Philip Rosedale is back as "Strategic Advisor"

[Prokofy Neva]

17 hours ago, Tama Suki said:

If I could ask Philip Rosedale for a change, I would ask him to totally change the marketing strategy. I don't understand why SL has to be advertised as a silly game to entertain only bored and wealthy elderly housewives who just enjoy chatting, treasure hunts, sex, shopping and wearing the latest fashion avatars. Come on Philip! Bring us back to the magic of the early days when SL was a research tool and a world where you could meet teachers and professionals. Above all, make a big investment to attract real artists and not people who think that importing a bad mesh with 5k prim cost is art.

Your argumentation here and on other threads would have more heft and weight if your inworld account with this name, created in 2011, wasn't completely and utterly blank. Or if that is an alt, if you used the main account where you do your building. 

[Prokofy Neva]

6 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

It's going to take far more than what LL has on the 2022 roadmap to bring SL back from the dead.

What dead? 

And compared to which world does SL look dead?

Meta, where there are no legs?

Roblox, which is all blocks for kids and where you are not allowed to get married?

Sinespace, which is competent but has few people?

OpenSim, same?

Fortnite, where you have to form posses and battle and kill people even if you get to rest and chat with your pals in some luxurious environment between battles?

Uplands, where there is no world at all, just a map?

Which world are you talking about which is an always-on, contiguous, virtual world not requiring goggles with open acceptance of user content and a permissions system ensuring IP protection and a thriving economy? FreeSO? Did you mean World of Warcraft?

Which world, indeed?

[Prokofy Neva]

6 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I actually take exception to your use of the term "bored and wealthy elderly housewives". I don't think you actually understand this demographic that dominates SL. I think RL women are the biggest spenders of money in SL, as well as the majority of SL creators/merchants. As such, we drive the SL economy to a large extent and shouldn't be trivialized. The RL women of SL come from a wide range of ages, from collage age to working age to retired, and I don't think many of us are actually wealthy by US standards, but more often middle-class. We're wealthy enough to afford a a decent computer and internet access, but not wealthy enough to be able to afford servants or even going out to expensive restaurants all the time. Second Life lets middle-aged, middle class women relive their youth in the form of sexy avatars with nearly unlimited access to new clothes and etc., but free of all the social messiness of real life. For what we would spend for one outfit or one trip to the beauty parlor in RL, we can enjoy this fantasy world for months in SL. Those who have the talent and drive for it, have harnessed our fantasies to make their own RL money, as well as to exercise creative drives that may have been limited in their RL jobs. Some people will always be content to repost gifs of kittens on Facebook, but for those who want a bit more, there is SL. 

I tend to agree that the core demographic of SL is middle-aged, middle-class women -- and mainly in America, but also Europe and Asia. And while the matrons of Bellisseria and their cookie recipes and Mole crushes are now a trope, the interesting thing is that SL is a place for the empowerment of women entrepreneurs, providing opportunities for Black and Hispanic women in the US who struggle to access the power structures of real life, and for people in the poor parts of Latin America, Europe, and Asia. They can actually make a living in SL as creators and providers of services that are impossible in their homelands. It really is a success story of our time and the media never covers it.

And the other inworld miracle of SL is this: that the *other* demographic of SL, the second-largest one, is young, virile men in their 20s, bored with war games, bored with social media from which they often get banned either for opposing political correctness or slewing barbed insults -- bored even with Reddit! -- who can now find a creative outlet in SL, particularly as furries and skilled weapons- and vehicles creators.

And they can find as their partners the middle-aged moms they never had in RL because their moms went to work and left them on the Internet to be raised. In RL, such partnering is frowned on and mocked, but in SL, it thrives because you don't have to reveal A/S/L if you don't wish to. The females in RL of their age cohort are inaccessible, because either they aren't furries, or don't like games, or prefer social media, or slave away at their low-paid jobs to make a career in a still-male dominated world. But in SL, they are older, with disposable time and income, and available.

 

Edited January 15, 2022 by Prokofy Neva

[Alwin Alcott]

well... seeing the hip hip huray posts it's like the big savior is arriving .... for me it's more a statement about the possibilities that LL had with the current team, hów sad is it to employ one of the original creators to save the project, because they can't since 2011.
No original thinkers and creators?
I think Belliseria was a great idea.. why not go on that way?
I'm affraid the ideas PR brings aren''t all that great yet, his HF project sort of went the same road as Sansar.
Let's see what happens first..

[Tama Suki]

35 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Your argumentation here and on other threads would have more heft and weight if your inworld account with this name, created in 2011, wasn't completely and utterly blank. Or if that is an alt, if you used the main account where you do your building. 

My inworld account is not completely blank and in any case what I do is none of your business unless you want to offer me a commission but I tell you right away that I only work on big projects that require big investments. Anyway congratulations on being able to create a post using only 45 words this time.

[Alwin Alcott]

42 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Your argumentation here and on other threads would have more heft and weight if your inworld account with this name, created in 2011, wasn't completely and utterly blank. Or if that is an alt, if you used the main account where you do your building. 

YOU dare to call others to the stand?... good lord you burn all the people you don't like down to the earth on your own blogs as soon you have time to type... you disqaulified yourself as trustfull sparring partner years ago.
[yes i know this doesn't belong on the forums]

Edited January 15, 2022 by Alwin Alcott

[Tama Suki]

13 minutes ago, Alwin Alcott said:

YOU dare to call others to the stand?... good lord you burn all the people you don't like down to the earth on your own blogs as soon you have time to type... you disqaulified yourself as trustfull sparring partner years ago.
[yes i know this doesn't belong on the forums]

I'm not sure what got into him. Maybe he think people should write their resume on their profile and present themselves professionally. But I'm not a professional, I'm an artist and I don't care about being a professional and I don't need to adjust to some standard in real life and even less on SL.

[Alwin Alcott]

19 minutes ago, Tama Suki said:

I'm not sure what got into him. Maybe he think people should write their resume on their profile and present themselves professionally. But I'm not a professional, I'm an artist and I don't care about being a professional and I don't need to adjust to some standard in real life and even less on SL.

i do think filled profiles are a help to get in contact with others. Here on the forums it can be very usefull when, for example, looking for friends or relations, give a glimp of your interests will absolutely help in that case. Also inworld, give people something to read, and see about yourself.
But... if people keep it limitited to a very few details, OK, thats totally good too, and their choice.

[Tama Suki]

58 minutes ago, Alwin Alcott said:

i do think filled profiles are a help to get in contact with others. Here on the forums it can be very usefull when, for example, looking for friends or relations, give a glimp of your interests will absolutely help in that case. Also inworld, give people something to read, and see about yourself.
But... if people keep it limitited to a very few details, OK, thats totally good too, and their choice.

Actually Alwin I agree on that. Very often I open profiles in search of information to find quality producers or even discover interesting places. On my profile I have only written ANIMATO now because it is my group. I have recently returned to SL after a few years, I have canceled all my works that I had done and I am preparing a new asset. I will send a Curriculum Vitae to Prokofy as soon as I have the time, I will also look for someone authoritative to help me with a cover letter.

Edited January 15, 2022 by Tama Suki

[cunomar]

2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

such partnering is frowned on and mocked, but in SL, it thrives because you don't have to reveal A/S/L if you don't wish to. The females in RL of their age cohort are inaccessible, because either they aren't furries, or don't like games, or prefer social media, or slave away at their low-paid jobs to make a career in a still-male dominated world. But in SL, they are older, with disposable time and income, and available.

I slept with most of my mother friends when i was a teen . One of the funniest memories i have of her was when she was sat at a bar with a particularly good looking strong willed and wild friend and said to me "you will never get this one" . Her face was a picture when i stepped up and kissed the girl saying i already did lol .

On the flip side the thing i regret most saying to her , when she decided to interfere because she learned the woman i was with was older than her and more than twice my age and just out of prison for stabbing her husband to death , "piss off shes better looking than you" .

Of course on reflection she would have understood i was her son so i never looked at her the way other men did , but for that one brief moment it cut her deep .

If it doesn't happen in rl i'd say because nowadays boys don't become men until they 30+ years old divorced parents lol .

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/15/2022 at 1:47 AM, Tama Suki said:

I'm not sure what got into him. Maybe he think people should write their resume on their profile and present themselves professionally. But I'm not a professional, I'm an artist and I don't care about being a professional and I don't need to adjust to some standard in real life and even less on SL.

" I only work on big projects that require big investments."

"I'm not a professional, I'm an artist and I don't care about being a professional and I don't need to adjust to some standard in real life and even less on SL."

Well, which is it?

[Tama Suki]

5 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Well, which is it?

If you can't understand what I've written you can safely rely on those who write "CEO" in their profile.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/15/2022 at 1:33 AM, Alwin Alcott said:

YOU dare to call others to the stand?... good lord you burn all the people you don't like down to the earth on your own blogs as soon you have time to type... you disqaulified yourself as trustfull sparring partner years ago.
[yes i know this doesn't belong on the forums]

Yes, indeed,  I do. Anonymity breeds impunity -- in general on the Internet, and specifically on the forums.

It's one of the many governance problems left unresolved by Philip and his colleagues in the prototype Metaverse but it's unlikely he will focus on it at all, as he's an engineer and will be involved in the technology. The Lindens don't even have a Governance office hour any more because they couldn't stand the fact that people came to these meetings with unresolved situations of harassment and griefing, and their concept of it was merely that they should help people to write an AR report and learn that they can't send Governance matters to Concierge. 

Meanwhile, since I only devoted half a line to you once a year ago, I'll have to up my game and see if I can live up to this wildly exaggerated notion of me you have. 

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

So, anyway, Philip Rosedale is back, huh?  I wonder what his priorities are and if he found a nice creator to help him update his very recognizable look that he likes so much.

[Daniel Voyager]

I'm sure we will hear more at the upcoming Lab Gab episode airing before end of January 2022. 

No times or dates have been announced yet. 

[animats]

On 1/14/2022 at 3:04 PM, Lucia Nightfire said:

It's going to take far more than what LL has on the 2022 roadmap to bring SL back from the dead.

I am slightly more hopeful than Lucia, but based on 2021 LL performance, she's more likely to be right than wrong.

[Katherine Heartsong]

I'm with Sid and others on this.

Until SL gets rewritten from the ground up to use all the cores of my CPU and take advantage of the 3070 card in my machine, I'll wait. I'll be here selling art, but I'm not optimistic. That change should hav been happening 5 years ago. Yeah, that'll be a painful transition for many of us, ask any of us who have been using Macs since 1985 and every major processor transition, but it'll be worth it. 

[Coffee Pancake]

People really do have to remember that we're customers of a corporation, and marketing isn't just reserved for attracting new people or media gossip, plenty of time and effort is spent on how to present things to us.

We're only ever told half the truth, given half the picture, half the time at twice the price.

It's going to take a lot more than the headline "good news" to turn this ship around.

We will have more developers and some of HiFi's IP to play with, that should result in some movement of the dial ... if the business numbers folk don't steal them.

Philip is back .. but actually not. He's going to show up to some meetings and "advise" .. probably on a high level abstracted basis. His Twitter feed is a fairly good place to start if you want to get a feel for what that might be like. He's not in charge or steering the ship, business numbers are doing that the same as always, same old trash fire.

 

LL have basically one shot to make this work, or it's all for nothing and the Tilia life raft will get pulled down with the ship. 

[Innula Zenovka]

4 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

business numbers are doing that the same as always, same old trash fire.

I hadn't realized Linden Research's accounts are available for public scrutiny.    Could you please provide a link, since I'd like to see for myself whether the business numbers are a trash fire or not.

[Lucia Nightfire]

5 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

We're only ever told half the truth, given half the picture, half the time at twice the price.

And LL only half-implements major features.

5 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

We will have more developers and some of HiFi's IP to play with, that should result in some movement of the dial ... if the business numbers folk don't steal them.

Philip is back .. but actually not. He's going to show up to some meetings and "advise" .. probably on a high level abstracted basis. His Twitter feed is a fairly good place to start if you want to get a feel for what that might be like. He's not in charge or steering the ship, business numbers are doing that the same as always, same old trash fire.

 

LL have basically one shot to make this work, or it's all for nothing and the Tilia life raft will get pulled down with the ship. 

A HiFi "rep" was present at the end of the last server meeting and basically eluded to what all this is about and that the same maneuver was done in HiFi.

All these niche, gimmicky features which no one asked for, only benefit a handful of users and even some developers are seemingly skeptical of are simply to showcase & promote the platform's "capabilities" to outside investors and advertise "third-party" software for purchase/acquisition to outside buyers.

There is nothing in it for average, everyday users other than the return of "familiar face" to persuade them that something magical is on the horizon like it was the last two times "familiar face" showed up, when nothing of use to the users resulted from it.

Alternatively replace "familiar face" with "rockstar daddy" or "MMO Jesus", if that does it for you better.

Edited January 17, 2022 by Lucia Nightfire

[Qie Niangao]

14 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

Until SL gets rewritten from the ground up to use all the cores of my CPU and take advantage of the 3070 card in my machine, I'll wait. 

Just in passing: that hardly requires a ground-up rewrite. Busting apart threads is a common development task, even big scary synchronized threads, they just have to work up the gumption and resources to do it. And for other reasons rendering specifically is getting its foundation pulled out from under it, so that part must be updated anyway. Yeah, it's a scary expensive part of the viewer to re-develop, but it's far from insurmountable, just write the check and burn the calendar pages. All that tedious stuff needs doing anyway, just to survive on the Mac or to have some prospect of rendering on new graphics-capable mobile devices.

To the main point of the thread: I largely agree with the Philip-skeptics. His most valuable role now may be to support installation of a new CEO. I liked Ebbe but never realized the real loyalty he had among Lindens, so his absence has been a blow, making his replacement a challenge. Philip can bestow blessings on a successor—and that ain't just nothing.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Innula Zenovka said:

I hadn't realized Linden Research's accounts are available for public scrutiny.    Could you please provide a link, since I'd like to see for myself whether the business numbers are a trash fire or not.

When your only metric of consequence is growth .. and there is no growth .. it's assuredly a trash fire.

The global pandemic hit and rather than focus their efforts on SL as place to reconnect personally and escape, LL's brainchild idea was ...  https://www.connect.secondlife.com/about ... I don't think we need see the balance sheet to know how successful that was. Or  Tilia .. an endeavor that's measuring growth in terms of hiring, not customers, of which it has only the ones it started with.

Prior to that business numbers moved all the companies efforts and staff away from SL to Sansar .. how far back to you want to go?

SL is doing fine, it it wasn't, LL couldn't have been off doing side quests for a decade while this platform coasted into irrelevance.

Speaking of side quests .. LL just bailed out HiFi, bought up their IP, hired all the staff and spun it as the rereturn of the King.

 

How does this help SL compete with Meta or VRChat or Roblox or any one else .. who knows.

[Pamela Galli]

39 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

When your only metric of consequence is growth .. and there is no growth .. it's assuredly a trash fire.

The global pandemic hit and rather than focus their efforts on SL as place to reconnect personally and escape, LL's brainchild idea was ...  https://www.connect.secondlife.com/about ... I don't think we need see the balance sheet to know how successful that was. Or  Tilia .. an endeavor that's measuring growth in terms of hiring, not customers, of which it has only the ones it started with.

Prior to that business numbers moved all the companies efforts and staff away from SL to Sansar .. how far back to you want to go?

SL is doing fine, it it wasn't, LL couldn't have been off doing side quests for a decade while this platform coasted into irrelevance.

Speaking of side quests .. LL just bailed out HiFi, bought up their IP, hired all the staff and spun it as the rereturn of the King.

 

How does this help SL compete with Meta or VRChat or Roblox or any one else .. who knows.

I can’t believe they resorted to promoting SL as a corporate tool again, after the spectacular flop that was. LL ought to dig up the SL history someone wrote years ago and give it to staff. (But add a new chapter on how LL went into competition with its own clients, landlords and home builders.)

 

[Innula Zenovka]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

When your only metric of consequence is growth .. and there is no growth .. it's assuredly a trash fire.

The global pandemic hit and rather than focus their efforts on SL as place to reconnect personally and escape, LL's brainchild idea was ...  https://www.connect.secondlife.com/about ... I don't think we need see the balance sheet to know how successful that was. Or  Tilia .. an endeavor that's measuring growth in terms of hiring, not customers, of which it has only the ones it started with.

Prior to that business numbers moved all the companies efforts and staff away from SL to Sansar .. how far back to you want to go?

SL is doing fine, it it wasn't, LL couldn't have been off doing side quests for a decade while this platform coasted into irrelevance.

Speaking of side quests .. LL just bailed out HiFi, bought up their IP, hired all the staff and spun it as the rereturn of the King.

 

How does this help SL compete with Meta or VRChat or Roblox or any one else .. who knows.

I'd have thought income vs expenditure has to come into it somewhere, doesn't it?    Do you have any idea (preferably based on something other than speculation) what those figures might look like?

As to Tilia, assuming US and UK have broadly similar regulations concerning electronic money and payment institutions and financial crime, I think that splitting off  payments in and out of SL, to keep them completely separate from in-world transactions between residents, was more an operational necessity than anything else.   

[Qie Niangao]

22 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

[…] I think that splitting off  payments in and out of SL, to keep them completely separate from in-world transactions between residents, was more an operational necessity than anything else.   

That's certainly my understanding, but I also think they envisioned commercializing Tilia to be a way of turning a cost center into a profit center (analogous to AWS making a business of Amazon's then cyclically idle computing costs). In that endeavor, current progress can't be very exciting, but I don't think we can quantify the current owner's expectations for Tilia.

If anybody has a way of gleaning background info relevant to this non-public balance sheet, I'd guess it might be @Nika Talaj.