Started roleplaying in TaconBanana, which was at a huge peak at the time. It was really the only dedicated serious platform of its kind and had a huge playerbase that filled 5 servers at the time.
They had FOUR half life 2 RP servers, which included
1) City, which had 40 players
2) Canals, which usually had about 20
3) Outlands, which usually had about 15-20
4) Inner Nexus, which was used for CP training and passive and had about 10-15 players on.
Then you had the Terminator Roleplay server,
@Powley and others including myself fucking adored this server. This server had 30+ people on at a time.
The community was great, roleplay was of a really great quality and DaveBrown was a seriously active developer and community head that often played killing floor with me and a couple other guys. Couple of lead admins died, and we held ceremonies and shit, was really nice.
The server only started to really decline when GMOD got really popular, and a lot of younger people came on with their own notion of roleplay and made RP what it is now, really. It lacks of a lot of its charm and has a lot of whining in it. One thing i love about Davebrown and his moderation and rules of the servers is that it's HIS vision for what is right and wrong, and there were no loopholes.
I saw a man on Terminator roleplay get killed by a /event of a terminator sniping him the moment he left base on his own. Absolutely brutal.
I wish that kind of challenge and community focus came back.