[prof1515]

Spelling is incorrect. While "ph" and "f" are phonetically similar, one is not my screen name while the other is.

As has already been pointed out, there is a lack of documentation in the MUD community for just about anything aside from personal recollection. I will refer you to review a discussion over on though to get further information on the term. It is one of the few cases where the discussion of the term was ever documented though by no means is it the first or a definitive discussion.

First of all, your url is wrong. Secondly, the evidence also extends before that to discussions here and on mudlab.org. Third, the old rpimud.com never represented any systematic attempt to define RPI, just one man's loose interpretation.

The term is not ambiguous. The exact characteristics of the term were a bit ambiguous since they were never clearly defined until a couple years ago by examining the games to which the term first applied for similar characteristics which could constitute why some games were called RPI while others were not. It was simply a matter of figuring out what those games had in common that was not standard in other games of the time. By doing so, a clear definition of the term could be derived which matched its original usage.

Because despite different code origins and different codebase development, they all possess the same characteristics.

This is the root of your problem. You still apparently have a sub-par understanding of the English language. "Role-play intensive MUD" and "intense role-play MUD" do not mean the same thing. The order of the words signify to what the word "intensive" refers to. In the former term, the word is an adjective of "MUD" while in the latter it is an adjective of "role-play".

Then they, like you, would be wrong and demonstrating their ignorance. Like it or not, the term was coined for those particular types of MUDs.

Again, your ignorance of English seems to be the root of your problem.

NFL is trademarked, not copyrighted. Even if they weren't, it still functions as an example because I was pointing out that while all NFL teams are football teams, not all football teams are NFL teams. The same is true of RPIs and role-play enforced MUDs.

And you would be wrong as I coined the term and can tell you what it means and my intent. RPI does not represent any ultimate goal. It represents a particular type of game. The term RPO was coined to signify games which stand out from the 300+ role-play enforced MUDs but which are not RPI. It is an ambiguous term because these games really lack any identifying standard beyond being role-play enforced. Some have levels, some do not. Some have OOC channels, some do not. Some have permanent death, some do not. They do all however possess differences from MUDs merely with stock H&S code and a role-play required policy though these differences are by no means the same from game to game. That is why I came up with a term for them.

Apparently you don't know what a guild is. Beside that minor point, what would this have to do with the definition of anything?

And yet again the problem is that you don't understand English very well. "Intense" is subjective. Your use of the word is also irrelevant to the discussion because the term is "role-play intensive" and not "intense role-play".

How does the number of open games make any difference? To date, there have been about three dozen games which have been RPI. At present, there are 6 open (Dark Horizon's website states that they're open) and at least another 5 in development. But even if there was only one around, that wouldn't change anything as that has not always been the case.

What does playerbase size have to do with anything? No one has ever claimed RPIs were anything but a niche type of MUD. Although the two largest, Armageddon and SoI, have fairly good-sized playerbases that doesn't change anything.

Furthermore, combat and PK is not the emphasis of any of the games even if they do emphasize it as an element of their role-play. It relates to the setting they have chosen. What does Tolkien have to do with anything? These things don't relate to discussing what constitutes RPI.

Seriously, as an administrator of an ENGLISH TEXT-BASED game, you should have some understanding of the language. If English isn't your first language then my apologies for being rude. However, if it is your first language then you need to learn how the language works because that seems to be the root of your inability to comprehend things.

Take care,

Jason