This post could be taken as a rant, or an attack on the recent change to introduce the child-free zone in Hathian. Please don't consider it like that; I am merely expressing my sadness at this decision since the original thread has been locked and I wasn't online during the period when this was discussed, decided and then enacted.

Before anyone gets into automatic defence mode, I want you to consider things from my point of view, even if only for a moment.

- For the last twenty-seven months, 90% of my character's IC story has occurred in what is now in the red, child-free zone. All of my IC family's RP work interests are pretty much in the red zone. I have no IC reason why my character cannot continue to do as he as always done, running in and out of his parents' workplaces and interacting with them and the various that also frequent those places.

- I am primarily a player of a minor (early teen) character. This is not my part-time kiddy alt that I play as light relief from an adult main in CD; this is also not a character I'm aging up to eventually become an adult. I've played adults in CD before, and it's okay but it's not my thing and I've more or less retired them, so this is what I do as a main. Therefore, suggestions like "why don't you age him up to 18 then?" or "don't worry, you can always come into Hathian on your adult main" are not helpful to me. Not everyone who plays a child character falls into the two above categories.

- On the other hand, my character is not a 'kiddy' kid. Whilst I respect what Nadir and others have done at Seaside, the whole school, playground and "kid-friendly" thing is just not what my character is about. He's no Chance or Rabid, but the majority of the interactions he has with people (excluding his siblings) are with adults, for good IC reasons.

- I completely understand and agree with the no-sex, no graphic violence policy for minors that has been in place all the time I've been in CD. I am not arguing for a change in that stance, it was common sense. It worked.

- I don't set out to ruin anyone else's RP, and as a minor character, I will always respect that in a sim like CD, sometimes I will have to move on from a particular area temporarily to allow a story with certain themes to progress.

I've read the rationale that has been given, I see the assurances that things will be done to help those of us who play minor characters. However, I do feel pushed out of the majority of the RP in CD, and cannot help but feel unwelcome as a result. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Why?

Well, despite what the aspirations might be to rebalance RP in CD amongs the various sims, it's undeniable that the vast majority of the spontaneous public RP in CD occurs in what is now the no-child area in Hathian. A majority of the area of Vodou, Devil's Pocket and a sizeable area of Black Bottom is private-residential, where this sort of spontaneous public RP does not generally occur to anything like the same degree. CU is not really an area for general RP...the hospital likewise. Most of the people in the peripheral sims like D8 hang around, mainly afking, either by themselves or with maybe one another. So when people say the traffic in the non-Hathian sims is okay, that's slightly misleading since a lot of that is afk-traffic or residential traffic. Actual RP activity is still quite poor compared to central Hathian.

As a child character (and especially one in a European time zone), it was already quite difficult at times to get the sort of RP I wanted due to a sub-current of "oh no, not a kid!" that seems to run under the surface amongst some in CD. But now, with being shunted off to essentially RP-less peripheral sims, where 90% of the RP activity isn't, it becomes next to impossible.

Yes, I know there is Fishtown but really...unless you're into the whole school RP / playground thing (which I'm not with Mitch), it doesn't really help. I do realise some effort has been made to include a portion of Hathian which isn't child-free, and I thank the sim management for that little concession. However, most of the times that I've been on, that area is pretty deserted and there is a concentration of green-dots in the restricted area.

I don't want to come off as excessively self-pitying, and I'm not going to go all dramatic and accuse people of imposing an age-apartheid (though it feels like that in some ways to someone in my position), but this really has killed most of the RP that I wanted to do and leaves me wondering how in all practical sense I can continue to RP here. If you've spent hours not being talked to, sometimes even blanked merely because of the avatar you wear, you might feel the same way too.

Why was the main sim, where most of the RP activity occurs, chosen to be the child-free area? If one of the objects of the exercise was to spread RP around more evenly, wouldn't it have been better for a sim like D8 to have been allocated as child-free rather than Hathian? That would have allowed those who can't abide the thought of RPing in the same area a child character their haven, whilst also allowing those of us lil'uns who have RPed here for years not to have our roots pulled out from under us. The loss of D8 to kids would have been more bearable whilst Hathian would have remained accessible to both kids and adults alike, minimising the negative impact.

Like I said, the purpose of this post was not to rant, or even (despite how it may appear) to wallow. I merely wanted to show the sim management the impact of what has been decided upon some longstanding players. I would love for this to be reversed or significantly altered (as per a suggestion like mine above), but I am realistic enough to realise that now it has happened, it is probably here for good. This is a great shame because I always respected and admired how skilfully CD hitherto managed the difficult task of carrying parallel stories of utmost misery, violence and squalor alongside those of innocence (tarnished or otherwise), family and of the generations.

I feel that something special has been lost.

R.I.P.