What's your roleplaying career?

[Amaterasu]

We have all levels of writers around here, from newcomers to experienced players, but how did you end up in the Omniverse? Was it the first site you found, or do you have a long-standing career? I'm curious to hear it.

For those who're curious, here's my story. T'is a bit long.
[spoiler]
Tl;dr version:
Children Network => [break] => roleplaygateway => rolepages => The site that shall not be named => Omniverse

My first writing experience was on a german social network type of site called "Children Network" (translated) which was heavily regulated and sheltered. Just to give an indication, you had to print and mail a letter to the guys to activate your account.
The site was designed for kids from 6-16, you had your profile site where you could pick the most eye-boggling background tile pattern, text background color and text color. Oh, and the font was locked to Comic Sans. There were some other stuffs but the main thing I was there for was the roleplays. This was restricted to creating one per person (if you made a new one you had to delete the old one first), and joining 15 roleplays from other people at max, including your own. You submit your story for approval from staff, and the roleplay owner makes all the characters which other players can then request permission to use.
As for the roleplay itself? One "feed" with the newest post at the top, no formatting options or the like. Most plays were consisting of 2-5 lines of 10 words each, with players having an attention span of a month on average (posting every 3 days, too) before they forget about your play. Just to think of the atrocities I joined, created or posted back then makes me cringe.

After that, big break of several years. I was too busy with other stuff but eventually (age 15, I think?) I got back in the groove. I wrote a few things here and there but no site struck me outside of one called roleplaygateway, which to my knowledge still exists. It has a few restrictions and a short attention span for people as well, but I was the type of player that refreshes the site multiple times a day expecting activity. Although, I'm still rather fond of the memories I accumulated back then, I actually made a decent roleplay and learnt a few good lessons (mainly that being a doormat and letting people join as scifi characters into a medieval fantasy roleplay with the excuse of "time travel" is not okay). I was too focused on writing fanfic though, so this isn't as big a chapter of my career.

Fast forward to when I was 18, I stumbled upon rolepages.com by sheer coincidence. That was my first experience with live-chat roleplay sites, and my fondest non-Omniverse memory. The site featured a chatroom with a consistent theme and a site-spanning story that was driven forward by a weekly event, driving the crapsack world into an even worse situation or getting it back from the brink of extinction. It was pretty fun and I made a few friends there, as well as developed my first character that lasted for a while. Due to the site's members being almost exclusively american and the events only happening while I was asleep though, I eventually lost interest. It was impossible to get myself really established in the (small) community and due to the lack of events for me to play I didn't feel involved and progressing. It lasted me about one and a half years, but it was a pretty big turning point.

I went to seek out other sites after that to get a better experience. It quickly led me to a site that shall not be named, as it's adult content. I've been on there ever since, mainly thanks to that it has a ginormous community (usually there's upwards of 4000 people logged in at a time) and several neat features for its live-chat. Been there for five years and some, and counting. Funfact, I also met Arthuria there!

And finally, the Omniverse. I believe that I found the site when searching rpgfix, in any case it was one of the "roleplay sites list" sites. I decided to give it a try, and ended up here. Transitioning from live-chat roleplay where two paragraphs are more than the average post to a site that encourages people to write big posts and has cross-site consistency in its events, people's actions, quests etc. was a pretty big leap but I fell in love with the site pretty fast![/spoiler]