I agree with Chenier, the caliber of RP and Lore has fallen apart but I think some of it comes down to the fact that we used to be young when we started playing this almost a decade ago or more. Im 40 with 2 kids now and I barely have time to bang out a paragraph roleplay and usually now reserve them for special events and speeches etc. I used to spend a lot of time thinking of little details to inflict on the world of Dwilight and about my characters or local cultures or aspects of the uncivilized world I remember before the established kingdoms etc, trouble causing things that defined my imperfect character.
I still see RP and things but its a bit less than before, the thing I notice now is that there are fewer larger than life characters left, or perhaps I dont interact with them as much as I used to or they are all gone.
Glaumring is now 98 years old, even his roleplay has aged with him.
There's definitely a much lower investment in regards to time and effort being placed. I was in high school when I joined, and now I'm expecting my third child and running my own business. You've got kids too, and I suspect a lot of us do.
But it's more than just that, the culture has shifted. When I quit, I wasn't just annoyed that people weren't going along with my schemes anymore, but that opposing them was the *only* thing they bothered to do. I'd have been quite content to see a counter-movement growing to bring things in an opposite direction of what I was pushing for, but instead people would just return to their slumber as soon as I stopped. It burnt me out. While a few years earlier, I had managed to recruit a bunch of people to start ritualized human sacrifices, and before that I had tagged along with others' non-conventional plans. Worth mentioning the Bloodmoon fruit again, a bunch of people started promoting the spiritual use of a fully made-up psychotrope, and then a bunch of us started our own "war on drugs" around it, drafting laws to create a monopoly on its production, roleplays about developing non-psychotropic varieties, etc. These aren't things that require a lot of people to invest a lot of time to get going, they just require enough people to care and then merely vocalize their care, even if it's a one-line letter. Guys like us, we used to write pages of RPs about this stuff we were really passionate about, but this kind of stories would still be possible without as much investment as we put in back then.
