Emerald Warrior

In light of the fact that the moderator of the Modular Systems blog - the words of wisdom from the Emerald Viewer team - can't be bothered to approve or disprove my comment on their admission to launching a premeditated attack on another blogger, I've posted a screen grab of the comment, and copied my comment below. It goes:

I’ve never used your viewer. A lot of people I know have used it. Apparently it has some ‘really cool features’, but never having used it, the only ‘really cool feature’ I’ve ever witnessed it the chunky multi-coloured Edit particle beam, which I can live without. However, those I do know who’ve used it have complained repeatedly that with each successive update, the viewer has become more and more unstable and unusable, so they’ve switched away.

I don’t know what you did, who you targeted, what happened, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t care. However, based on what I’ve read, I will say this: get your fucking act together. You’re harming the credibility of not only yourselves but every other self-serving basement-dwelling script-babbling software engineer who IS working to do something better for themselves and others. You can hire all the ex-Lindens that you want to try and bolster your credibility, but if you can’t even get past something as petty and as fruitless as this, you may as well give up now.

Goodnight everybody!

In an (un)related side-note, I visited the Emerald Point sim last night. I was in conversation with two friends in IM just before I went, and was flitting between chatting to each of them and reading about someone trying to investigate the story of their blog attack who kept being booted from the sim. I told both of my friends I was heading over there, and there'd be a strong chance that I'd be kicked offline. I was force-crashed three times in 10 minutes of being there. Coincidence? No way. These Emerald people are griefers in sheeps clothing.

Tweet

Dear Uncle Phil

Dear Philip,

I watched your keynote speech not with especially great interest, to be honest, as I came into it with a crippling amount of pessimism about the state of the company and its future given that you’d laid off a host of other people just the week before. Still, you have to admire me for still wanting to see it, right?

My review would be: mixed bag. I heard you talk about stuff that was all a bit too techno-jargon for me and I heard you mention some things I could understand. However, I do still have some issues I’d like to address…

I’ve been in Second Life for approximately 47 months, and have been a Premium Account holder for approximately 46 months. I’ve purchased L$ during my time too, so I’ve given you a fair bit of my own money over the years. In that time, I’ve built things for little or no financial gain, and I’ve taken the time to help others build things; I’ve designed sims and I’ve helped others design sims; I’ve had a blast making machinima, and seeing what kind of reaction my approach to mini-movie making has had; I’ve made contacts with people from all across the globe, I’ve made genuine friends, some of whom I’ve then had the great pleasure of meeting outside of Second Life – some are even coming to my forthcoming wedding! – and I’ve suffered genuine sadness at losing some of those friends along the way too. I’ve done and experienced quite a bit that I should be very appreciative of the Lab for, as without SL, these things would never have happened.

However, when I hear that you want to put the focus on new sign-ups, it pains me Philip. It really does.

Of all the things I’ve done to enhance for the Second Life experience and promote to others, where is the return of the appreciation? Where is the love, Philip? I’ve been paying for your support, so where is it? Maybe you’re not a fan of my machinima – it’s OK, a lot of people don’t like Coldplay or waffles (I call these people ‘the crazy folks’); maybe you don’t have a tiny avatar and therefore think that your tall avatar look ridiculous in the tiny outfits I make. I can’t figure it out! I still suffer with lag. I still see log-in issues, I still see inventory issues, I still see transaction issues on a weekly basis. If these are going to be ongoing issues, come out and say so, so I’ll stop clinging onto the belief that these things are being worked on.

Of course you want new people to come in-world, that’s completely understandable. I worked in the retail sector for a while, and I appreciate that Second Life is (in part) a product, and you need your customer base to continue to grow if you want your company, your business and your revenues growing – that’s Economics 101.

And I can appreciate you wanting to get the experience right; if I was a new customer about to walk into an amazing looking new store with fancy flashing neon signs and sexy music playing out over Bang & Olufsen speakers, I’d be thinking, ‘Wow, why didn’t I come here sooner?!’ But if, on the way in, I hear someone on the way out muttering about how bad it’s getting and getting worse in there, I’d be stepping into that store in a very different frame of mind.

You said in your SL7B speech: “So going back to those basics and just trying to make this thing work for all of us is what you can expect to see from us next.” No offence, but in the time you said that and now, I haven’t seen a whole lot of improvement. So why are you working on new stuff already? Are you seriously telling me that everything’s fixed?

I know it’s hard to please all of the people all of the time (especially those scripting geeks; sheesh, trying to please them sometimes seems to be as infuriating as trying to turn a lion into a vegetarian), but have some appreciation of the paying customer base. I don’t consider myself one, but some of the longer-term residents do have some very good ideas that should be looked at and addressed. However, I do know that most of those ideas are based around improvement of the general experience, not how it looks. You seem to be focusing on giving new users a fancy new pair of shoes to walk in; however, when you’re asking them to walk down the same muddy, puddle-ridden, debris strewn road as the rest of us, having shoes with the springiest of steps or the whitest of laces won’t make an ounce of difference.

Regards,

Chaffro

Tweet

Childish Behaviour At SLCC

So it's SLCC this weekend. I'm not really sure what it is, but I get the impression from looking at the website that it's like a fan convention for Second Life, put together by residents, but endorsed by Linden Lab.

Philip went. He announced that they were shutting down the Teen Grid. I'd like to think that at the same time as that bombshell was dropped, a dark silent figure right-clicked and Touched Blue Linden's virtual grave and set a fast rotation script off.

So this probably means that the main grid will now become populated by teens who talk in 'txt speak', hassle you for money a lot more and generally think they're cleverer than you. Word up, kids: you're not.

It also means that kids will be walking freely amongst groups of adults, unsupervised, having conversations with adults unsupervised and generally being open to everything that already goes on in the Main Grid - unsupervised. I'm sure (read: hoping) that LL are planning some protocols to safeguard underage residents from the potential dangers of online grooming, but it hasn't taken people long to realise the dangers already. My pal Toxic Menges worked for Habbo, a social networking world specifically aimed at teenagers and was quick to point out some of the problems she had to work around via a series of (always interesting) Tweets.

Another big thing that got mentioned was 'meshes'. A whole bunch of Lindens were laid off the week before SLCC too and Qarl Linden was one high-profile casualty of the latest round of redundancies (perhaps deflecting from the fact that up to ten others had also been given their marching orders). Apparently Qarl was the person who made sculpties possible and was working on or towards bringing 'meshes' in-world. I've no clue what they are or how meshes work, so I can't comment on that, but better educated geeks tend to rave about them, so I'll assume they are a big deal. However, the fact that they were talked about at SLCC almost seemed to indicate that someone at the Lab had actually listened to the outcry of residents upon Qarl's departure and sought to calm the mob. Or maybe I'm being optimistic. It's a shame that another obviously incredibly talented person has gone. Sculpties are good fun to play with, and they have certainly helped shape (no pun intended) SL in a far more creative way.

Anyway, I lead a bunch of tinies - Escape Unplugged, Patience Littleboots, Clover Denzo and others - to the SLCC sims on Saturday night, just before speeches were about to resume. We hid beneath the stage before climbing onto the tables and riverdancing to the audience below. We'd done three dances before a moderator told us all to leave the stage. In retrospect, maybe he'd seen us earlier and thought that although it was the most entertaining thing that had happened there all weekend, three dances was enough.


Tweet

Flip Linden

This past week saw M Linden step away from Chief Executive Officer duties at Linden lab and Philip Linden (aka Rosedale, Lab co-founder) step in as interim CEO.

Some have seen this as a blessing, worthy of Grid-wide parades and celebrations. I, personally, haven't been that enthusiastic.

Why have people been celebrating? Because M Linden has parted ways with the Lab? Seems a pretty shitty reason to throw a party; a man's just lost his job. Regardless of the fact that he may be able to step into another high-profile position fairly easily, being told that you've lost your job is something you don't ever really want to hear - unless you're a suicide bomber, perhaps.

M Linden was never widely accepted by the SL-community, for reasons I'm not exactly sure why. I don't follow the politics and ins-and-outs of a company based thousands of miles away from me, I have my own life to be getting on with (by the way, that's not a sleight on hardcore SL-bloggers at all, just simplifying the fact that I don't really care); but for some reason, he immediately seemed a bit detached. Maybe it was having the M prefix - meaning that his name couldn't be brought up in Search, and therefore made him seem distant and inaccessible. Regardless of whether he ever saw an IM, Philip Linden's profile was always on-hand to rant at via IM.

M Linden lead an increasingly-large team of Lindens to pick-up things like Avatars United, XStreet, SLim...and do very little to the actual platform that all of these things supported. Despite some early signs of promise with regular blog posts about the status of the Grid and efforts to fix things like group chat and general lag, nothing really improved. We all just became a little more accustomed to it.

I spoke to another Linden on the day that the changes were announced and he was genuinely sad to see M Linden go. "I had some good conversations with M," my Linden friend told me. "And despite what people think, he did get Second Life." Unless you worked in the same office, I can't see why you'd have any reason to object or challenge that, so I won't.

And so Philip Linden is back. Huzzah, people cry! Um, really? I started out in SL in the latter part of 2006 and by the time Philip Linden stepped down from his original CEO position, lag had gotten worse from the time I joined, an excellent customer support was beginning to dwindle and people were already beginning to look at other virtual world platforms.

So, I'm generally unfazed about the whole thing; I'll admit to directing people towards blog posts about the rumours of a switch-around before it was officially announced, but then I knew some other people would be more interested than I was/am. I'd like to believe the hype of a 'second coming' but I'm more concerned that it might be the rapture.

Tweet

SL7B

Wow, another year rolls around so soon? Doesn't seem like 5 minutes ago we were setting up for SL6B!

SL7B (Second Life 7th Birthday) kicks off next week, and as usual, Raglan has a plot, and I was lucky enough to be able to design and co-ordinate the build for Raglan this year! The theme is Unexpected Collaborations: it seems a strange theme, very open and therefore good for some really creative stuff to happen, but I find SL a wholly collaborative experience already. At Raglan, we collaborate with each other for every event held; we all come from different corners of the globe, all have very different lifestyles and yet we're able to find a common ground and common language to make things happen. Without collaboration, we wouldn't achieve anything. Surely it should be the same for any resident? Well, yes, that is true, and the SL7B Wiki does actually support my belief too, but it still seemed like a strange title to me.

Anyway, with that in mind, I decided that we should do two things: 1, celebrate the awesomeness of tinies and 2, highlight how contradictory the theme seemed (to me, at least - I can't speak for the Raglan community as a whole, or my fellow builders). And how best to do this? By making tinies the be all and end all of all Second Life.

Our build is a 'power hub', powered by a couple of interactive hamster wheels and a conveyor belt that feeds waffles into the Grid. It's kitted out with big mechanical gears and computer terminals. We've also got some 'control flowers' that Misa made up, where we can access the infrastructure of any sim at any given time and fix things on that sim - for example, fix lag or clear griefer debris - at the flick of a switch. We also have a network of TinyCams dotted around the Grid where we can keep an eye on whats going on and where, via a live feed of CCTV images fed back to the power hub.

Well, not really - but that's the general idea!

It all looks great, and much thanks to Misa Delight, Panacea Pangaea, Dagmar Klaar, Bree Himmel, Shadow Marlin, Luna Twilight and Etheria Parrott for their assistance and ideas in helping us get this build together! Another collaborative effort, as we'd have expected.

The only downside to the whole thing is, is that (some of) the moderators seem to have developed a God complex over the course of a fortnight. It appears that some residents have been given the task of moderating the sims (I can't remember of that was the case last year too?), so they've come along and picked on anything that might cause even the slightest bit of upset to the Lindens; I guess the ones who are left must be feeling uber-sensitive at the moment.

We (at the Raglan plot) were told we had to change our textures, with no clear reason why ("check the rules!" we were told. I did - nothing about textures in them); deadlines were changed at the drop of a hat; rules were talked about that never seemed to appear in any of the number (and there were a LOT) of notecards that were sent out. Poor Noramyr of Extrovirtual had all of her stuff returned to her - BY A LINDEN at the behest of a resident moderator! - because her build looked unfinished, leaving her just six hours to get something set up properly. I can appreciate that the mods are trying to manage a large number of plots over just a two week build period, but come on - you've had a year to prepare for this, surely the rules can't be that different from last years? And if you're a mod and someone says Hello to you in open chat, at least have the decency to acknowledge them with a cursory greeting rather than ignoring them.

Same time next year then?

Lindens Lost

I’ve been reading a number of articles this morning about Linden Lab’s mass culling of over 140 employees, including the potential phasing out of the UK office (based in Brighton) and other international areas such as Germany.

I use Second Life a lot; at least six days a week. I go in, do my thing, chat to friends and enjoy what I can from it (which is usually the company of others). I can’t really offer any more to the stories about Black Thursday that the more hardcore Virtual World bloggers have already written; I can only offer my own opinion, based on my own experience over the last several years, so I hope this blog posted doesn’t get noted or bounced around Twitter, because the VW snobs will only be down on me telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about. So, pre-empting any that might stumble across this, this isn’t coming from a tech-side, or even business-side argument. This is my opinion, based on what little I know.

More astute, educated or controversial observers will say (and have already said) that it’s the beginning of the end; I don’t want to agree, because I love the community that Second Life has allowed me to become part of, but I can see how they be drawn to that conclusion; the sight of any company slashing over 30% of its workforce within a single 24-hour period is never going to be pretty nor fill you with optimism. I do hope it’s simply a case of taking eight steps back before shuffling forward again, whatever the ultimate aim. It’ll be difficult though; even though residency seems to have stalled with the maximum number of online residents never really at any more than 75-80K users, that’s still four times as many as it was four years ago, and now with a substantially smaller staff to support that.

I think it’s a real, genuine shame that people such as Blue has gone; he was a frequent voice in the Friends of Raglan Shire group, very quick to offer assistance to the 1000+ people in chat with any operational problems they had or solutions they needed. He and Tiggs Linden’s helpfulness (the latter of which has survived the cull, despite reports to the contrary) harkened back to a time when I was a noob and needed support; back then, instead of plucking a ticket off of a virtual reel and waiting to be served at the deli counter, Lindens would actually be IN-WORLD (what a novel concept!) and would zip from sim-to-sim showing residents what they needed to do to fix their problems. My first experience of such support was when I’d lost a transparent object in the branches of a tree; Ethan Linden turned up (incidentally, as a Wynx Squirrel, my first ever experience of a tiny!) and promptly fixed the problem before zipping off again. It was that personal approach that made me feel valued as a resident; a feeling that I’ve long since lost. Blue and Tiggs came some way to doing the same, and I’m sure some of the Raglan residents felt very valued to be in conversation with a Linden, fixing their minor gripes.

Pink Linden hadn’t been at the Lab a great length of time either, but had had to face some serious resident vitriol over the XStreet changes (and fired on the deadline day before new migration to the new Marketplace? Poor timing.) and in retrospect, had held her own really well, in my opinion. As a tiny Wynx bunny, she’d also shown up to a couple of impromptu Waffle Day parties we’d held on the Shire for the Lab and had always demonstrated a kindness, a warmth and a fun attitude that only tinies can demonstrate.

There are many others on the list who I didn’t know as well, but whose names stand out for me, so I know that they must have had an influence on my Second Life in some small part. For them all, I am very sad. They’ve lost their jobs, and I’m sure their treatment has also tempered their approach to using Second Life themselves. If you got fired from Starbucks through no fault of your own, would you go back and drink their coffee? Maybe, but I bet it’d taste more bitter than you remembered.

What’s the answer? I don’t know, I’m just a casual blogging-bunny. I kinda wish that some financially secure, independent educational establishment (for example, the Open University in the UK) bought out the Lab, reinstated the old school developers and community managers across the world (Claudia Linden first in line please) and gave the platform more of an emphasis towards learning. Learning isn’t confined to increasing one’s academic knowledge within a specific subject matter, but can also be applied to wider cultural, theological, political and artistic development. The commercial aspect could be allowed to stay, but it might give the Grid a better long-term future. At the moment, it seems to be the case of adapting to current market conditions in order to preserve an end-of-year bonus for several key individuals.

As for the announcement that M (which I think must stand for Money) Linden wants to develop a web-browser based version of SL, I can understand why. Look at the success of Farmville (just look at its success, not necessarily the game itself which to me resembles something like ‘Charlie Brown At The Farm’ on an N64). It’d give a lot more people an opportunity to get in-world, although it could also open the doors for any number of idiots/lunatics/weirdoes to drop by – presumably, they’d only be allowed to access certain sims or certain features? But who’s going to support the Grid now that the focus of an international community seems to be being eroded and the ones who are left seem to be less-product orientated? As one of my good tiny pals noted, “I think Geo Linden, who couldn't work a dance ball, still works for them? What that about? He must empty trash cans for them because he couldn't work SL, which should tell you something. Just sayin’.”

We’ve left our fate in his hands. Or trash can.

All Quiet On The Western Front

It's been ages since I blogged properly here. Not a great deal to report, really. Sci-Fi Month in Raglan went pretty well, and now it's time for Art Walk! I spent a good two hours the other morning wandering around and taking in all the amazing pieces of art on display; I think I spent about $8000L on art. I should really set up a gallery.

I did open up another branch of Funny Bunny, on adjoining Shire-sim Extrovirtual. EV is a brand all in itself, thanks to Noramyr and Wynx's hard work at creating the best tiny avatars. Noramyr recently renovated part of the sim and has set up a marketplace area, where shops are now available to lease. The market place - as expected - looks amazing, and I hope the input of tiny creators can help give EV the recognition, traffic and sales it so richly deserves.

Linden Lab recently announced that they were planning an overhaul to XStreet, but introducing the Second Life Marketplace, which promises to be more customisable, and more shopper-friendly. Details have been very scant, so we'll have to see just how customisable 'store fronts' actually are and how easy it is to use and manage. Annoyingly, although they haven't entirely dismissed the idea of their stealth taxes listings fees they announced last year (to great dismay from, er, everyone), they have said that it's not something they're going to be following up just yet. Which means that I know need to re-upload all the details of the items I took off of XStreet last year, in preparation of facing having to make a massive payout to cover the fees.

Note to self: must do something interesting to blog about...