Haha, exactly! It is tension and problems that drive plot. Otherwise it just gets boring and peters out. The world doesn't have to be ending for it to be fun, but there has to be something a little wrong at least to work out. My bestie and I see eye-to-eye on this but have troubles actually roleplaying together very often, which makes me sad. But we absolutely LOVE to torture our characters. Even if it is just cutesy romance, you have them so awkward and oblivious that you have to sit back and laugh at them for constantly getting in their own way and misunderstanding each other and blowing things out of proportion... you get the idea, lol. Or if they do get along well, there needs to be external conflict, as you said. So.... yeah... lack of conflict is a pet peeve, definitely!

I agree with the previous points on literacy, too. You don't have to post paragraphs to be a good roleplayer. A good post includes a reaction to what happened and then something for the next person to react to. Meaning gets lost in purple prose, and on the other hand nothing gets done if it all comes down to a bunch of one-liners. I actually once knew a guy whose purple prose was so bad that he could write several paragraphs and there would be absolutely nothing to respond to because it was mostly happening in the character's mind, yet he was remaining emotionless and stoic on the outside, so it didn't even matter. One of my buddies and I actually use part of one of his huge posts as a running joke, because he actually said something like "And the creatures in the woods doing the things that creatures do in the forest" and we were like... WHAT XD LOL.