What I Love:
GOOD roleplay, the kind that simultaniously tells a good story and highlights more about the world. It's my opinion that in roleplay players get a chance to put their own spin on the 'verse, and I would like to see someone making an RP and discussing the underlying design facets of their militaries, the geographies of their nation, and underlining some more national history. Show, don't tell and all that.
The application of naval power. I'm a nautical fan at heart, and there's nothing I love more than a system that allows wooden ships and iron men to blaze away at each other and showcases the effects and problems of a strong naval war system. Similarly, air power is a very good selling point to me, but I simply regard land war as boring without a powerful naval and/or air system to spice it up.
Logical, serious, realistic(in-universe) nations that do things that MAKE SENSE. Nations that establish clear foreign policies and determine how they'll follow them, don't make exceptions for some other nations but not others, and who generally have a personality beyond that of their player.
A simple, yet challenging economy. I don't want to micromanage resources(take that MP3) because I have more serious things to worry about in my life than an IOT's economy, but nor do I want a cruelly simple economy prone to exploits. IOTE2's was a bit on the simple end for what I'm talking about. Easy to learn, hard to master, is I guess the point.
What I Loathe:
BAD Roleplay. Like, the kind that only is in it for the RP points, is incredibly biased, serves no purpose to expand and/or flesh out the world, or is comprised mostly of pictures and one-off statements. An RP with good characters, thoughts, and such as its core can incorporate pictures or a desire for RP points, but without internal logic, a more neutral demeanor, and a perspective on what the world is like - it doesn't even have to be a character-driven RP - it's just glorified fanwank, and that gets on my nerves.
A military system that's clearly only an afterthought, especially naval. Systems that treat navies like they're just transports for armies, because of course armies do the heavy lifting, or systems where the economy or the roleplaying is well developed but the armies are accidentally or deliberately made unusable. I *like* my hard power to be effective when it comes down to it, even if I do like soft power as well, and there are far too many IOTs lately that treat hard power like it's a disease.
Espionage. Absolutely freaking HATE it. Nuff said.
Stupid nations. Nations that make no sense. Nations that are clearly just avatars of the player. Nations that the same player has played in the same spot many times beforehand. All of those things are guaranteed to make steam come from my ears. A nation that makes sense has its own internal logic and is more than just a tool for the player to use in order to "win" the game. And for those of you who argue that the player's personality is inherently going to leak over and be his nation's personality, I have over a hundred characters in my head right now who are completely at odds with each other and myself. It's not hard to actually ROLEPLAY if people get off their butts and give a crap about playing the game instead of just shooting everything.
An economic system that feels like a college course on the subject. I didn't come to study free market systems vs. state control, I came to roleplay a nation and let my ministers work out the detail work of that. I want to make RPs, I want to threaten NPCs with soft power, I want to make clients, I want to deploy my fleets to threaten trade lanes, I want to interact with nations that actually make sense and follow in-universe logic. I don't want to adjust stocks, bonds, investments, and allow for income derivations while trying to prevent an economic recession. I get enough of that planning for my life after I move out with my girlfriend.
And above all else: shoddy GMing. GMs with bias, GMs with stupid rules, GMs more interested in defending their rulesets than in fixing problems, GMs who want to play their own games so much they make a GMPC and use OOC knowledge to rule the game, and especially GMs without the backbone to kick problem players. A game is only as strong as the GM - I've had object lessons in that before. A weak-willed GM will cause even a wonderful ruleset and great players to spiral into absolute anarchy and chaos before long.
These are, of course, just my thoughts. But they're what I look for in games. In other news, considering starting IOTCW2 here very soon.
-L
