Wow its 2025 and its a whole new CoLA! I certainly didn’t have “CoLA under new management” on my 2025 bingo card but here we are!
I’m sure people have a lot of questions or perhaps have heard many different things about what has occurred but I can also assure you that almost all of it is pretty misrepresented and in some cases just entirely untrue.
I had a great group of people running the community prior to February of 2025, and all of the sudden they decided they were going to go do their own thing without communicating any of that with me or even bothering to bring up any issues they may have had previously. No one in the community we’ve all built together over the last 18 years except those directly involved even knew what was going on until it was done.
I am not going to use this post to run any one down though, I am very surprised and disappointed by the sudden shift in situations, but I was also never given any chance to discuss the situations that led to them and given no opportunity attempt to recompense or rectify any of the issues that may have caused them. So there isn’t much I could have done.
But what I can do is re-direct CoLA back to its original premise of free form roleplay and be far more active in the direct management of the endeavor because apparently somewhere in the last few years, it became irrelevant to keep me informed of situations in CoLA and rules and standards were changed without any real notification to me (even some sections of this website were altered from their original content) and done on the basis of what the prior admin staff felt was best practices for managing the community in a manner they felt fit their interests and unfortunately that apparently does not conform to the original “Vision” of CoLA, which was a vision I originally established in 2006 where our community was a place where anyone could come and roleplay and if their abilities and character were strong enough they could even end up becoming one of the major storyline groups of the city simply by being inclusive, adaptive and willing to help create stories and engage others in positive and meaningful ways that made the city exciting, dangerous and amazing.
I have been told that this shift away from my original “Vision” was in the best interests of “The Community” but it has also come to my attention that somehow in that process, many people felt marginalized, excluded, or straight out blacklisted from our community. And in that case all I can really say is that I am sorry, I felt our prior leadership had the best interests of everyone at heart, I believed that to my very bones and even now I find it hard to believe that they would have ever have done anything that would have harmed the community….regardless of what is now more or less self evident.
So again, not going to dwell on that, just wanted to ensure I put up an official notice. CoLA isn’t going anywhere, the old rules we established during the 2022 rebuild are now FULLY in effect. EVERYONE IS WELCOME. ALL PLAYERS ARE VALID. ALL ROLEPLAY AND ROLEPLAY STYLES ARE VALID. AND EVERYONE HAS THE SAME EQUAL CHANCE AS ANYONE ELSE TO CONTRIBUTE AND RISE TO PROMINENCE WITHIN OUR STORY.
Administrative staff and Faction Head Staff are now entirely decoupled.
All Faction Leads are Storytellers and have no Administrative position within the sim.
All Administrative Staff are simply background players and are builders/designers/support staff for the sim.
No roleplay will be dictated by the “people that run the sim” and I am, and will always be, your primary community manager….and my door is always open to ANYONE with any issue at all. You do not need to observe some kind of arbitrary chain of command simply to try to get an issue to my attention…..just message me directly and I’ll be happy to talk to you. I will ask you if you have discussed your issue with relevant Storytellers or Admin staff of course, but you can always come to me if you ever have an issue.
I’m immensely sorry to everyone for the upheaval everyone has experienced, but I assure you that had I been allowed to try to fix it, I’d have fixed it. But I was simply never informed there was a problem till the problem happened.
So from here on, we move forward, CoLA has a 20 year anniversary to see next year, and I intend to be here for it, and even if its just me and 30 people roleplaying and having fun, that is entirely acceptable to me as its better than faking it or shutting down and leaving and abusing so many people that love the city just because my feelings got hurt.
Much love to you all.
I remain,
Suzanna Soyinka
