I am only a recent convert ... and lately have been very busy in RL ... so have not been around much. (Trying to get a domain up and running at the very small school my two youngest kids are at has been way too time consuming for my Illa habit ... I will be finished and back again soon)
Also, being from the antipodes has unfortunately meant that there are very few other players on line during my free-est times but in spite of that ... the roleplaying, the character interactions have been my main reasons for playing.
I am older than alot of other players and come from a pnp dungeons and dragons background (I have kids old enough to be playing lol) and have never had any interest in the sort of online games I saw my son playing. I too have never managed to figure out how they can be called "role playing" games. Role playing was what happened during a good DnD session ... and wasnt even vaguely related to the stuff I was seeing.
For a number of reasons, I went searching for an online game that actually did involve RP. Now I am pretty good at searching ... (too much time in libraries back when everything was done by index cards in long skinny drawers

) and I know my way around computers pretty well (long time hobby - now my occupation) but I came up with ... exactly one.
During my short time here there have been alot of things that have annoyed me ... and (especially when you get kids romping through pking for some half thought out tortured soul plot that really isnt what I would have called RP...) I have considered leaving. But I like it here. I like the way the community (mostly) feels, I enjoy most of the RP and my character has developed in ways I never anticipated when I created her.
The love between Yvanna and Saigwin was especially unexpected - and a real high point for me. And there have been so many other friends that she has made, people she has become very fond of, and those interactions ... the unexpected, the annoying, the scary, the tearful, the heartwarming ... all of them ... are what makes the experience.
It is kind of like playing a huge (and in many ways freer) DnD game with people from all over the world ... or writing a collaborative story. All of this ... makes this game pretty awesome for me.