Tanita Blackburn

You wrote: 4) LAND Thoughts: Right now only a sim owner can set the textures of the land. Land and SL water is ground level only Questions: Will a parcel owner, no matter how small, be able to set the textures and landscape the land they own? Will it be possible to make walkable 3rd dimensional lands in the sky? What about SL water in the sky? _______________________________________________________________________________________ Why would you want a parcel owner to be able to set a different ground texture ? To have snow, beach, rock, mud, jungle, all mixed up in a single region ? Is land, especially mainland, not ugly enough yet ?

You said earlier: "We will continue to invest in SL and keep improving and have no plans for any shutdown." -------- sounds nice but who is supposed to run it ? You left only a small team to monitor things in 1.0 while most Linden's seem to be working on 2.0 now. Bug fixing for example seems not to be of any interest for you anymore. For example: That well known bug causing land owners receiving an error message on their very own land saying "rezing is not possible because the owner of the land does not allow it". Only a sim restart can solve this issue for a short time before the same happens again. According to concierges pretty much every region has been infected with this and for about two months now - whenever beeing asked how long it will take to finally fix this - the given answer is: "Our engineers are working on this and we hope to find a solution soon. Please be patient in the meantime." Two months to fix a bug ? What if search should go down ? Or teleports keep failing ? Who will be there to fix it if not even this can be fixed in a timely fashion ?

Ebbe I hope you read Macklin Deckard's original comment because I couldn't agree more to this ! Straight to the point. I will not migrate to any new grid - I will stick with 1.0 as long as it is fun and my business runs stable and after that I am done with Linden Lab. Migrating ? Investing all that money again ? tens of thousands of $US ? - Maybe only to find out after a year or two that 2.0 is not working out and they shut it down ? Migrating back to 1.0 after that - or to 3.0 ? - It was you who said in your original posting they you cannot say wether or not you will shut down the old or the new grid or keeping them both or what the future will bring ... Not very promising, is it ? Defintely not enough ! - Ebbe, you asked a few times your suggestive question what we would like better - Linden Lab coming up with a new grid or someone else ? Trying to make us believe it can only be bad if someone else would do it. The answer is - someone else would be very welcome ! - The only reason why me and many others are still here is because there IS nobody else. --------------------- Macklin Deckard wrote: > So you think SL can continue forever and still be competitive enought to matter in the future? Yes, IF LL does the following and earns trust / makes changes. I've been here 9 years+ and my trust for LL and its revolving door CEO's is nearly nonexistant. LL has a track record of overpromising and underdelivering, as well as jumping on the latest fad / shiny / company groupthink. Examples. The Tao of the Lindens as illustrated by Philip Linden making decisions take ages for consensus rather than management made decisions. Refusing to actively fight griefers for YEARS until grid crashing became a fad and started costing LL money. Some Lindens were actively friends with members of various groups causing issues with SL, others had a near-religious sense of hands-off anarchy they projected on the world due to lack of action. The corporate phase where they were your customer (like content creators will be in 2.0) and residents were to be just eyeballs for the corps...that lasted until the hype died and the corps moved on to the next big thing. I believe LL even developed a walled-garden version of SL for internal corp use...how's that one selling for ya now? The OS phase, where a few rabid open source Lindens and their followers inworld managed to get the client open sourced...some good, much bad from this, including the drama that lead up to banning Emerald client. LL has also shown a track-record of dishonesty and playing favorites. Examples: Back when sims increased in price, certain land barons 'discovered' this and that purchases would be grandfathered at the old price... It was only when it leaked to the general publicthat the offer was extended to all sim owners. So as a resident I am supposed to feel good about 'content creators as your customers?' The homestead fiasco. People were told there would be no price increases, then two weeks later, price increase. Countless homesteads closed after that and there were lots of bad feelings towards the lab. And a track record of releasing broken and incomplete shineys, then rushing to the next project and denying bugs or promising fixes that never come or come years later. Examples: Mesh rolled out such that creators needed to include 3-5 sizes for each clothing item. Only grudgingly, much, much later were additional AV bones added, even though they were mentioned in the initial descriptions of mesh implementation and got somehow dropped during development. Sculpts rolled out with broken uploads. Sculpties worked find in Beta, in RELEASE, they were somehow broken and lossless sculpt files uploaded fine, lossy uploaded jagged and broken (I may have the types reversed, graphic artist I am not). Sculpted gears I had used in beta suddenly were jagged and had to be reuploaded and builds changed at release. LL's Devs at the time denied there was a problem over and over...it was somehow OUR fault as builders. Then when the next patch came out, they were magically right again. Stealth fixed to save face? These are what I remember off the top of my head, I am sure others could add more. Now you see why folks keep saying they don't trust you or the Lab not to screw residents in favor of content creators? Or to release a SL 2.0 that is just as broken/buggy/incomplete as the current one or possibly even worse? You really need to work on resident perceptions....of course content creators are going to fawn all over you and new SL2.0, you just declared them to be the new world's gods, but what about the rest of us? Now, How could SL 1.0 be future-proofed? Get the Lindens back inworld - I remember the Linden Village area, inworld meetings, Lindens just hanging around just talking to passers by. I haven't seen a Linden since M was CEO and their inworld presence got cut back. It was reassuring to have staff inworld...proof they used the product they created. Ditch the TPV's - Figure out the best features of the various TPV's and implement them in YOUR client and OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE. There is no reason residents shound need a TPV to get MORE features, higher FPS AND less crashes than the official client. Third party software should not hold back releases so they can implement features. If you really feel you need TPV's, release new code even if it breaks their browsers and let them catch up. I use firestorm, but losing it would be a small price to pay for faster releases (not that we have to worry about that, SL1.0 being in maintenance mode and all). Incremental Graphics and Infrastructure Upgrades - To use MMO's for an example as they are the closest thing to SL, you could redo the graphics and optimize to fix the dated looks.. You could optimize the back end for current standards on a regular basis. Instead you decided to build a product to compete with your flagship product. This did NOT fill me with any degree of confidence or any great desire to remain a premium or use the Lindex. If you did all the above, ESPECIALLY the Incremental upgrade of graphics and infrastructure, with gradual depreciation of things that just cannot be carried forward, I see no need for a 2.0 SL. We could get there by evolution rather than revolution. > We are going to do our best to make it smooth, but if we have to make a crappy product with crazy complexity and poor user experience to preserve some very specific content compatability we don't want to cause those problems. Make it smooth, I really doubt you can, based on past rollouts of new features. If you need to depreciate various pieces of older content, do it and explain why. Don't depreciate the entire world, which is what you are doing. Rewrite what you have to current standards. I'd rather lose a fraction of my inventory rather than 9+ years of collecting, outfits, and memories...and possibly my AV name. > A lot of what you have will be possible to move across and more specifics will come through over time. You should not have announced this until you have specifics. First it was no compatibility, maybe, now its a lot of compatibility. Make up your minds. It appears you announced early, shooting for some kind of PR boost, but all the vagueness and 'we can't answer that now' has just destabilized things for many. Quite frankly, and this is strictly me speaking for me, I will be staying with SL 1.0 until you pull the plug, then I will find another home that does not involve giving money to LL. I have NO desire to have to rebuild my VR life and possessions in a 'like SL, only better' SL 2.0, not with LL's track record.

As much as I understand the need of technical innovation - the success of Second Life does not only depend on that. The main reason why Second Life is struggeling for some years is not hecause we need new stuff - what we need is new staff. - We need more, better support. We need 24/7 Live Chat as Second Life is open 24/7. - We need an abuse team that cares and act quickly and does not operate as a shadow army but interacts with users. - We need a TOS which recognizes that user created content is owned by the creator and we need the Lab to protect them - We need bug fixes ( just 1 example: that bug that causes that users cannot rez on their very own land receive the error message that "rezzing is not possible because the land owner does not allow it") is spreading out for at least two months now and concierge team is not getting tired to repeat that "a team is working on it and hopefully they come up with a solution soon" Most of those who left didn't do that because they miss something new and shiny - they left because they have been ripped off numerous times, they gave up on support after waiting weeks if not months for help and because the Lab keeps ignoring us. Linden Lab never understood their users and they never understood their own product. So before you work on a new grid I would recommend to make sure not to repeat the mistakes of the past and present or it will most definitely fail. You asked: Would you like us to do it or someone else ? - If I have to pack up and leave everything I created behind I want someone to do it who knows not only how to run the technical stuff but also how to deal with paying customers.

If they will put focus on content creators as the primary customer they should know that only a very small number of Second Life users actually are content creators. 95 % are content BUYERS and the Lab may very well end up with having the creators on the new grid and their customers remaining on the old grid for a very long time. Because it will take a damn long time before the new workd will be a world worthy to migrate to - for a long time there will be no clubs, no events, no homes, no nothing - many will create an avatar over there to look around but that will be it - all their friends, favorite places to go, their stuff will be on SL 1.0. - What I expect for the first few weeks is a high number of sign ups and a very small number of active users because - well - its stoneage ... remember inworldz ? blue mars ? nexxtlife ? ... the new grid will just be another competitor for a very long time.

Those who have been in Second Life in 2008 already may still remember what happened when Linden Lab suddenly announced to raise tier for homesteads by 67 % overnight and short time after assuring us that tier prices are stabile and won't be touched. When thousands of residents dropped their homestead land within four weeks. I still see all those avatars with their black flags and that red hand symbol occupying all Linden owned buildings, help centers and other public places for days and weeks. And those were only residents who owned homestead land. THIS will affect ALL who invested lots of time and money into their beloved homes and places, no matter wether they live on mainland or private land or no land at all. Limden Lab was surprised by the uprising in 2008 and now once again I think they will be surprised by what will happen if this will spread out to the grid - with all the rumours, false information about "SL closing" and so on ... Once again they only think in bits and bytes and see only what they want to see and they refuse the huge impact this will have on the community ... the users ... their paying customers !