[ender]

I think a lot of people are really missing the point on what Delerak and a lot of members of the RPI community are trying to achieve with guidelines like this.

We are not trying to invalidate the RP of other MUDs, we are simply trying to make it known what YOU, the gamer, should expect when you run across a MUD that calls itself an RPI.

This has come from the fact that big three did not have a designation and were forced to call themselves MUDs when they were vastly different from all the various other categories of MUDs out there. Too much unforgiving code to be called a MUSH and such a strict RP environment as to really sour someone who was expecting one of the various styles of RP encouraged MUDs and even RP enforced.

What the RPI standards are trying to do is not to say "HEY JACKASSES YOUR RP IS AWFUL AND I HATE YOU!" to any other style of MUD or game out there that does have "intense RP", but just to let people know what they're getting into when they begin to play an RPI.

This has been fine for awhile, and everyone was happy until other MUDs starting picking up on the term that were vastly different experiences than one would expect from an RPI, they weren't necessarily bad games, they were just different enough that they couldn't really be accurately compared to the other games using the designation.

And the whole point of a designation is to define something, whether people are getting their panties in a bunch because it's a term that holds some sort of importance outside of RPIs, it's not a perfect term, it was coined by those who played the RPIs, not something a haughty MUD owner used to fluff themselves up. And it's just stuck for a long time now.

I suggest to those who are arguing against the use of the term. Give one of these RPIs a try, see how different they really are from other styles of MUDs.