I doubt this fits the exact purpose of this subforum, but eh. Just found myself thinking back to some little instances of MMO RP I’ve run into over the years and thought I’d share.
This wasn’t even in TSW/SWL but in LoTRO, my MMO of choice around 2011/2012. My character was Gondorian, and I had started a guild to gather RPers keen on playing Gondorians in exile (this was years before Gondor was added as a zone ingame). One day I got a message from one of my recruits through the ingame mail. Written ICly, it informed me, his commander, that he was returning to Minas Tirith on urgent business and would not be back for some time. He even spelled out the exact overland route he would take south to Gondor, and ended with an OOC postscript explaining that he was going on holiday in Europe for a few weeks. I remember how I smiled at that — it remains the single best explanation for a leave of absence I’ve ever witnessed in MMO RP.
Another time, my Gondorian met an Elf scholar who was studying the Dunedain ruins near Bree, and the two became friends over shared interest in Dunedain history and lore. Shortly after, this Elf began sending me ingame mails with Fragments of Dunedain Script (a farmable crafting resource) attached, along with transcripts of what she had discovered from said fragments. Too dense then to recognize an RP hook when I saw one, I contented myself with sending back similar items of an Elvish nature, and her mails eventually stopped. But I’ll be damned if that wasn’t a great example of incorporating ingame drops into MMO RP.
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I used to play a lot of WoW. Most of my mains were males (like what I am) but I was playing on a human female warlock at one point, and I’d put in the effort to make her clothes match. I was chilling in Goldshire (on The Venture Co. EU, back in like 2005), taking in the various RP conversations that regularly took place, and once when it was fairly quiet, I found my character getting chatted up by another female character. At first it was fun, but as we descended into the basement of the Goldshire inn, I realised the other player was probably typing with one less hand than I was. During the conversation, I remember seeing a male human paladin descend the stairs to see what was going on, then make a hasty retreat once he saw what was going on. When the other player started removing clothes, I’d reached as far as my comfort zone would stretch, and made a hasty apology and an even hastier retreat. As I passed the paladin on the road, I said in /say, “That was weird.” and returned to Stormwind, intent on never going quite as far down the rabbit hole again.
Since then, I prefer to remain within earshot of RP, but without getting directly involved before I know who I’m dealing with. A lot of time the conversations get rather disjointed, but they’re fun if you can be bothered to keep up.
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Not exactly what I had in mind when I started this thread, but memorable is as memorable does. 
I sure heard a lot of Goldshire stories, though I didn’t RP in WoW to any meaningful extent. There was just that one time in a Hellfire Ramparts run (pre-WotLK), when I got into an IC debate with another Human in the party over killing fel orcs in revenge for the Second War. We wove so much vitriol, moralizing and snark into the fighting that the party leader – a non-RPer – demanded we stop or be kicked. 
For all its cartoony looks and loose lore, WoW was certainly a great world to RP in. I miss how incredibly diverse the environments were, above all.
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I only grasped (
) the essence of that the second time I read it.
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I still have it installed, and keep it patched up. Last weekend, I could play for free and went to all my chars to see how they were doing. I’m not ready yet to give up on WoW, but at present I lack the time to get into it again.
I also have two SWTOR accounts (subscriptions!); I often play simultaneously (so that’s role playing inisde of my head; I could elaborate on that). Together with SWL, that’s about what I can handle.