Thank -you Rodvik ( What are we thankful for in SL? )

[Persephone Emerald]

I know SL still has problems & Linden Lab could still improve our experience as users, but I'd like to take some time this holiday season to thanks Rodvik & the rest of the crew for a few nice things they've done for us.

1. Thank you for not raising tier prices for 2012. High tier costs has been driving many users away from owning land. I'm glad you guys apparently figured this out & decide not to try to squeeze more money out of users who are often already struggling to pay for their SL recreation time.

2. Thank-you for getting rid of the Basic viewer, which just confused new players & didn't give them an enriched experience.

3. Thank-you for more free sandboxes (even if they are just for Premium members).

4. Thank-you for the gifties to Premium members. The items you've offered aren't really that important to most of us, but I appreciate that you're trying to find ways to reward Premium membership.

5. Thank-you for the Linden Realms games. I don't need the few free lindens I can get from playing the game, but I think this is a great way for newbies to get used to using SL while also earning a few lindens. More people joining & staying means more money for Linden Lab, which is good news for us regular users, because we want SL to stay around for us to play here.

 

If I might offer few more suggestions for improving user experience at little cost to Linden Lab:

1. Increase the "free" land for Premium membership to 1024 m. This would make owning land & having one's own home on it comparable to using a free Linden Home. As the situation stands now, a user gets more prim usage with a free Linden Home than they do from owning their own land & rezzing a low-prim house or sky box on it. If you can encourage Linden Home users to own their own land instead of using a "free" Linden Home, some of them will inevitably purchase more land & pay tier for it. Some of them will also learn to improve the appearance of land that is currently abandoned & empty.

2. Continue to develop public spaces that all users can use, especially roadways, waterways & parks. These look much nicer than large tracts of abandoned land & encourage users to explore this virtual world & get to know each other better.

3. Offer users, especially newbies contacts for in-world training on how to enjoy SL better. Newbies need help leaning to use the Edit menu & basic building. Almost everyone needs help with managing their Inventory better. I'm pretty sure all the huge inventories many users have is a drain on the servers, so if people can learn to delete duplicate items, that will help the servers as well as the users.

4. If this hasn't been done already, abandoned land should automatically send back prims to the previous resident & be set to disallow others from rezzing prims on it. Allowing just anyone to abandon objects on abandoned land creates an unsightly mess that may include Adult objects on Mature & General land.

5. If possible, keep General land separate from Mature land. If you have to keep one continent that is General, one that is Adult, and all the others Mature, then do that. Placing land that is supposed to be appropriate for 16 year olds next to land that includes Mature images & items for sale makes no sense if you want SL to be used by people who believes SL should be "family-friendly". I don't personally care what the teens in SL do, but I don't want Linden Lab to be sued by parents saying their children were exposed to inappropriate material.

 

[Jennifer Boyle]

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Persephone Emerald wrote:

...1. Increase the "free" land for Premium membership to 1024 m. This would make owning land & having one's own home on it comparable to using a free Linden Home. As the situation stands now, a user gets more prim usage with a free Linden Home than they do from owning their own land & rezzing a low-prim house or sky box on it. If you can encourage Linden Home users to own their own land instead of using a "free" Linden Home, some of them will inevitably purchase more land & pay tier for it. Some of them will also learn to improve the appearance of land that is currently abandoned & empty....

3. Offer users, especially newbies contacts for in-world training on how to enjoy SL better. Newbies need help leaning to use the Edit menu & basic building. Almost everyone needs help with managing their Inventory better. I'm pretty sure all the huge inventories many users have is a drain on the servers, so if people can learn to delete duplicate items, that will help the servers as well as the users.

4. If this hasn't been done already, abandoned land should automatically send back prims to the previous resident & be set to disallow others from rezzing prims on it. Allowing just anyone to abandon objects on abandoned land creates an unsightly mess that may include Adult objects on Mature & General land. 

The first proposal is absolutely correct.  I am living proof that once one owns land, one keeps wanting more.  LL would do well to provide strong incentives for the initial acquisition of land.

Newbies do need training, but what would really help with inventory management would be some way to efficiently identify duplicates, similar to duplicate file finder programs for computers.  Another thing that would help tremendously would be some way to have a hierarchical folder structure in prims used for storage.  Currently, the only way to do that is to use prims within prims.  Accessing the contents requires that each prim be rezzed and the next one down be taken into inventory and then rezzed.  I wonder if there could be a script that display prims inside prims as a folder tree and allows the owner to extract the folder of her choice.

Why does land stay abandoned so long?   It should be immediately put up for auction, but land remains abandoned and not for sale for many months.  Why?  

 

 

[Jenni Darkwatch]

I second your "Thank You". My personal feeling is that LL has a renewed focus, though it still seems blurry at times.

Personally, I'd also like to add one big, major suggestion - even if it's not an easily doable one: Improve sim crossings _or_ offer "megasims" (i.e. 512x512m sims, 1024x1024m sims or somesuch). As it currently stands, driving, flying or boating in SL is a mixed experience. With sim crossings about every 256m, using any "fast" vehicle becomes an exercise in crashing.

My suggestion would be to offer megasims. Considering that there's more than one simulator on each physical server, it sounds like a no-brainer to me. Collate mainland sims into megasims, or even just open water sims like Blake Sea to test it.

[Maelstrom Janus]

Thank you Rodvik for allowing me to pay an arm and a leg to enjoy sl.... and devalueing my sl land- or is it your sl land -  to such a point where a full region is only worth something to a greedy land dealer prepared to pay a fraction of a linden per square metre for it...

Thanks also for the increased crashes on teleporting and the phenomenal lag when more than three people get together in a region..

And thanks most of all for being able to find these  people who no matter how bad an example of 'value for money' sl becomes always manage to play the lickspittle....

As for 'not increasing tiers' ( what a laugh)...give it a go man and see how long sl lasts..... The map will look as if its got the worse case of jaundice seen outside a tropical illness hospital

 

Gad its no wonder sl gets away with diminishing value and poor customer service with some of these fawning forum dwellers !!

[Irene Muni]

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Jenni Darkwatch wrote:

I second your "Thank You". My personal feeling is that LL has a renewed focus ...,

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Sure, see http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/12/2012-linden-lab-pivots-from-second-life.html :smileyfrustrated:

[Jenni Darkwatch]

For a company, diversification is good. SL will eventually go the way of the dodo bird anyway, considering its tech is _still_ more approproate to the year 2000 than it is for 2011 or 2012.

[Porky Gorky]

Thank you Rodvik for propping up this dying cash cow for just a few more years so we can suck every last drop from it's wrinkly weathered udders.

[Mayalily]

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Persephone Emerald wrote:

I know SL still has problems & Linden Lab could still improve our experience as users, but I'd like to take some time this holiday season to thanks Rodvik & the rest of the crew for a few nice things they've done for us.

1. Thank you for not raising tier prices for 2012. High tier costs has been driving many users away from owning land. I'm glad you guys apparently figured this out & decide not to try to squeeze more money out of users who are often already struggling to pay for their SL recreation time.

2. Thank-you for getting rid of the Basic viewer, which just confused new players & didn't give them an enriched experience.

3. Thank-you for more free sandboxes (even if they are just for Premium members).

4. Thank-you for the gifties to Premium members. The items you've offered aren't really that important to most of us, but I appreciate that you're trying to find ways to reward Premium membership.

5. Thank-you for the Linden Realms games. I don't need the few free lindens I can get from playing the game, but I think this is a great way for newbies to get used to using SL while also earning a few lindens. More people joining & staying means more money for Linden Lab, which is good news for us regular users, because we want SL to stay around for us to play here.

 

If I might offer few more suggestions for improving user experience at little cost to Linden Lab:

1. Increase the "free" land for Premium membership to 1024 m. This would make owning land & having one's own home on it comparable to using a free Linden Home. As the situation stands now, a user gets more prim usage with a free Linden Home than they do from owning their own land & rezzing a low-prim house or sky box on it. If you can encourage Linden Home users to own their own land instead of using a "free" Linden Home, some of them will inevitably purchase more land & pay tier for it. Some of them will also learn to improve the appearance of land that is currently abandoned & empty.

2. Continue to develop public spaces that all users can use, especially roadways, waterways & parks. These look much nicer than large tracts of abandoned land & encourage users to explore this virtual world & get to know each other better.

3. Offer users, especially newbies contacts for in-world training on how to enjoy SL better. Newbies need help leaning to use the Edit menu & basic building. Almost everyone needs help with managing their Inventory better. I'm pretty sure all the huge inventories many users have is a drain on the servers, so if people can learn to delete duplicate items, that will help the servers as well as the users.

4. If this hasn't been done already, abandoned land should automatically send back prims to the previous resident & be set to disallow others from rezzing prims on it. Allowing just anyone to abandon objects on abandoned land creates an unsightly mess that may include Adult objects on Mature & General land.

5. If possible, keep General land separate from Mature land. If you have to keep one continent that is General, one that is Adult, and all the others Mature, then do that. Placing land that is supposed to be appropriate for 16 year olds next to land that includes Mature images & items for sale makes no sense if you want SL to be used by people who believes SL should be "family-friendly". I don't personally care what the teens in SL do, but I don't want Linden Lab to be sued by parents saying their children were exposed to inappropriate material.

 

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Hi Pers, Yes I have personally been working on my inventory and deleting items I don't use, old landmarks, old notecards, all kinds of stuff.  Torley Linden has a tutorial on You Tube on how to make a box and store a bunch of items in that box that are rarely used.  So, thank you Torley for that very interesting video. 

As far as Adult, Mature, and General.  Mature requires no age verification but Mature is becoming more and more ADULT every day.  People are constantly pushing the limits on mature sims.  I find more nudity on Mature sims than on Adult, and that's WITH teenagers?  I believe LL should just have General and Adult, and forget the Mature altogether because on Mature they don't have to be verified and could steal someone's guilable teen off SL and right into rl.  That's pretty scary.  People want anonimity and adult at the same time, and there is no logic to that, and all the while there really isn't much difference at all between Mature and Adult, except one is age verified and the other is not.  But, mature is looking more and more Adult every day. 

All I can really say thank you to Rodvik for is for listening to some of his customer's, which he has as per shown in his feed.  But, I think the Mature/Adult thing does need to be addressed as they both should be age verified or just go with Adult and General.  

I'd love some free sims for exploring as per your suggestion No. 2.   

 

 

[Canoro Philipp]

i want to thank Rodvik for his efforts to make Second Life better, you really did.

when you came, you enjoyed your first experiences, you took the time to learn the experience, you shaped your land, put many trees around, made a home, a cabin, and scripted a mailbox to recieve your email. you called yourself a noob not trying to look at everyone down, and you enjoyed buliding, that is one of the core experiences that make Second Life what it is. you made some events, tried out different subcultures, being a Tiny was the one you enjoyed most, and even expanded in creating a new one, Vehitars. and then you made a list of everything that could be improved, like when you said that group chat had a problem because it was lagging, and you fix it.

the way you fixed search was a great improvement over the previous search, thank you for that, you bringed us the feed when our accounts were being deleted from facebook and google because we didnt wanted to reveal real life information.

you bring us mesh, and that has improved the world, reducing lag, and made the world look better. you rolled up your sleves and work with the viewer to make it more adaptable to any kind of users, making it flexible enough for the ones who prefer buttons with text in the bottom to the ones who prefer buttons on the side. im one of the ones who prefered the buttons on the side, i liked the sidebar, i have my windows arranged to the right, just like viewer 2.

there are so many things you have done for us, many that we dont know, as you said, some server side features "makes for a poor headline, but has enormous payoff for the customer experience.", you did something too that was untouched for many years, you are working to give us new creation tools, with so many diverse talented creators, Second Life is going to be more impressive.

also, thank you for finding a way for the newcomers to make lindens, without having to expose themselves to fraud or give up their dignity. the new welcome screen of the viewer was a good idea too, for people that dont know where to go or where to find people, you gave them the destination guide in front of them and the most popular places. thank you also for the new registration process that is more welcoming and easier for the new user, and the new sets of avatars that gives them a glimpse of the varity that is Second Life.

another thing i want to thank you, is for the communication you had with us, is rare that a CEO would talk to his customers, as you called us in your first post, thank you for that too. when you came to the Second Life Birthday, you decided not to appear in stage, looking down on us and give us a speech and go, you decided to mix with everyone, and talked with everyone of us, being one of us, and thats very important to understand Second Life in many levels, you become a noob and the CEO at the same time.

you are working to give us back last names, you have proved that you are listening to us, and not only listening, but doing something about it. the last names was something that many people felt it was taken away from the essence of what Second Life is.

you have done many things that had improved Second Life in only 1 year. im sure you have many things in your mind that can be improved, and im sure you are already taking those steps to bring them to us when they are ready.

thank you for your efforts Rodvik, they are being appreciated.

[Seven Overdrive]

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Maelstrom Janus wrote:

Thank you Rodvik for allowing me to pay an arm and a leg to enjoy sl.... and devalueing my sl land- or is it your sl land -  to such a point where a full region is only worth something to a greedy land dealer prepared to pay a fraction of a linden per square metre for it...

Thanks also for the increased crashes on teleporting and the phenomenal lag when more than three people get together in a region..

And thanks most of all for being able to find these  people who no matter how bad an example of 'value for money' sl becomes always manage to play the lickspittle....

As for 'not increasing tiers' ( what a laugh)...give it a go man

and see how long sl lasts..... The map will look as if its got the worse case of jaundice seen outside a tropical illness hospital

 

Gad its no wonder sl gets away with diminishing value and poor customer service with some of these fawning forum dwellers !!

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 This post sums it up for me.  

 

You'll get my thanks Rod when you lower tiers across the board.  Linden homes and premium sandboxes just do not cut it for a certain segment of SL that wishes to do more with the platform than play dress up, shop and chat.  

Here's to hoping LL gains some sense about their high subscription fees for land in 2012.

[161488303349]

im thankful that when i crash out of sl then i can log back in straightaway and not ghost like before and stop me logging in. i  crash a lot bc i use linden dev viewers most of the time and try max them out when i do

im thankful that when i crash out and log back in and ima cloud then develop \ avatar \ character test works everytime for me now and i can easy get my avatar to show again

im thankful that ll made it so that when random person click on a vehicle it not stop anymore and keeps going now. bc of that i buy my first vehicle ever. a simboard. is way cool (:

 

[Ceka Cianci]

Thank you Rodvik for the PonyBear!! \o/ (had to get that out of the way first hehehe)

Thank you for the new parcel settings that allow us to block what others see and hear from outside our parcels =)

Thank you for the new premuim sand boxes..it makes sorting inventory that much faster when rezzing huge things hehehe

Thank you for popping in threads and talking to us and even on your feed..

Thank you for V3

Thank you for having Mesh to the grid this year =)

Thanks for making things a little harder on those irritating caped crusaders that thought they owned the grid and we were their toys..

Thanks for changes that feel good and feel like a right direction..

Thanks for being the coolest CEO in a long time.Don't ever change hehehehe =)

Thats all until i can think of more..

[Maelstrom Janus]

Dont hold your breath... despite the many worldy wise utterances from sl's creator  SL looks increasingly motivated by one factor ...greed... and to me as a customer there seems to be diminishing returns and a poorer service.

And while Lindens keeps trying all these new gimmicks and contemplates new pies to dip its fingers in ( I wonder if theyre going to divert manpower and resources from what seems to me a labouring SL) the one thinG which seems to get totally bypassed all the time is the simple notion of expanding on and improving the INWORLD building system...

Not some vastly over complex software you cant use in world but something  new to invigorate building for those people who like to actually create WITHIN sl...

All mesh software does is take away the inworld creation process which allows you to walk around your creation while you work on it.

I love building but the system is so jaded... and Im tired of making umpteen suggestions and not even getting a linden answer as to whether the ideas are feasible or not...

[Lilibet Constantine]

Thank you for improving lag. LL promised to do this and so far my lag experience has had a lot more lag.

Thank you for making sure I have to log my alt on to check I'm dressed whenever I attempt to get changed in SL.

Thanky ou for killing off land sales, not just with high tiers but by putting abandoned land up for 1l per sq m it makes it virtually impossible for anyone else to sell their land now.

Thank you for making me crash more. It gives my laptop a chance to cool down.

Thank you for spending vast resources linking to Facebook when second life users ARE IN SL!

Thank you for killing of in world shopping by making land tiers so high people can no longer afford to own / rent land for stores and allowing marketplace to continue to show items by people whohave closed their accounts.

Thank you for integrating the teen grid so now you have to be ultra careful when talking to people because ther'es no way of knowing how old they are.

And of course thank you for driving on with getting new players in to the game while totally and utterly ignoring those you have been loyal for a few years now.