A Conversation with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg

[CB Axel]

Is there any way to block sounds coming from other parcels? I keep hearing media coming from other mainland parcels, and even when I find the source, I can't always block it. I have my rolloff distances set to where I shouldn't be hearing it, but I still do.

Also, I don't know if this is possible, but can the mainland roads be upgraded to make complete circuits? It's really frustrating to me to travel along a road only to have it end abruptly in the middle of no where. 

Thank you.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 4/13/2018 at 12:04 PM, Linden Lab said:

This is where you can ask your questions for the April 20th Town Hall meetings with Linden Lab's CEO, Ebbe Altberg. For more information about the Town Hall meetings, visit this blog post.

In the meantime, post your questions here and we will select as many as we can to have answered during the events.

 

 

1. Can you make abandoned land available to anyone who files a ticket on a first-come, first-served basis instead of this torturous process of either auctions or filing tickets that often get rejected or only allow small amounts to be purchased?

2. Can you go back to publishing the economic statistics of inworld transactions so that we understand the world better -- i.e. number of transactions of $1 or more divided into groups, i.e. 1-100, 101-500 etc. Also statistics on Marketplace purchases in the same way.

3. Can you go back to publicizing who bids on each land auction and who wins the auction and leave it on the record?

4. Can you put paid ad boards for residents back in the infohubs?

Edited April 17, 2018 by Prokofy Neva

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

1. Can you make abandoned land available to anyone who files a ticket on a first-come, first-served basis instead of this torturous process of either auctions or filing tickets that often get rejected or only allow small amounts to be purchased?

I neglected to ask any land based questions in my mega list, but Prok raises an important point.

The land market in SL is stitched up by a handful of businesses with very large holdings. Land barons have greater access to abandoned land simply by virtue of it being their business. getting land at low prices means they can cover their costs by keeping sale prices artificially high and sitting on parcels for years. This is anti consumer and high buy in costs inhibit end users participation in one of the most fundamental aspects of Second Life. Especially when owning your own mainland is a key reason to have a premium account. Please look at your metrics for mainland parcel sale and ownership. It's a mess.

Simply increasing the supply of land, or creating land specifically for new players does not address the dire mainland situation. Second Life needs consolidation and the community that comes with it.

Will LL take steps to address the condition of the land market accepting that the greater good of the platform as a whole is more important than the business practices of a handful of large customers ?

1. Can we have a clear policy declaration that when applying for abandoned land that individual residents take priority over land barons ? (Small teir commitment to LL trumps massive teir commitment).

2. Can we have an additional option of "Region Resident" when picking who a parcel is set for sale to in addition to "Anyone" and "Specific Avatar". This would allow land to be released for sale to anyone/group who already owns a parcel on the same region.

2b. Can abandoned land automatically flip to being sold to "Region Resident" for a period (say 28 days) before going to auction.

3. Can we have a hard block on minuscule parcels being set for sale "to anyone". Only permit sales to a specific avatar or abandon. (and 2 & 2b)

4. Can parcels sales come with a lock in period, during which time the land can not be set for sale for more than the last purchase price. Use it, abandon it, no immediate flipping it for a profit. (allowing 2 & 2b)

4b. Should someone abandon a parcel during the lock in period, it be automatically set for sale back to them for L$0 for 7 days, after which point it could flip to 2b

5. Can parcels set for sale have a drastic cap on the available land capacity (say, no more than 20 LI regardless of parcel size, enough for vendor information) to prevent A: land sales being used as an additional marketing tool (come to this club, parcel also for sale L$9999999), B: Land barons renting land while simultaneously having it for sale (creating a disruptive and negative experience for actual end users who rent - rent it or sell it, not both at the same time)

5b. Can the LI cap on parcels for sale be set to 0 for parcels under 128 sqm, ending once and for all the disruptive practice of buying land, rezzing billboards and then setting them for sale at a high price.

6. Can ALL residents have the power to return objects that encroach onto Linden owned land. Residents bridging over Linden Land can easily create temporary spans, draw bridges, etc.

7. Can land auction tools be built into the viewer making the process accessible to everyone, rather than the limited few who know about the special webpage.

8. Can automated land bots actually be banned and come with a penalty for the operator. Even bots that simply check parcels for sale.

Edited April 17, 2018 by CoffeeDujour

[Ethan Paslong]

Just wondering.... is this meeting for structural and usefull subjects or for every sore toenail anybody can come up with?

[Kool Mekanic]

Any plan to boost LSL scripting possibilities, please ?

It would be a real benefit for the whole SL if scripters could code bigger and smarter projects. Right now there are many limits (like 64K maximum per script, no permanent data storage...) or cumbersome ways to do what could be done with a single new LSL function (llNameToKey() for instance...). Half of my time is wasted by struggling with these limits instead of working on new products. Often we need 2 or 3 scripts with heavy inter-communication to do what could be done in 1 script with a smarter LSL.

The JIRA is full of old LSL requests which would improve what scripters can offer to the community. It would allow more interesting interactions for all users, and also certainly save servers resource and speed.

Thanks.

[Bactine Bates]

Hi!

I would like to ask: Are there any plans for Linden ($L) Purchase Fees to be lowered for Premium members? Or possibly for Premium members who own land?

Previously, the fees were lower (overall) and so it was no problem to purchase $5USD or $10USD of Lindens, here and there. Now that it's basically $1USD for just fees, there's more hesitation to buy the little amounts and more of a need to wait until a larger amount can  be afforded.

[Dakota Linden]

Hi All!

We have once again had to hide multiple posts in this thread since those posts have gone Off Topic.  Please restrict your posts to asking questions that you wish to have presented during the Town Hall with Ebbe.

Comments about, or posts directed towards, other users and their questions will continue to be removed from this thread. 

[TheLebowski]

Hi, really appreciate this kind of session with Ebbe! So, some questions from me..

- is there a roadmap to continue doing improvements of the experience when sailing or flying, e.g. over simcrossings?
- how is the plan considering development of graphics?

Also a big Thanks for the passed 15 years! :-)

Cheers, TheLebowski

[Charlotte Bartlett]

Hi Ebbe

Now you have had some time to settle into your role, what have you found to be the biggest challenges with Second Life with regards to your planned vision for the upcoming years / and how are you overcoming those challenges?     What you most excited about in the future plans for Second Life and why?

Thanks so much

Charlotte

Edited April 18, 2018 by Charlotte Bartlett

[Tyr Sartre]

Hi Ebbe,

A couple things I'd like to ask (Sorry if I'm repeating anything)

1. Will there be any modernization of structures like the linden hubs and other linden owned objects both on mainland and to the "developed" regions for sale?
The reason I ask, is while it was all awesome and new back in the day, the developed regions are circa 2004 builds, the hubs are ageing and places like Pit's truck stop in Ribeata are very dated looking. An 18 year old logging in today would have been 4 when some of these things were built and I believe modernizing these places would help retain younger people that don't understand or care about the "historical" significance it holds to us older users.

2. How will servers that shut down effect scripted items such as rent boxes and breedables? Will items have to switch over to more of a web based system of tracking time? 

3. Will switching to a cloud server reduce some of the bugs and lag that currently takes place on mainland? Will there still be weekly restarts for maintenance or will it work differently than it does now?

Thanks,
Tyr

[Hintswen Guardian]

What are you doing to stop the traffic bots I keep seeing? It's not hard to find them, search for any common term eg. a well known mesh body, sort by traffic and the top results will have traffic bots.

[Hintswen Guardian]

Will the L shaped lake ever find it's name? (May I suggest Linden Lake?)

[Tricky Fairey]

Will this be recorded for viewing/listening or perhaps a transcript that will be available?

Unfortunately due to the timing, I will not be able to attend but, I am very interested in what will be discussed and covered.

[Devine Teardrop]

I would like to know if the Teen Grid will ever come back. It seemed that once that grid was intertwined into the main grid the issues with the "G" "M" and "A" sims/regions started to increase. If the Teen Grid were to come back I think it would assist in allowing just General places to be sure that no adult material would accidentally be rezzed in the sim next door.

[OliverTwisters]

Anyone Know If This will Be Recorded for People Who Cant Make it?

[Niko7513]

Are there any plans to support Multicore CPU's besides the rezzing only?

(At this moment i have seen my CPU working on the full 12 Threads/6 cores with rezzing only, but when everything is rezzed it's down to 2 Threads/1 core.)

[Send Starlight]

1. Will Linden Labs be backporting some of the technology developed for Sansar to SL? e.g. direct Marvelous Designer clothing support (samd) or the new rendering engine?
   
2. Feature request: If an object like a board game table was picked up in a large group of others objects it is impossible to find it again when searching the inventory. Could it be possible to add a feature to allow searching inside of groups of objects. And, perhaps even folding open that group to see in a tree-like fashion to see what is inside that bundle?
   
3. Feature request: Tagging inventory items in search would make them easier to find. For example, an item named "Elf Tree" could be tagged, "foliage; elven; fantasy" And, then later on be found when looking for those tags with a word cloud or via search terms it can be found.
   
4. Will the quality of the voice system be upgraded at any point in the near future? Many players are starting to move over to discord vs talking inside of SL because the Opus codec in Discord provides significantly better quality and the app has more modern chat features. Although, it lacks 3D positional audio.
   
5. Feature request: Prices on marketplace, unless adjusted manually by the creator, remain the same linden value even if the value of $L in regards to USD changes. Can sellers have a way to set a desired USD price and the $L will always match that value.
   
6. Feature request: Can a better scripting language be provided for scripting objects? LSL has no real world application and is a tedious language to use as it lacks many features of real languages. In addition, can the memory and capabilities for scripts be increased; e.g. a better random number generator, coroutines, a comprehensive remote runtime debuggers (breakpoints, watch variables, etc.), and a more modern built-in editor with autocompletion, better highlighting, high contrast color mode, etc.
   
7. Harassment, doxing and fraud have become an accepted part of existing in this world. Are there plans to make support more responsive and useful?
   
8. Feature request: The "baked mesh" feature seems to be designed to simply apply the standard SL body alpha to mesh bodies. Is there any plans to perform "mesh combining" to speed up batching of polys.
   
9. What can be changed in the SL client to improve the framerates for users? Even top of the line "godboxes" struggle when a small group of 20 - 30 avatars is near. And, many users on older machines are getting 2 frames per second of which there are many.
   
10. Have you considered performing a hardware survey in the viewer similar to Steam's survey which can provide a benchmark and hardware telemetry for the purposes of redeveloping the viewer with performance for actual customers in mind?
   
11. Feature request: Many accounts have been hijacked via social engineering of support, compromised security questions, easy to guess passwords and brute forcing logins. Are there any plans to release two-factor authentication support for those of us who want peace of mind? And, are there any other planned security measures coming down the line in the near future to help improve security?
   
12. Is Linden Labs planning to advertise SL to attract new customers and keep the population size healthy and sustainable?
   
13. Why are SL cash cards no long available in retail stores and are there plans to bring them back.
   
14. Having premium concierge support access does not seem to provide much benefit beyond filing tickets which are much of the time quickly closed with, "We can't help." I myself have had the phone hung up on me in the middle of a call or had tickets closed on me as resolved when the issue had not been resolved. How do you plan to improve support so customers, especially those who are paying extra for premium support, don't feel ignored or abandoned in their time of need?
   
15. Are there any plans on the horizon to provide land owners with management tools to better cope with attacks, lag, and grief.
   
16. Feature request: In voice chat; some voices are too loud, for example screaming or blasting of music, and others are too quiet. Could audio normalization be performed to automatically lower and raise these sounds to match surrounding voices?
   
17. Will prices for private islands be adjusted now that mainland has become more competitive to help land owners?
   
18. When will animesh and baked mesh become available?
   
19. Are there going to be adjustments to premium accounts to make them more worthwhile? e.g. no upload fees, a higher group limit, no search listing fee for sims, etc.
   
20. Voice hacking has become an issue that has not been resolved. When an account is SL banned, Vivox isn't made aware of the ban and still has those accounts active. A rogue viewer has the ability to randomly pick these accounts from a list and cycle through them on the voice server without an account ever needing to enter a sim as long as the simulator server is known. Blocking those accounts has no effect, because there are hundreds of them and the ban list would be filled and still there would be more.
   
21. In skyboxes at thousands of meters up textures flicker. Can this be solved?
   
22. Is there any reason for an upper limit on how high anyone can build? Can this limit be removed?
   
23. Is there a reason sims must be limited to 65536 meters and will this ever be extended?
   
24. Are there plans for an official mobile SL viewer for phones and tablets?
   
25. Homesteads are easy to crash and have a very low limit of 20 people that can get in. Is there ever any intention of increasing this limit and providing better hardware?
   
26. Feature request: Can a feature be added for land owners to set a required landing point for initial visitors that visit the sim but allow existing visitors to teleport around the sim without being lured back to the landing point again?
   
27. Can we get longer than 10 second wav uploads and larger than 1024x1024 texture uploads now that it is 2018 and other games are starting to go from 4k to 8k and have official ogg support? Edit: Lower resolutions could be requested by viewers on machines which can't handle it or when network conditions aren't optimal.
   
28. Feature request: For higher end client machines, now that it is possible, will we ever see an official real-time raytracing viewer?
   
29. Feature request: Will SL ever get to experience official VR / AR support? Edit: If yes, do we have a target date and a viewer project name for this to look forward to? If no, how can the customer base believe the 15 year community post that indicated LL is still committed to SL when it is clear that it is being left behind.

30. Competing platforms are starting to provide better real-time movement, scene and model quality, voice quality, and higher player counts. Are any improvements being made on the net code and these features?
   
31. Feature request: When purchasing a product on real world retail websites a customer sees: "Customers who purchased this also purchased x y and z" and "You might also be interested in q and w" product listings are shown. Can this feature be adapted to Marketplace?
   
32. Feature request: Will there be support for Firestorm windlight descriptions in the official SL viewer? Many sim owners use these descriptions and SL viewer users aren't seeing these parcels in the way they were intended.
   
33. Feature request: Why can’t we have more than one partner? e.g. several partners with an order chosen by us.
   
34. Why doesn't LL provide the reason a user is banned from SL? Especially if they are a paying customer.

35. What happens to the creations and contents of stores of players who are banned from SL and why?

36. Can cacheing be fixed so that it functions correctly? The bandwidth seems to be wasted each login regardless if the content is already in the cache. Edit: The cache is frequently corrupted and causes instability, graphic glitches and lag unless cleared occasionally (every month or so). It is clear this area of the code needs a complete overhaul. Also, squid proxy could be used to create far larger and faster caches on the client side, but I was unable to use it properly - If the viewer was closed before the textures were fully downloaded then blurry versions were stored in the squid cache and are never redownloaded due to missing HTTP features in the asset server for indicating a hash.

37. Feature request: Can SL provide a built-in way to backup your inventory so when you get hacked all the items that were deleted can still be recovered? Edit: This includes no copy items such as gachas.

38. Feature request: Restarting a sim keeps the current sim and users loaded until a fresh copy of the sim has been instantiated and booted, then users are automatically teleported into the "rebooted" sim and the previous is shutdown. This way, visitors barely notice the sim has restarted and do not need to leave.

 

Thank you. - Palisade

Edited April 19, 2018 by Palisade Coronet

[Linden Lab]

Hey everyone!

Thanks so much for all of your questions - we are locking the thread at this time and will be selecting our questions for tomorrow's Town Hall. Looking forward to seeing you there for those who can make it. 

While we will not be able to get to everyone's questions, we hope to get additional staff into this thread to address many of the questions we can't get to.

Thanks again!

 

[Brett Linden]

Thanks to everyone for your questions and product suggestions!

For those who missed one or both of the April 20th Town Hall sessions, we've edited them both together into a single video (with minor edits to remove some voice/technical issues). During the session, Ebbe had a chance to answer many of the questions in this thread. Keep watching this thread for additional responses from other Linden Lab staffers, who will answer some of the questions that did not get addressed at the Town Hall.

[Brett Linden]

On 4/15/2018 at 5:10 AM, Tricky Fairey said:

I have been a resident for 10 years, I would love to be a resident for another 10.

While I do understand that this world is really up to the residents to shape and evolve, I do feel like Linden Labs takes far too much of a passive approach in this.

1) Why doesn't LL advertise more? Are there plans to? With the popularity of Ready Player One, this is prime time to try and capitalize off that popularity and bring in more residents!!

1

Thanks for the question, Tricky.

We are always looking for more effective and visible ways to spread the word about Second Life. We do still advertise! Until recently, many of our paid acquisition efforts have focused on search ads that are triggered by specific keyword searches. For example, someone searching for "virtual pets" might get a pets-themed "landing page" that contains imagery and text that reinforces the interest expressed in the original inquiry. These efforts include several popular Second Life themes, including romance , vampire roleplay, music , fashion, 3D content creation ...and even zombies !  You mentioned "Ready Player One," which also is something that we're trying to embrace via a new dedicated sci-fi campaign.

...but I agree that there is more work to do. In 2018, we'll be expanding our paid and organic campaigns to include even more themes that we've perhaps overlooked or failed to target. For example, we're about to test some new ads and a landing page that targets people who want to deejay in a social online environment.  We'll be doing a new dedicated LGBTQ campaign to celebrate Pride over the summer, too. There are numerous other experiments we'll be conducting -- with the intent of learning what types of content and themes most resonate with potential SL Residents.

In addition, we're looking at new acquisition efforts that go beyond paid advertising. There's more work to be done on improving the new user experience, which includes an ongoing experiment we call Themed Learning Islands that matches the ad or landing page theme with the type of experience someone has when they first arrive in Second Life. We also want to better leverage the passion and creativity of the community on our social media channels including amplifying and sharing some of the best videos, photos and other content. We'll debut our first official presence on Instagram shortly, too.

So, there is lots underway...but lots more to do in 2018. Thanks for your question!!

[Brett Linden]

On 4/19/2018 at 6:12 AM, Palisade Coronet said:

12. Is Linden Labs planning to advertise SL to attract new customers and keep the population size healthy and sustainable?

   

 

Hi, Palisade.

Yes! Just addressed this in the response to Tricky (see above in this thread).

[Brett Linden]

On 4/13/2018 at 6:54 PM, CoffeeDujour said:

Going forward what are Linden Lab's plans to bring new users into the fold and to reincentivize past users to return ?

Keeping in mind that user evangelism drove a lot of SL's growth, what would you like the community to do in this regard, or to put it another way; How can we help ? 

How do you address the perception that Second Life is just for 'weird pixel sex' ?

 

Hi, CoffeeDujour.

To reach potential new SL Residents, we're doing lots of paid search and display ads (see previous response to Tricky above). However, there are also plans to do a new round of PR this year to celebrate the milestone of our 15th anniversary. For returning SL Residents, we are doing some unique "win back" efforts that aim to re-engage lapsed SL community members with emails and other campaigns that mention recent and future SL improvements and Mainland price drops (among other incentives). 

Word-of-mouth and the community have always been critical in driving growth and healthy culture in Second Life. I'm amazed at the sheer number of original community content that is found online including videos , photos , blogs and even e-magazines that are devoted to SL culture and creations. For those SL Residents who are active on social media, it is always helpful to share and show off your own creativity and/or the work of others you admire. These types of social shares also help to dispel stereotypes about SL so that the world has a fuller picture of the diverse and creative community in SL. If you have your own space in Second Life, you might also want to consider creating a Place Page to show off your destination. 

Thanks for the questions!

[Oz Linden]

On 4/13/2018 at 1:23 PM, Stephan Gaudio said:

2. 95% of all people hate Windows. Please provide a working Linux Viewer again!

3. When will there be grid-wide experiences?

I'm not sure I buy the 95% number, given how many people run it... but in any event, we have an active effort working with open source developers to bring the Linux viewer up to date.

Grid scope experiences are on the road map for this year.

Unless we are very very close, we prefer not to set expectations for release dates of anything - SL is so large and complex, and the number of unexpected events that can occupy developers for a time so large, that we have not found that we can accurately predict very far in advance. 

[Oz Linden]

On 4/13/2018 at 4:24 PM, Richardus Raymaker said:

1. Do we get a real first person mode in Secondlife ? 
2. Are there plans to make secondlife so that we get a more stable higher framerate
3. Why does the official secondlife viewer not have the very usefull vector copy in edit mode ?
4. A smaller chat window in the official viewer would make it more usefull. take exampel at the firestorm viewer, that still have compact mode. Or just let us move like asked before. move the chat window to a second screen.

And it's more a whish. It would be very nice if we can move chat window and edit window Outside the viewer to other screen. So you start to see soemthing from the secondlife world. Now a chat window covers a corner.

I'd be interested in hearing what specific changes would make a "real" first person mode. Submit them as Feature Requests in Jira, please.

We're working on a number of improvements that we are optimistic will improve framerate for most users.

I'm not familiar with "vector copy" - another good candidate for a Feature Request.

The chat window does support "compact" mode, and can also be set to be largely transparent. Moving it (and other floaters) outside the main viewer frame is something we've discussed many times. It's a big job; while we have some ideas on how to do it, at the moment it would mean not doing a great many other things. We'll try to get to it eventually though.

[Oz Linden]

On 4/13/2018 at 4:47 PM, Pussycat Catnap said:

2. Will LSL ever support arrays?

3. Will LSL ever support reporting avatar complexity? The current function actually returns the now obsolete ARC score. With event sims now starting to restrict access based on the results of this function - it would be useful if the function actually returned a proper value. Or failing that - have it return null so it cannot be used to do automated access monitoring.

4. Can we get 'redelivery' for anything 'copy' built into Marketplace?

Adding substantial data structure support to LSL at this point isn't a very high priority; I think we've got ample existence proof that people can do pretty amazing things without out them. That having been said, there are other things we'd like to do to make LSL more powerful, but other than a few new functions we don't have anything big on the road map for this year.

Access to Avatar Complexity would be relatively easy - please file a Feature Request.

Some support for redelivery is among the things we'd like to do for Marketplace - we're trying to hire a developer for that - tell your friends.