First of all, I'd like to disclose that I in no way intent this post to be whiny or rude if it may sound like such.
I do not agree with the decision to completely remove General from public maps without consent of the Feral-Heart community beforehand. As stated, many people use general to have open conversations with others across the map. They can meet a person in general, and maybe decide to go hang out with them and roleplay or just chat in local. However without General that becomes much more difficult. Especially in big maps like Flourite and South Pole, the chances of coming across a random person who you have something in common with or could become friends with isn't very high. With General chat it gives players a much more open way to find people to become friends with.
Another thing is roleplay advertisements. Without General people are going to start crowding around landmarks in masses looking for roleplays, and this will without a doubt cause severe lag just like in Bonfire. I for one hope this doesn't happen, because Feral-Heart already lags sometimes as is and with masses of people on top of one spot it wont ever lessen. Also this causes an issue of space in those landmark areas, often recruiting roleplays will have their new members group around them, but they try to keep themselves seperate from other groups also there. The more groups, the more members, the more people, the less space. It'll undoubtedly cause fights over space.
Movie advertisements are bad. There's not enough room to post everything you might like, and from the chat you cannot see what the movie will be about. Perhaps if you could title movies rather than just publishing them under your username it'd be different but... That doesn't stop the fact that there is now tons of movie spam throughout maps where people are trying to advertise. Which I also find an issue because, I personally cannot use movies as a means of finding advertisements. If I click on a movie to view it, it comes up as "Cannot find move {Random Number}." so I cannot even watch movies. How then am I supposed to find an advertisement for a roleplay? I realize you could always run around the map looking... But what if I want a mapped roleplay? Do you recognize the problem here? And one last thing:
In terms of the RP thing, I just want to point something out as a FH member, not a staff member.
Today a RP group I am in - a literate, mapped, realistic group that people seem to keep saying will never work right again because of no general chat - went out to recruit today, and we got more members that met our standards than we ever did.
Why? Because it forces people to socialize and ask questions. Maybe our RP might not seem too appeasing when you type it in general chat, but if you walk past the group and as what it's about, people take interest in things they would've passed off before. It forces people to get out and notice things they might not have before.
I understand everyone has their opinions, and in regards to some of the advertising issues, this is what I've experienced on day one. I really do encourage people to try and keep an open mind about this.
While it's true that people gathering to find roleplays will be more social, it also has a major con that I found out in the last two days. I'm in a literate, mapped warrior cat roleplay. So like most others I headed out to sit by Cape Portal and advertise, without General you have to use the movie and local chat means of advertising... But by the time I got out to advertise several other clan leaders were out for their roleplays. One had several cats around him, and the other couple of leaders had next to none. I sat out for about 20 minutes but all the cats who came by went straight to the leader with the most cats around him. Why? Because their roleplay appears the most active. With General you could gain members from far away by luring them in with plots and other such things. In local or movies people tend to pick the roleplay that has the appearance of the most activity. When in reality most of those people had just joined and might not actually end up being active. We had to call everyone from the map to stop roleplaying and come out to Flourite to sit around us while we advertised, and even then we only got two new members. It's really not an effective way to advertise. Especially since our roleplay is trying to bulk up on members for an upcoming war in our plot.
