Biggest Complaint with LL (now be nice, 'cause they want/need some constructive feedback)

We've been hammering on LL a little (lot maybe...) lately, mainly it seems because so many of us care about SL and want to see it/us do better. Across the blogs, there clearly are some LL people that are reaching out and trying to share info that they can (is like some weird pentagon/start-up thing I guess). Anyway, i think there is a lot of noise, so let's assume now that we have LL's attention and have a moment now to give them some feedback. Start with the complaints first, 'cause it'll make you feel better! Then we see if suggestions are worth collectin'...

I am tired of gloom and doom that is community facing. I believe it is time now for YOU to take action and work directly with LL. I said it to you in person, and I will say it to you here. This only depresses the community.

First, my compliments to the Gods of Second Life: I'm amazed at what they've proven possible and frankly, surprised it works as well as it does. As a programmer myself, I recognize the difficulty of what's being attempted and the sheer scale of it! What I'd like to see: Easy importation into Second Life custom avatars / objects created in third party applications. Faster deployment of user interface improvements in the client. The UI needs major work! An improved shopping experience: shops are too big, take too long to rez, and it's difficult to find stuff and know what one is about to buy from just an image! Either some benefit of premium accounts besides owning land, or dropping premium accounts altogether and allowing anyone to buy land.

I see Linden Lab doing an awful lot to make things better for SL. I also see many places that need to be improved. What can we do to make SL a better place for all of it's citizen's given the current state of SL? How can we make commitments to visit Linden's during office hours to vent our frustrations? If you have not made it to office hours, what is stopping you? I see change happening especially when we participate in the process. I keep looking at new virtual worlds to see how they are doing better than the Linden's and no one else is doing it. That being said, let's make SL magical together! Hugs and Fishes, Tuna

It's been said already, but kudos to you for what you do accomplish. Messages about overloaded servers should be rare though. Change the business model if necessary, but provide enough capacity. When logins are restricted weekend after weekend, I'm not encouraged to spend more money.

They are not stable enough to be a work platform. They are not flexible enough to be a game platform. They are not controlled enough to be an economic platform. What they ARE is a scam selling the "your dream, your reality" idea then dumping those that buy, to glean more suckers. If fact My simple dream, "make a cave in the side of the mountain" or better yet a tunnel through the mountain (laughs insanely.....) did you suggest a sculpty megaprim????? (insane laughter rising exponentially...) did I mention wanting to walk through said tunnel (convulses in a blithering mass of quivering protoplasm....) They arbitrarily scam "players" by charging one price for land in real US dollars today and they for no reason except to line their pockets, drop the price (PUMP AND DUMP securities scandal) so that anyone who bought "virtual land" has no hope of selling it even though it was bought at a 1,250 price.... They state now that land sales and tier fees are 8x more profitable than premium account people. So this "linden government" instead of printing more money, simply print more land... empty islands dont cost them anything to render since they are only some bit images on a hard disk somewhere until an avatar actually GOES there. so an island that someone buys and pays $75 a month for (that is the cost of the "limited use islands" I think) only costs lindens when they log in on that odd weekend they have nothing to do except play doll dress up. I wont even start with stability(was poor is now "ok) but two things they have never realized and both were PRIMARY movers were first: the ability to use babbler and babbler like devices so that people all over the world could meet on one place and "typetalk" to each other. The should have had translation "builtin" so that a persons type statements are "automatically" seen by everyone in the vicinity, in their own language without ANY interaction required. My club used to have people from France, Germany, Italy, UK and US, but since babblers have all started screwing up more than they work, I now have a few English speakers come in. I never tried to "make" money in secondlife... I get way to nutz to deal with half assed operations that don't stay up from one hour to the next. In My professional life, I buy My mainframe computer time from an IBM complex in Dallas and in the year I have been on it, it has NEVER BEEN DOWN ONCE except for the one hour weekly scheduled maintenance window... I can and DO run My business on that platform. a platform BTW that will support 1,000 concurrent linux boxes running on it at once. Each linux box seeing itself as the only user. Lindens make a pretense of "protecting" creators rights, but they can't even "protect" creators objects much less the rights to them. Things that have been working in the real world for years, group chats, group voice, share images, shared streams, linden labs insists on making their own mistakes that were all made before and fixed by others and so their group chat still doesn't work reliably, teleport at least now does not log Me off when it fails, at least not today, and I can login usually. What I DON'T any longer is pour $2,500 USD a month into linden labs "economy"... I am down to $195 a month and one class 4 sim and I am walking away from that (because I can't sell it, when they try to raise My monthly fee from the $195 that I bought in at. The second thing they needed to be but failed, was a data "visualization" platformbut they have never had a powerful enough scripting language to allow the mathematic's to be done that needed to be done.....perhaps mono will help that some, but the second part needs to be what I call "dynamic sculpties" which is where I can build a texture in-world numerically to represent the web mesh needed to show the relationship between points and then drop it onto a prim and have that relationship changed as the mesh changes.... (steps down off soapbox.... so much to say.... so few to hear)

yes, that and buying into the dream sellers ...:) It just took me a while to get to the closets to find out where the skeletons were, and to dig down a bit to see the foundation of sand.... and now the storms, they are a coming... :) but I still dream

Tateru on M's open letter and Lively

That's not fear of Lively as a competitor, though -- that looks more like fear of the media circus that says it that Lively is one. The whole post (from M here: http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/07/09/letter-to-second-life-residents/) would have been a good one, last week. Or even yesterday.

Today, though, it gives us the impression that Kingdon's worried that Second Life won't be the first name that comes to mind in virtual worlds, rather than any concerns about Google's Lively cutting into the Second Life market.

more here: http://www.massively.com/2008/07/09/kingdon-feels-the-fear/1#thankYou

mark this day: a new virtual reality and the battle for the metaverse begins!

Grid seems ok to me lately...compared to last year for sure things are a lot more reliable, so at least on the Rezzable sims things are ok. The switch to H4 could have been a lot worse--nothwithstanding the impact on pre-H4 scripts. But seems like sim work better, faster. Big opportunities now with higher sim altitudes. I still think people sharing parcels have a lot of neighbor issues that impact SL performance perception. People also overload their areas and avatars wear a lot of silly attachements that crash the sims. For me, grid is pretty amazing in current state, so definately don't see stability as biggest problem.

bob...ya, thanks for reminding us! I guess our expectation on this is so low we forget how exposed all our stuff is. We do need enterprise security and account access so we can protect assets better. great point!

http://getsatisfaction.com/secondlife