over time, people wanted to be able to the people on the other side of those characters they kept meeting on the battle field. They wanted to thank them for exciting battles, or talk a little playful smack, or give someone praise if they got stomped. Since the game completely forbade this, what evolved was an IRC channel that people of all 3 realms would login to every time they were going to RvR. This was harmless at first, but once people were in the habit of it the lines started to blur. Soon they were engaging in "cross teaming" (2 sides ganging up on one, arranged outside of game), and all manner of other illegal behavior. If they game had just allowed some method of in game discussion across the realms (perhaps only /says and not /tells), the IRC channel may never have been created, probably would never have reached critical mass, and would mostly likely have never been abused.

Absolutely. That is very common. But once you prevent them from having harmless OOC discussions inside your game, you force them to have these harmless OOC discussions via a third party program. And once they are doing it "off game", all bets are off. Now they are talking to people OOC with absolutely no guidelines in place.

But honestly, the code design really isn't any more RP intensive than a lot of contrary code design concepts. RPI stands for a certain type of features that SOME PEOPLE like and SOME PEOPLE want in their RP oriented game. But this feature set has more to do with personal preference than RP. Equally good arguments can be made that some of the "RPI" style features are actually a detriment to role play. I'll give five examples:

1) Some people think totally free form emotes are actually absurd, unrealistic, and bad for role play as they let people do absurd, impossible things that make no sense. (I disagree with this, but I can certainly see and understand the reasoning behind it.)

2) As I already noted, I find things like non-codified advancement extremely arbitrary, unrealistic, and a detriment to role play.

3) And as I argued above, I think a total lack of an OOC "pressure valve" coded within your game is also a detriment to role play.

4) I think skilling up through use unfortunately ends up being one of the most OOC things ever. It just results in people standing in a corner typing (or even scripting) a command over and over. It reminds me of how people playing Morrowind would jump everywhere so they could raise their jump skill and related stats "for free."

5) Then there is the whole classless and/or level-less concept. I won't go into detail, since this could be its own 500+ post topic, but this has *NOTHING* to do with RP. This is purely a game design decision. There are plenty of real world analogues to classes and levels.

Now, I am not saying the above 5 things are "right" (in fact, I totally disagree with one of them, and I partially disagree with another). But they are valid points, and they illustrate the fact that the RPI feature set is more about game design preferences than anything to do with RP or RP intensive code design. The fact that nobody seems to be able to hammer down an explicit set of features that defines "RPI"ness just exacerbates the problem. And Mina already pointed out the natural result of that problem: it makes "RPI" seem more like a "club" than an actual philosophy of game design.