It was originally just for practice, but now I don't really have a purpose to RP anymore. Roleplaying is obsolete compared to even simple writing-stories-for fun because of tons of reasons, as I discovered:

1) High mortality rate and shelf-life of roleplays. People just could just up and quit anytime, and usually for no good reasons. What this does to your practice is that it'd never come full circle and it'd never be as wholesome as writing a story-for-fun that'd be complete.

2) No single authorial vision. The GM could have vision, but the roleplayers would have their own. In the end, you don't get to practice writing a good story because there's no single collective vision of what the story should be (not that it's really possible), and neither can you impose your own vision (and you shouldn't either, in roleplaying). This can also lead to #1.

3) You write as a break from reality, or writing requires a break from reality. Either way, you record reality in the absence of its constant bombardment in some way or to express creativity. With roleplaying, you'd have to deal with the reality of working with people. While most of them are fine, don't count on all of them to be fine, and that'd lead to frequent distractions that'd compromise practice. Could also lead to #1.

4) Roleplays lack the 'purpose' of writing traditionally. Practice pieces aren't supposed to go nowhere. Even as you write to practice, you're practicing your craft (giddit? :D). Your practices pieces could easily be published somewhere, or they could be refined to be published. They're yours to do with, totally. With roleplays, the extremely different medium makes for poor storytelling in the traditional sense (for example, what a novel could do in 100,000 words, a roleplay does in a million, and good luck finding someone to edit that!), and as it's a collaborative effort, cannot be published easily. The publishing industry caters mostly to single-authored stories/novels/what-have-yous.

5) Roleplaying requires a bigger infrastructure to accommodate. You need a website, you need your internet, you need people and you're going to need SOPs, standard practice, rules, a social order and in addition to everything a traditional writer needs. Logistically, it's less sound than pure writing, which requires only a grand total of one person, one good location and a writing medium, and maybe some books, the internet and other people only when you're going journalist.

That's all I can think of for now. Coming on here is now only a habit, one that I've been trying to kick for years. I realise that I'm being negative, but I call it as I see it. This probably won't apply to most of you, because we're all living in our own worlds. In my world, that's how it is.