I realise that opening the letter in this way might open myself up for not being taken seriously, but I'd like to point out that the most common use of the word 'inappropriate' is incorrect. It means 'irrelevant or unrelated to the subject at hand'. People have recently taken to using it to mean 'unacceptable', usually in the context of what they consider overly violent, rude, or adult material. But hey, given that most people now unthinkingly use the latter definition most of the time, I think I'm willing to let ST have this one. About this RP in specific: It would appear that the ST considers this RP, or associated activity, to be 'overly violent'. At first glance this would seem fair enough; we recently had a world war that resulted in one country that had formerly occupied an entire subcontinent split up. But it really isn't. Let me say from the offset that this isn't an attack against ST. Indeed, I applaud them for trying to keep the site suitable for all age levels. Making a website a safe place is an excellent goal, and well done to everyone who devotes so much time to doing this. However, lately they seem to have got a little carried away, and I'm not the only person who thinks this. If we discussed war from a first-hand perspective, with unacceptable levels of graphic detail, that would be different. I agree that role playing soldiers attacking each other would not be suitable for a website that has ten-year-old users, and be best confined to somewhere else. But that's not what the RP is like. We discuss warfare from a detatched, tactical perspective, and have no more real involvement in it than the leaders of a country would do. This is because that's effectively who we role play - the rulers and governments (if any exist) of our respective countries. In times of war, about eighty per cent of the comments merely read 'Khampavhan officially allies with Tsolteg' or 'Djelibeybi deploys X soldiers to Y location' or 'Inutilia invades AST'. The only comments I recall that could be described as violent were the ones where one country bombed another, and even that wasn't extreme enough to be worth worrying about. Anyway it's not like we endorse warfare as such; apart from the occasional warmongering nation that's been in a state of unrest since the RP began (no names mentioned, but the nations in question know who they are) the only wars declared were out of necessity (within the RP story, of course). I mean, seriously. War-related projects with more first-hand content than this RP have been known to get onto the front page. I've seen comics set in wartimes with actual illustrations. Nobody got upset about them, that I'm aware, and rightly so in my opinion. If that's OK, surely CCRP is nothing to get worked up about. In any case, it's not like war is the only thing we do here. The best way to describe this RP is as 'a hypothetical political debate set in an alternate world'. We basically simulate being the leaders of countries, and explore the challenges of keeping on top of every facet of keeping it going. (From this perspective it could be argued that this RP is even educational; in fact it definitely is, given how many real-world historical events have been replicated by the players.) Most of what goes on here is trade and technology development. When players stop role playing for the night (except for the occasional people in Europe and Australia, who thus manage to be active at 3AM CST), nine times out of ten the top comments will read 'Khampavhan sends Tsolteg X tonnes of iron' and 'New Canciona pays 3,000 nocks to research generators'. I can't imagine that anyone could interpret this side of the RP as violent. If anybody vehemently disagrees and insists that this RP isn't suitable for younger Scratchers, I'd like to add that several of the people in here are about 10 or 11, and don't appear to be emotionally scarred from being in it (I know none of them irl, so I can't prove this, but I feel someone would have mentioned it if they had been since most of them seem to be younger siblings of the original RP players). If this still isn't enough, we could always add a warning in the studio description, like 'Warning: This studio includes role playing of warfare tactics'. Adding, of course, a clarification that it won't be first hand. I really don't think it's necessary to remove it from Scratch altogether, though. Thank you. [Hah, I wrote this at college during my Tuesday morning free study line, when I'd finished all my maths homework but couldn't actually RP due to not having campus internet yet.] [A clarification I've already sent to three people who asked about my age because of this: I'm 16, getting closer to 17. I realise that in the US, college is what us Australians refer to as 'university'. Over here, college is Year 11 and 12. That's still pretty old by Scratch standards, but not that old.]
