In-Game Age restictions on free emote spaces

[Brentan]

Greetings all,

I'd like to propose that as part of the effort to attract wholly new and interested players to the game that the Admin require and institute code that restricts free-emote spaces (bathhouse, tent, tree, actor's club, etc)to those who have earned a considerable in-game age. When I first joined Genesis there were no free emotes allowed (outside of the wedding suite) until the wise men's club and the actor's club were introduced. And the wise men's club was restricted to those with 100 in-game days played and the actor's club was heavily gate kept by their very few members.

There is a small part of the Genesis community whose primary interest in the game and in role-playing is erotic roleplaying to include sexually explicit erotic roleplaying in free-emote spaces. Genesis is not marketed as an ERP (erotic roleplay) game and it would therefore be natural to assume that many of those who do make young in-game characters with ERP as their primary form of enjoyment in the game (which, btw, there is nothing wrong with) are older players who have created second characters for the explicit purpose of ERPing.

The problem this has is that there are truly new players in the realms, hopefully soon and in great number, who did NOT come to Genesis for the intent of ERP as their primary means of roleplay who find themselves very quickly targets of the small population of ERPers within our community. If we were to disregard the very serious concern of some of those new players being IRL underage (not that it isn't important but that is an entirely different issue) it is important to ask ourselves if we want a minority of players (those who primarily ERP) to have the ability to paint our community as an ERP community.

It is also important to note that often truly new players find themselves lost and confused regarding how Genesis works (the Genesis learning curve is steep) and can be trapped into unfair and unequal ERP relationships in which assistance to grow, quest, and gear-up quickly are to some extent locked behind the new player's willingness to engage in ERP and sexually explicit ERP with older more experienced players. This is a legitimate form of sexual harassment where a person in a position of power or authority (the older more experienced player) withholds advancement opportunities from a person with considerably less power or authority unless they fulfill certain ERP requirements.

With these thoughts in mind I return to my original suggestion that free-emote spaces have their access locked behind an in-game age requirement so that new players cannot, by design, be sexually harassed by older players nor have their primary understanding of Genesis become one of our community being a community primarily of erotic roleplayers.

Sincerely,
Brentan's Player

EDIT: After a discussion with Cherek I have emailed this proposal to them and the AoP team for serious consideration as a means to further protect our community, both new and old, from non-consensual acts of ERP and sexually explicit ERP in free-emote spaces. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to the Discord discussion on this topic.

[zizuph]

I looked into this earlier in the year, with this same concern. The solution the admin agrees to, and I implemented, was to limit entry for free emote rooms to only those with options intimate on.

Options intimate is off by default for all new characters and this blocks much more than just free emote access.

If any places are free emote and accessible with intimate off, please mail me in game so I can look into it as well.