The issue I believe is one of a subtle but rampant misconception on what is actually expected from players of an RP game. Too large a portion of the community are playing this game as if it were an RPG, like Skyrim or Mass Effect, when really this is supposed to be played like a tabletop game like DnD. Secondly, too large a portion of the community do not actually know all the rules and expectations of proper roleplay.
I will start first with the RPG vs RP problem.
All the time I see new players and veterans alike playing the game to win. They attempt to have their succeed in every altercation, every conflict, every adventure. These people are playing the game like they might play Skyrim. There is the role of "Dragonborn" and you get to play it and so you do absolutely everything you can to win and be the best at as many things as possible. After all there was never a time when the dragonborn lost was there? The problem here is two fold. 1, there is the problem of "Main Character" syndrome, and 2, there is the Always-Win Bias.
On main character syndrome: Everyone knows what this is and everyone knows they are not supposed to do it. Its an easy thing to do, but the first thing everyone needs to endeavor towards is avoiding main-character syndrome. You are used to fighting hordes of draugr and reapers as a single person and through your skill defeating them all. But that is because they are npcs! You cannot expect the same to be anywhere close to accomplishable against other player characters. Furthermore, as they are not npcs, you have no idea how they are going to react or what they are capable of, and so you can not dictate their actions.
On Always-Win Bias.
This right here is a poison that is perhaps the largest cause of bad roleplay. Many individuals are trying to beat the game like they would any other game. But you do not get to do that here. Roleplaying on Altera is about having the chance to create a story and simulate living a life you would otherwise never get the chance to live. But its more like a good TV show or movie than a videogame. Having the characters in a movie or show lose or get injured or even die makes things tense, interesting, excited and sometimes sad. Watching characters overcome challenges and recover from losses is what makes the show watchable at all. How utterly boring would it be to watch a TV show in which the main character won all the time. There's no point in watching it, its silly.
You have got to remember to apply this to your characters people! Losing is not the worst thing in the world and it very often makes things that much more interesting. But more than that its simply realistic to expect to lose things from time to time. And I'm not just talking about fights, though that is a major one. Think about the things that challenge people in real life. Shortcomings, failings, flaws. Emotional baggage, physical illness or infirmity. Not some token fault your character has so that you can justify their skills, but a character flaw which adds to the rp experience. When you are playing a videogame, flaws and weaknesses make things worse for you. But when you are a writer, flaws and weaknesses are just as interesting (if not more) than strengths and talents.
The dangers of this are obvious. When you are always playing to beat the game, or playing to win, you are no longer writing an interesting story. The rps you do aren't as fun, for you or for others. More importantly, it leads to people god-moding or being overpowered, as they won't accept that their character can or needs to lose. And of course when you are playing the game to win and someone better comes a long and beats you, you get upset. Whenever you lose, or even whenever you just don't win the most you get upset. Or when you are upset that someone older than you has the advantage because now you can't win. Really, its just that you are playing the game incorrectly.
The way to fix this is to remember at all times that your character is just like one in a book, and has problems and loses just like real people. Really its something that you just have to convince yourself to go try, it almost always ends up being fun or interesting, so once you've done it a few times it won't seem scary to allow every now and again.
Thirdly, I want to address another interesting thing I have seen, and that is some people play characters which... for lack of a better phrase, "Do not exist." What I mean here is that many of you will fill out a template with a name, race, and appearance, call it a character, but then play as yourself. With your morals, your values, your qualities. Playing the game as if you, the person on the other side of the screen, were the one actually in the game. Its sort of the default thing to do but it is incredibly dangerous, and the best Rping is not done like this. Unfortunately, You, the person, do not get to be in Altera, Altera is not for you, you do not fit there. You get to be the writer, interactively determining the life of someone who does get to be in Altera, who does fit there. That is, when you create and play a character, their personality is NOT yours. The dangers in playing like this are manyfold. 1, it becomes incredibly easy to be upset at losing or to be upset at people who do not like your character, because your character is, well, you. And you don't want to lose in real life, and you don't like it when people insult you in real life, so when your character is too similar to yourself and these things happen, it is so much easier to get upset and so much harder to remember that you are writing a story in a book. Second, your morals and your values and your viewpoints and knowledge and behavior often do not make sense in Altera. Our personalities and behavior are a product of the environment we grew up in and if you are trying to force a personality created in a modernized no-magic society into a primitive fantasy-based one, there's going to be times where it makes no sense. See: Altera is highly tolerant of people of different race, religion, gender, species, viewpoint, etc. There is almost no systemic bigotry in Altera because all of you are people who live in a society where we understand bigotry is bad. But we also all know that, back then, it wasn't so. I'm not saying we need to bring bigotry into Altera (though the rps I've had with characters who were were some of the most interesting I've had) but I am pointing out what I mean by sometimes playing as ourselves in Altera in a medieval fantasy setting doesn't quite make sense.
There are several ways to solve this, but I find that the easiest for people who are new to the issue is to imagine that the character you are playing is a good friend of yours in real life and you are pretending to be them and so you have to figure out what they would most likely do in each situation. After long enough it becomes second nature, where you do things that your character would do even if to you it makes no sense. People who can do this, by the way, are also almost impervious to accidentally metagaming.
Lastly and less maliciously, a lot of you just do not know how to give others a fair chance when you are rping, or don't know what you are expected to do to allow others the chance to interact. I've seen a lot of people rp something along the lines of "Fires an arrow into his chest" without giving the other a chance to respond simply because they didn't actually know they were supposed to, or if they did, just didn't actually thing that they had to. To this end, in the near future I will be releasing a very large and in-depth and comprehensive guide on combat rp.
So then the analysis is that the results we are seeing are the effect of widely held bad-roleplay practices. Now I know we cannot expect everyone to know these and be good rpers. Newcomers to the server often have had no rp experience and need to rp some and make mistakes to learn from them. When I started, I didn't know crap about rping. But our veterans must know these things. The newcomers take their cue on how to play from them, but our veteran player population has these tendencies entrenched in several iterations of players. If they can be taught, then our newcomers will take their cue from them and eventually learn as well.
But as to policies or rules the staff can enact to handle it from our side? I have no clue. I can think of two things we can and should do.
1, publish well written and comprehensive guides on these issues. Have it written repeatedly in the rp section, the lore section, the events section, the character creation section, and in the guides for new applicants, what is expected of them in this free-form rp style, and that they cannot play like this like an RPG.
2, crack down on cases of people breaking these.
But past that, the ball is in the player's court. Learn these things, and teach them to others when you have them figured out. Settle disputes among yourselves, preferably through rp, and if you can't, just don't rp with the other person anymore.
Hey whaddya know not nearly as long as I had feared it might be.