I would like to remind the denizens of the Summit and OOC that next to none of you rely on CCP for your daily dose of roleplay. You all rely on each other. Our events are player driven, our debates are player driven, our enjoyment is player driven. The CCP interaction that has been most critical to the survival of our (and any) roleplay community has been that of regular news and events.
In short, it is a self-sustaining roleplay community that CCP has only recently deigned to join in on occasionally because Falcon is an ex-Moderator at The Summit and Logibro is a former regular. It's been a blessing the few times they have popped in, and we're all very thankful for it, but good things must come to an end eventually. We all expected there to be a conflict of interests popping up eventually, as CCP is very strict about such things.
I personally am glad that CCP is setting up a more open and inclusive 'official' IGS channel. This will allow us the moderators to introduce or reinforce more strict guidelines for behavior and interaction while still allowing those less fitting for the channel to roleplay in the public sandbox instead of our higher quality private one.
Consider it this way. For a long while, our private playground has served as a public park for anybody who happened to wander past. It's done an admirable job, but we've been stymied by the unwritten responsibility to provide content to everybody, that we've on occasion had to take extraordinarily long to decide on removing troublemakers. On the other hand, those who don't even enjoy The Summit have been all but forced to remain there as there is no comparable option. Consider "The Sphere" experiment, and how many people flocked there to attempt a non-moderated channel.
Finally, we can separate those who don't belong here from those who do. Finally, they can separate themselves.
In my opinion? Good riddance, and good luck.
