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Linden Lab is building a NEW virtual world


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Phoebe Avro wrote:

 

LL will say they will keep sl open  as long as its profitable but they wont within one year of V2 opening sl as you know it now will have its plug pulled

I cant see how it would make sense for anyone to have two parallel grids running simultaneously. I sure dont want to have to run two businesses simultaneously, I barely have time to run one. 

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Qie Niangao wrote:


Prokofy Neva wrote:

No. Not "well, duh, " Qie, you're wrong and he's right.

It's appalling that the CEO of a company would not tell vital news to his most faithful and high-spending users who bother with the forums, and instead go to an elitist, highly closed third-party forum to chat only with high-end coders and graphic designers about his plan to make an even more elitist world and shaft this one.

You may be surprised that I don't disagree about what 
should
be Linden's view of these forums, but that ship left port a long time ago. It's idle habit that brings me back to these forums to read and post, but this is the dead lands here, whether it should be or not.

On the plus side, we can all chat amongst ourselves here with absolutely no risk of any Linden ever seeing anything we've said.

Even the NSA ignores these forums, so if you've got any ECHELON bait you want to discuss, this is the place. Spetznaz, anyone?


I was just briefly discussing privately with someone the "here" verses "there" issue.  I said to them,

"I agree, SL killed this Forum.  It would be a good point to ask Ebbe over there.  "Ebbe, why is everyone posting over here about SL Centric matters rather than using the Official Forums you are providing?  Does nothing strike you as wrong with that picture?"

With respect to some of my fellow Forumites, intelligent discussion keeps getting rarer and rarer here.

As to the rest of the topic in general, I'm excited about the retooling of SL from the ground up.  There are probably things in the underlying architecture that makes fixing some problems next to impossible.  Changing those things has too massive a dominoe effect. 

But like most, our concerns are or will be two fold.  Porting our existing content to the new SL and what the pricing model will be. 

There could be a third concern.  A change in Philosophy about what "Your World, Your Imagination" means.  I know that there are some people who'd love to see LL turn into the moral police in SL.  But even as much as I disagree with some conduct in SL, I 'd hate to see that happen nor do I see it happenning.  I don't want Big Brother in my bedroom.

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It will be the interim period thats dangerous,

e.g. joe bloggs goes to the new world and there are no clubs or rp sims there yet gets bored and comes back to SL

I have owned a Goth club in sl for 7 years almost, so do i close it and try to open a new one on the new grid even if i ncan get the tools toi run it there and hope people will follow, unless LL rent land very cheap for a year or so and i mean cheap like a quater of the cost it is here because i wont be able to afford two regions for a year during the change over! coupled with all the other expenses of moving.

I bet the new world wont use L$ so your have to sell L$ then buy new$ a double fee no doubt

Edit to add

Land now thats another thing so is everyone gonna have to buy land from LL ? lol its not gonna happen unless LL rent land with no buying fee? whats the current cost of a new region $1000 isn't it?

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Exactly Phoebe. I am not saying this is a bad thing in the long run, but I am trying to figure out how I am going to manage the expense of having two stores open at the same time for an extended period, to say nothing of how I would find the time, when I barely have time as it is.  I would rather they just open it up and close SL rather than drag it out. 

But something tells me they are not terribly interested in the impact migration will have on merchants like me.

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Hey Prok,

How you been? Nice to see you are still around. You can bet I won't put up with a high tax on products. I do not sell on the various other 3D marketplaces because of their ridiculous fees. Heck, that is why I have my own Marketplace. I know exactly what it costs to run 1.

It truly is ridiculous that Ebbe goes over to SLU. Many of those people aren't even in SL anymore. Obviously, every1 here on the SL forums are highly involved in SL. Who knows tho, maybe it is the whole coder thing. It is plainly obvious that coders have more pull in SL than any content creators. Although Ebbe is trying to make nice with us, all you have to do is look at what gets worked on. Fitted Mesh is a joke, and only done because they had to do something. Just last Friday, Jessica Lyon brings up the problem with avatar heights, and LL is right on it. Of course, they miss the fact that it is not just the z position on the pelvis. LL should do this right if they are going to correct it. But no. Some coders give their solution to 1 aspect of the problem, and LL runs with it. This is why the backend is so messed up, cause they never actually fix the real problems. They just hack away at what bothers them.

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Phil Deakins wrote:

 

... the SL system has become a bit of a mess, and could do with a complete overhaul; i.e. start again using hindsight, up to date technologies, programming that is better able to do what will be required in the future, and features from the start that they've realised would be good, but would be too messy to try to get into SL.


That's what I'm thinking too. Present SL has too many issues to be able to correct it effectively. It's a tangled spaghetti. When trying to fix things they always have to take care of "not breaking the existing content". That is a big obstacle to make something really new, to be up to date with present technology,. So it's better to start fresh without the burden of taking care of things of the past.

Personally I'm very eager to see what they come up with. Hopefully it is something really awesome. :matte-motes-smile:

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Pamela Galli wrote:

Exactly Phoebe. I am not saying this is a bad thing in the long run, but I am trying to figure out how I am going to manage the expense of having two stores open at the same time for an extended period, to say nothing of how I would find the time, when I barely have time as it is.  I would rather they just open it up and close SL rather than drag it out. 

But something tells me they are not terribly interested in the impact migration will have on merchants like me.

Something tells me that LL isn't terribly interested in the impact migration will have on any of us! Heck, they can't even be bothered to post any kind of official response on their own user forums.

At this point I feel like the old goose being coerced into squeezing out one last golden egg in order to pay for a new goose.

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Pamela Galli wrote:

Exactly Phoebe. I am not saying this is a bad thing in the long run, but I am trying to figure out how I am going to manage the expense of having two stores open at the same time for an extended period, to say nothing of how I would find the time, when I barely have time as it is.  I would rather they just open it up and close SL rather than drag it out. 

But something tells me they are not terribly interested in the impact migration will have on merchants like me.

I think we are kind of leap frogging over a bunch of steps here and making alot of assumptions. The biggest assumption is that the new world will even be a place any of us will want to do business. More than likely, when they do open the doors, it will not have a fraction of the functionality that SL has. SL is a cullmination of over a decade of work. It is not possible to do all that, and get it remotely right, in just a couple years. I'd be willing to bet that it will be a good 3-4 years before any of us take the new world seriously, if it even lasts that long. Remember Lively? It was literally open for a couple of months. Even CP only last about a year.

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Coby Foden wrote:


Phil Deakins wrote:

 

... the SL system has become a bit of a mess, and could do with a complete overhaul; i.e. start again using hindsight, up to date technologies, programming that is better able to do what will be required in the future, and features from the start that they've realised would be good, but would be too messy to try to get into SL.


That's what I'm thinking too. Present SL has too many issues to be able to correct it effectively. It's a tangled spaghetti. When trying to fix things they always have to take care of "not breaking the existing content". That is a big obstacle to make something really new, to be up to date with present technology,. So it's better to start fresh without the burden of taking care of things of the past.

Personally I'm very eager to see what they come up with. Hopefully it is something really awesome. :matte-motes-smile:

It won't affect me at all. I may become a user instead of a merchant, but that's what i've been aiming at here for years and, like you Coby, I am also keen/eager to see what SL2 will be like as compared to SL1. It might give me a new lease of interest :)

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Phil Deakins wrote:

I've been involved in a side issue in this thread but not in the main topic, but I've been reading the main topic too, and I'm wondering something.

I'm wondering if LL isn't really creating a new virtual world, but instead recreating SL - with hindsight. I'm thinking that SL has run into a great many difficulties since it began, and many of the fixes/solutions must themselves cause further difficulties down the road, etc. In other words, the SL system has become a bit of a mess, and could do with a complete overhaul; i.e. start again using hindsight, up to date technologies, programming that is better able to do what will be required in the future, and features from the start that they've realised would be good, but would be too messy to try to get into SL.

In other words, SL has become a bit of a technological mess and they're starting again, and making use of all the knowledge acquired from the first (this) incarnation, and knowledge of the pitfalls to avoid.

That's what I'm wondering - not a new world - just a second incarnation of SL but done much better through hindsight.

 

That gets me thinking, I've watched systems reconstructed, either starting afresh or using the current system as a base but not requiring backwards compatibility, and the second approach is way more likely to work. In fact, after the purity of the blank slate has been tainted enough with failed attempts to reimplement on the sparkly new architecture, often the floundering madness must be forcibly halted and replaced by the messy "fix what's broke" approach.

System architects just hate it when that happens. It's so traumatic for them that they forget that most of their careers have been spent designing sparkling new systems that are never completed.

It would have been really interesting if LL could afford a "red team" that used the ugly old approach, in parallel with the "blue team's" start-from-scratch approach, and see who pulled out ahead after two years. With a system this size and complexity incorporating years of  tweaks, I know on which horse I'd bet.

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Would be nice if they had made a little more of an effort to fix even the simplest things -- things we have begged for for years -- and provide decent governance, before announcing plans to ditch SL, even if such ditching is waaaaay down the road. 

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Now that the cat is out of the bag I have to say this about the timing of the announcement:

By announcing too early Linden Lab stand the chance of being ridiculed like Microsoft were when announcing Vista year after year without delivering, or he might stall the current customer base and revenue flow to the point is threatens the very existence of the company.  

Because of the (premature) Vista announcements coprporations held back their investments for years, froze their application developement on dated technology and created the situations that a frightening share of their customers are still running XP - an unsupported system. 

By announcing more or less out of the blue without any clearly communicated technology and transition plan, he might just alienate both the landowners and creators so they stop their business. 

What is even more chlling are these copybot parties we hear about, and if they are true, entire product lines by many developers stand the chance of being available in the public domain, violating their IP rights and hurting their revenue

 

Fundamentally such a premature announcements stems from Linden Lab not really understanding who their primary customers are. I have said it for years they have about 80k customers, namely the tier bearing landowners and content creators (which more or less are landowners.) The rest are secondary customers. 

By not talking to these primary customers, but slipping this casually out in a TPV developer meeting, who frankly have little financial interests in SecondLife, LL has given their primary customers a collective slap in the face that can prove fatal. 

The Lab urgently needs to come up with a communications plan that details both the envisioned SL 2.0, but more importantly how they want to ensure business continuation till whatever is ready for prime time, and also a clear transision roadmap that the content providers can believe. If not I fear that there will be lights out in very many sims this comming summer and fall. 

 

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Ebbe Linden wrote:

Why are you guessing that? I have not hinted that we would do that and have no intent to go in that direction. 

 

Welcome to the world of rampant speculation, Ebbe!

Your new world, our old imaginations!

;-).

ETA: it's also the case that, the less you say, the more we'll imagine. And saying it elsewhere is not quite like saying it here.

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Ebbe Linden wrote:

Why are you guessing that? I have not hinted that we would do that and have no intent to go in that direction. 

 

Ebbe, how exactly would we know your intent? The only way we would, is if you/LL had conversations with us. Granted, we are getting a tiny fraction more convo from the Lab, but it's not a consistent thing. We are not having weekly meeting. We know zero about this new world, other than it will be better. Merchants have not had a meeting with LL is years and years. Since before Rod. Do you not think it would be important to start having weekly meetings with content creators?

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  • Lindens

I don't think we can assume that the SL tech and experience as we know it can last forever and that something better will not come around some day. It's either us or someone else. By letting you know that we are working on something I've already seen a lot of positives come out, and yes, some doomsday stuff, but there are always a group of people who dislike change (even for the better). So, in the future, you will move to something better, and we plan to provide that.

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Ebbe Linden wrote:

I don't think we can assume that the SL tech and experience as we know it can last forever and that something better will not come around some day. It's either us or someone else. By letting you know that we are working on something I've already seen a lot of positives come out, and yes, some doomsday stuff, but there are always a group of people who dislike change (even for the better). So, in the future, you will move to something better, and we plan to provide that.

The problem with this is that you have stated you will only have a small staff lead by Oz on the current SL, meaning it will go they way of XP without ANY - and I mean any direction for where your primary customers (landowner and content creators) are heading.

The only thing we have are loose statements about better, taxation and hundreds of millions of users. 

There are no transition plan, no reassurance that your primary customers can keep their business till the new product is ready. You might stand there very alone without content on opening day unless you start telling your customers and business partners what the plan is, and how to get both you and them there. 

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Ebbe, at this point I am inclined to think that if we are moving to something better, then do not drag out the period of time in which there will be two parallel grids. Beta test the hell out of SL2 and when it is ready for prime time, give us time to do whatever it is we might need to do, then go back to one grid.

Diluting the customer base -- for merchants as well as LL -- while greatly increasing overhead is better done for a short rather than long period. (And who knows how much further dilution may be caused by Hi Fi.)

 

 

PS A lot of that fantastic new professional quality content? Is not created by the ones who uploaded and sell it.

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