As said earlier, most there just want to play house.
Roleplay that would break from this is generally frowned upon. The game has about a dozen different races, all with different characteristics that could lead to some interesting cultures and roleplay. I tried setting up one race to be a bunch of xenophobic racists through a religion I developed and taught all the children of this race as they grew up. Unfortunately, most people had OOC friends who were of other races nearby, so they decided that racism is bad and that you should go over and mate with every other race. It's been the same on any other character I've played where I tried to make things different.
In my observations over most of the period of time, with the exception of some ice elves who were brutal and uncaring and mermaids who had no familial unit, the most unique differences between cultures was what you called your 'Mother' and 'Father', Di=Father, for example.
As for the situation with Vaylon. Vaylon was extremely immature and emotional in how he handled the situation and because he was friends with most of the chat playerbase, most of them followed him. Lumin had his own problems and he handled a number of things badly, particularly with the plague that he added to kill off older characters.
Lumin wanted a dynamic game where people built towns, went on adventures, went to war, arranged marriages, etc. He wanted a game that would generated interesting and varied stories and history in a wholly player created world. You can tell that from how he describes it on the front page.
In reality it's a game that's played by a bunch of people who treat it like a forum roleplaying chatroom who all want to be perfect hippies who do not want to anything else but sit around and gossip, have babies, and feed babies.
