River Kyomoon

I bought some of the mesh clothes at Jane and I have to say they are fantastic. However, the Linden viewer allowing you to see mesh is just terrible. When Firestorm Beta was released I changed from Phoenix to that and what a wonderfrul viewer Firestorm is. Things rez quickly, lag is minimal, customisition of the interface is easy and - despite still looking like the hateful Viewer 2 - it's the most stable viewer I've ever used. I installed LL's Viewer 3 specifically to try the mesh clothes at Jane, but as soon as I logged in on Viewer 3 (and yes - in advanced mode) it was like I was being handicapped. Rezzing is slow to the point that many things just never rez at all. Lag is crippling and the frame rate is often down to 1 frame every 5 to 10 seconds. Rarely, if ever, does it get better than 12fps. Add to that the stupid 3 to 7 second pauses when I click on anything in inventory or friends list; total freeze ups when there are more than 10 people around; an inability to TP out of almost any region regardless of prims, scripts or people, and the continual crashing, and you have a viewer that is rendered utterly useless by it's inability to perform on any level. Add to that it's awful design and layout and you have the biggest white elephant LL have ever introduced into SL. Mesh is a great inovation and people WANT to use it, but until there is a viewer people can use and want to use, mesh is going to be something people will have to live without - not because they want to ... because they have no choice in the matter. A few of us bought prim clothes from Jane ... which we love ... but we are all suffering the above problems with V3. All of my friends have gone back to Phoenix (because they hate the V2 interface - even on Firestorm) and I have returned to Firestorm. Our beautiful mesh clothes will just have to sit in our inventories until the mesh-compatible version of Firestorm arrives. This should have been something great and LL should be commended for finally bringing mesh to SL, but, sadly, they fumbled the ball right at the goal-mouth with Viewer 3. So LL can be proud of launching mesh, but they should be deeply ashamed of the abomination that is Viewer 3.

I've been having a recurring issue for the past 4 days now. I log in on Viewer 2 and there is something like a 2 minute pause where I'm stuck at 'Downloading Clothing' (at which point others can see me and IM me), but as soon as I get past this and get to where I should be seeing SL, I get logged out with a message saying something like: You have been logged out of Second Life. The region you are trying to enter may be experiencing problems'. I uninstalled all of my viewers and made sure I had removed all data left behind and then reinstalled Viewer 2, but I'm getting the same problem. I can log in fine on Phoenix Firestorm or Phoenix, but both are rather unstable and crash me often. As I DJ in SL, I really need some resolution to this problem, so any advice would be gratefully accepted. Something that may or may not be connected to this. Before this happened for the first time I was out sailing with a friend and we were having a bad time with sim crossings deleting the boat. The last time it happened, I saw we were close to a harbour island and flew towards that. I crossed the sim border to the island fine and landed but before anything could rez, I crashed and then the log outs started. I finally logged in at home on Firestorm and my friend told me there was a griefer on the island firing something at people and when hit they were getting logged out of SL.

Whilst I have nodded in agreement with many of the postings here, Wilma's post is the one I'm in most agreement with, especially concerning the way the Phoenix team offer support and deal with problems with their viewers. The first thing I noticed when I joined the Phoenix group was the general behaviour of those asking for help; making suggestions for changes, or expressing concerns about things they like or dislike about the Phoenix viewers. There isn't the same exasperated attitude we find here in the forums and the main reason for that is that Phoenix users know they are being listened to and that their comments/concerns are being taken seriously. The creators and management team behind Phoenix are often there to discuss things with the users of their viewers. If a support person can't give a satisfactory reply to a question, they make sure it is passed on to someone who can help and the questioner gets a quick response. Their commitment to their users and giving them what they want is the best example LL could ever learn from. Their interaction with their users from the head of the project downwards is just remarkable. I see more people on Phoenix than on any other viewer (LL's Viewer 2 included), yet the tiny group of people responsible for Phoenix make time for every user who needs help with their viewer. That level of support encourages Phoenix users to recommend the viewer to others and we all know that the best advertising in the world is word of mouth. Now, I can remember a time in SL where exactly the same thing happened with Linden Lab. If you had a problem, anyone could contact Live Help and get the assistance they needed. For sure, there were Linden haters back then, but the vast majority of us were happy with the support we got from LL.OK, so maintaining Live Help as it was back then was probably a costly venture, but the current 'ticket' system is just hopeless. I have attempted to submit tickets over several issues in the past and have either given up, or when I have managed to submit a ticket, received a confirmation email and then nothing ever again. What we have right now is sheer utter frustration and a feeling that we are not listened to by LL. And the breaking point was the teen/adult merge. At the time of all the postings, you repeatedly saw people posting 'I'm leaving SL!' and these were often countered by other's saying, 'Oh people always say that, but they never do!'. Well my experience is that a heck of a lot of oldbies have left SL over this. In the months since the announcement of the merger, I have seen countless friends leave SL. These are not people who joined last year - they are people who (like myself) have been here for over 4 years. These are people that had premium accounts and owned land in SL. Some are people that hated age verification and the introduction of moving adult activities to a separate area, but they stayed anyway, thinking things couldn't get any worse. But because of the teen merger, they have now left SL. I spoke to one friend who left SL on Yahoo IMs yesterday and she said, 'All of my friends have left SL because of the teen merger and the only friend I have left there now is you. Seeing as you're not here as much as you used to be, I just wandered around on my own and had nothing to do in SL anymore, so I just removed the viewers and left.'. She's not been in SL since November and that's the case with just about all of my friends. Two more left last month and although we still chat via Yahoo or GMail chat, neither have any intention of coming back to SL. I honestly thought the teen merge thing would blow over like all the other things LL implemented that we said we didn't want, but it seems the teen merger was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. The unwelcome changes to SL over the past couple of years have been bad enough, but the fact that a vast number of loyal residents have taken the time to speak out against them (often with sound reasoning), only for LL to completely ignore our concerns is really hurtful. No wonder that there is a feeling that we are ignored and our opinions are disregarded as a matter of course. What we want SL to be appears to be of no concern to LL. I think I can probably speak for around 90% of those people who say negative things about SL/LL in the forums when I say that we don't want to be saying negative things. We don't want to be yelling 'Please LL - don't do this' over an issue, But our experience over the last few years is that our concerns and opinions are totally ignored. Second Life really is a great experience and it deserves to be monumentally successful, but the very nature of what it is requires user input. When we say we have serious concerns about teens coming into SL, it's not because we've found something new to complain about. The reason SL was so successful and popular was because it was an adult environment in a world where every other on-line game or social networking site was geared to children and teenagers. It really was the only place where adults could come and be around their peers. Our views on this major issue were totally ignored and as a result, SL has changed drastically. Now we see the results of that change and they are worse that I could ever have imagined when I was yelling at the brick wall that is LL back in mid-2010 saying the merger was a bad idea. As for your communication on this subject, well, many people didn't even know about the merger until they were confronted by the new Terms Of Service detailing the inclusion of teens on the main grid, and the response I got from most people was, 'I can't stay here now they've done this'. If the changes listed in this announcement are going to ever work, then LL needs to deal with some past concerns as well as new ones. It needs to take our views seriously. The old way of thinking, that we will eventually accept changes we don't want, has finally backfired on LL. Not only have many people left SL, but those of us who remain have little left in the way of friends and little hope that things will ever get better. As our long-term friends disappear, there is little left for the rest of us to log into SL for. My guess is that this current announcement comes from the same comprehension at LL, as you realise older residents who regularly invested money in SL are leaving in droves.Wilma said that there should be new users flooding in every day. Whilst I agree with that, I honestly feel, LL should be doing something to encourage the people who have left SL to come back. The best and brightest - the pioneers of SL - have all gone. Listening to what your customers want is a really good idea. Sadly, I think you've left it a bit too late. I recently followed a link on Yahoo Answers to the WikiPedia entry for Second Life and - to be honest - it's a pretty damning tirade on the feelings of the majority of us about the teen merger. This was given as a reply to someone on Yahoo Answers asking what Second Life is about. Personally, I found the WikiPedia entry a little biased - even though I agreed with what it was saying. The point is, if that is the first information people see about Second Life, it's not really going to encourage people to sign up and join. It very much announces the fact that the owners of SL do not listen to their customers. So yeah, please make changes as to how you communicate with us and please, listen when a vast number of us say something is not a good idea. And you know ... it's still not too late to do a U Turn on that teen merger.

16-17 years: can connect to the regular grid, but are limited to PG sims, not able to see mature sims, even if these are adjacent. So it's very unlikely 16-17 year olds will visit your private mature place (at least the teens with proper age-info - the others (age-cheaters) are already talking on mature places.). Sorry Marielle, that is not correct. My friends and I met a newbie in a mature store on a mature sim. He was having problems working out the difference between skins and shapes, so we offered to help. We pointed him to stores with freebie shapes and skins and other freebie items. After he left in search of new stuff for his avie, we all went to a mature-rated club (again on a mature sim). A while later he offered to show us his new look and we TPd him to the club, where he stayed for the rest of the evening. A few days later, he IMd me and asked me out on a date. I felt it only fair to tell him my real life age is 52 and he was shocked. He asked how the heck I'd managed to get into Teen SL! I pointed out that this was NOT the teen grid - it was the main grid of Adult SL. He then told me he was 17 and was under the impression that he had joined Teen SL. In fact, he had registered with his real birthdate. He then said he now understood why some of the stuff he was seeing was so sexual in nature. He has (or still has) no restriction to any mature sim. Obviously, there is (or was when this guy joined SL) a lack of information about where he and other teens are being sent. The restrictions to PG sims are very obviously not working. Will LL fix this? I very much doubt it. Let me offer you this example of their inability to update anything. Three years ago, I went to buy a new laptop, and I printed out the minimum and recommended requirements page for SL, just to make sure SL would run on the lappy. At the store, the assistant laughed and said all their computers - the most basic even - was way past minimum requirements and most surpassed the max recommended specs. The new laptop bought, I downloaded and installed SL and upon logging in, got a message saying my computer didn't meet the required system specs. In other words, SL is so out of date with it's requirements, my computer specs were too new to be recognised. I have since bought another desktop PC that goes WAAAAY beyond the specs page (which hadn't changed in a year and a half) and I had the same problem. Previously I could just ignore this, log in and set the graphics setting to highest. With the new Viewer 2 release, they STILL haven't updated the system specs. Not only does it tell me my computer does not meet the required specs (when it actually surpasses them by 3 years of technology), the new viewer now terminates the program to prevent me using my 'poor performance' machine. If LL cannot do something as simple as update it's system to allow new PC to be used in SL, what hope is there that they can actually insert some code that prevents under 18s from accessing mature sims? There is no point in me repeating my deep concerns about this merger because LL have never once listened to the majority of their paying customers. This plan will go ahead regardless of how sickened the majority of us feel about this. Most of my friends have now either left SL or moved to InWorldZ. We all know how successful these SL clones have been in the past ... they've not! But the current plan to bring in kids has seriously rocked the faith many residents had in LL (which was shaky to say the least). This time though, I'm seeing people buying sims in InWorldZ and move entire venues there. Let's be very clear about this: InWorldZ has a long way to go before it can claim to be on a stability level with SL, but the influx of residents who are willing to pay money to use it is forcing the people behind it to work hard to resolve issues. I spoke to one major SL jewellery designer who has also opened stores in InWorldZ. She is disturbed by the current instability of IWZ and the copybotting issues there, but is even more disturbed by LL bringing kids into SL, especially with the copybotting issues of the teen grid. Speaking to one of the people behind IWZ about a week ago, he showed me land areas that have been purchased by major SL designers preparring to move to IWZ. These are not places making fetishwear or sex toys - they are the designers who make some of the most popular clothes in SL. The reason most are opening up in InWorldZ? They don't like the idea of this teen/adult grid merger. Will SL survive this? To be honest, I don't know. I don't want to see SL go down the toilet, but I can't see anything good coming out of this merger. The fact that the teens already moved here have access to mature sims certainly doesn't fill me with any confidence. Even makers of popular pre-Vista PC games are able to update to allow Vista and Windows 7 users and owners of more up to date processors and videos cards to use their software. If SL cannot be updated to allow any new computer technology over the past 3 years, what hope do they have of being able to fence off the under 18s from content, places or people they shouldn't have access to?

Welcome Kim. I think SL really needs someone with your experience. I read today that the value of SL has fallen by $100 million, and the value is dropping faster since the announcement of the teen/adult grids merger. My hope is that with your gaming experience you will get out into the SL world and see it's great value as an adult playground and manage to shake up the people at the top who seem to have no clue about what the majority of people want from SL. It certainly would be nice to see SL get a bit of the polish and acclaim Guitar Hero has had. Like a few others have suggested here, making an alt would be the best way for you to explore the richness of SL. I'd be only too willing to share my thoughts and experiences of SL inworld. Here's hoping that in these grim times for SL, we now have someone who will work WITH the residents to make SL the success it deserves to be.