For the record, I wasn't fishing, I don't want it to come off that way, and I'm about to say a couple Things, and it's not me trying to toot my horn either, just facts, as I still try and assemble my thoughts, trying to drift back to my original point, which boils down to tl;dr "self reflection".
I'm a writer. I'll fix that - I'm an author (as the stuff was 'published', albeit in tiny venues), the stuff won me scholarships at university etc. Back when AOL had that five minute author section they used to have these fifty word writing contests on subjects that I'd get mentions and wins in without really trying. I was writing spaceship stories when I was seven years old, which sounds like a bullshit story, but I could even make my mom get on teamspeak one day and state this as True (as she is an expert in all things me), redbox D&D in the fifth grade then it was off to AD&D to giggle at the heresy which was the Monster Manuals, Gaming Conventions (the tabletop versions, not the PCgaming kinds) LARPing in college running around in the woods... I know I'm not alone here in this ranking of 'total fantasy nerd', and a lot of us could geek out for hours telling stories. Despite my inability to type anymore these days, I do have the experience to write, to weave a story, to create consistent characters (as well as most do in RP, anyway. It is a very dynamic environment for them to exist in, as they can often run into things that the author of the character could have never anticipated, leading to some possibly 'out of character' reactions.)
In conclusion to that line of thought - I'm an experienced RPer and gamemaster -- in tabletop, MMOs, open-room plaintext, forum-style, and costumed live-action. It means that not only do I know the sorts of communities that can pop up inside of these environments, I also know what needs to be done to make sure I come under notice (or scrutiny, as not everyone fits in everywhere), and used to, long ago, be the one sitting a bunch of angry people in a cabin at 4am on a Sunday going "Look, I don't care who said what or who slept with who, don't you DARE bring this shit into our fantasy world and ruin it for the five of you and the fifty plus outside of this building - leave the fucking real world behind and keep your in characters and out of character shit separate."
Maybe it is just another facet in the "Eve is not an easy game", as the meta comes into play just as often here as everywhere, and though there are degrees, on the normal bellcurve of gaming humanity we're all definitely not candidates for player of the year on Hello Kitty Online. There was another huge thread on this topic already, how to disseminate the difference between an "in character action" (Someone emoted at me or posted at me on the IGS) and the in mechanics actions (Someone violenced my spaceboat or robbed the hangars), and maybe the issue is this sort of thing is never really going to be resolved into a single school of thought, as there is actually two, both equally valid and used, and all of us have different focuses on which is done more. As in, for example "I can help you on this mission but it'll be OOC." - which as we kow, violates a Rule. Your boat is there, you are IC.
"EVE RP" when I first started playing, and what I've found outside of people on Backstage (people who don't consider themselves tabletop types) is playing EVE and knowing the lore. If you have those two things you are a silent protagonist in your own story, or if the silence is broken, it is because you are interacting with Capsuleers, who have "their own society". No one needs to worldbuild it in a document, it's built -- it's there, on the EVE cluster, in countless official and corporate forums and voicecomms. RP is not dead in EVE, it's very, very alive. It is a bunch of Capsuleers living Capsuleer lives and not caring about anything else - which is sort of what they're written to be, so it's all quite canon. They either don't consider what they do as RP because it's not *emote I do stuff, they just DO it, or they do realise they RP every day, but just don't want to get involved in chatroom stuff.
Whether we're making a good example or a bad example is irrelevant because the roleplayers, all of them, without exception, are THE EXAMPLE, because we're such just a painful minority. Whatever labels we want to put on each facet of each different group's RP style or RL likes and dislikes, we're tiny fish in a literal sea of other people on the server, and we're all grouped together because of that.
This isn't a yell to be good or stop being bad, again, because there is no basis of comparison in the wide world of EVE to compare every 'group' to. In essence we're all 'fringe' groups to each other and as a whole we are a single 'fringe' group to EVE. The same usual crap we've all dealt with in every other MMO (and if someone reading this hasn't RPed in an MMO before, yes, this shit happens everywhere).
But when we cry "RP is dying" .. it's best to wonder why. Cause last I checked, everyone posting here is still alive. And the end result of that why should not be to lay a blame game, because in all of the shit that has come up and happened it doesn't matter whose fault it is, it only matters to fix it or find a way to live with it. Every single one of us does this for a personal motive, though there may be altruism in places, no one here is a martyr, and those who are, well, martyrs have this annoying habit of dying (ie. not playing anymore).
Took me WAY too many days to get all of that out half cohesively to the point that it's almost a necro statement on all of this. But I was being ragey. vOv
