It's been five years since the last review for this game. I've been playing it for the past three of them, on and off. I'm not even going to bother with following the trend of the old reviews - in the time I've been playing, I couldn't name a single case of favoritism or bias. The staff seemed mostly professional to me, and I've never had a problem with them.

Firan's mechanics are well done, in my opinion. When you join you have the option of selecting a character from a very large roster or going through a simple generation of your own. Both of these have advantages and disadvantages - it might take some getting used to taking on a character someone else wrote, but it gives you a way to dive right in to the RP. The custom character generation is a little limited, having you pick between several options for personality and such, but I feel like you're given enough leeway once in-game to play the character you want to play.

There's a very, very heavy emphasis on RP. While there are coded combat and crafting systems, the only way to advance is through a moderated voting system - each player gets five votes a week (not counting random bonuses), and can vote for another player a single time in that week. At the end, your total votes are converted into XP. While it sounds like a system easily abused, I've never seen it happen, and it's watched closely by the staff.

The community is very friendly and welcoming, for the most part. New players are typically greeted promptly and offered as much help as they need settling in.

Being a roleplay game, the quality of the world and lore is pretty important as well. Personally, I think Firan's world is excellently fleshed out - the efforts of the players over the years have really forged an interesting story on top of a solid base provided by the staff.

So for brevity's sake, if you're interested in a solid, heavily RP-focused game, I'd say you should give Firan a shot. The worst that can happen is you won't like it.