I have, in recent months, started to think of and refer to the Lindens as the “‘Let Them Eat Cake’ Lindens.”

My husband and I were at the Louvre exhibit at the Atlanta High Museum night before last, which was all about the kings’ collections of art during the time of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI.

These works were from the kings’ own collections, to decorate the castles where they lived in splendor, surrounded by their courtiers and favorites, who vied for the right to put the king to bed at night and get him up in the morning, while the citizens starved in the streets.

I came across a display of large pictures of the three kings themselves, and the last one, it was noted in the accompanying text, did lose his head to the guillotine.

What did I think of? I stood there in the midst of these fabulous art treasures and thought of LL, lol.

The entire mindset of those kings was precisely like that of LL, as exemplified in Philip’s seemingly clueless remarks above, in the new CFO’s remark that prices are going up because “corporations can afford it,” and in most of the actions and words that have come from LL in the past year.

coco

Cat”

And yet you’re still here.

You’re going to leave soon, right?

It’s true that the club hijacking of CPU is an outrage, and one that the Lindens are contemplating but not coming up with solutions for. I have a poll going in Ross on the infohub there with the question: “What can be done about laggy clubs?” And the answer most selected is “Move to powerful servers” and the one least selected is “Force people to move away from them” — yet it’s THAt solution that the Lindens default to. They may not have powerful servers that they can offer without a huge cost — clubs buy up cheap land and invade your sim precisely because they are often impoverished entities with no working capital and no ability to go on an island.

Of course, reducing camp chair usage would help a lot, as that artificially inflates traffic. You wish these poor clubs would stop throwing money at campers to get traffic, when the traffic doesn’t demonstrably lead to anything anymore (they imagine it does fill out vendor sales and that induces vendors to pay higher rents). Honestly, it’s such a toy world sometimes, and people are so stupid in it — you wind up paying out more to campers than you can take in, unless you are even more unscrupulous and force them to bet on slots in between camp payouts to suck out even more Lindens from them.

I constantly raise these issues with Lindens. And they constantly tell me that their value of “I can do what the fuck I want on my land” is uber alles, can never be mitigated in the slightest — even when it severely limits the right of another guy to do “what the fuck he wants on his land” because either he has no FPS, he has ugly signs devaluing his land and view, or he has extortionist grief towers clogging up his land access. This side of “my entitlements uber alles” is one the Lindens remain absolutely blind and deaf to — it’s incredible.

There are a few simple ways to address these things which I’ve endlessly blogged about and will have to blog again, but maybe it involves having Governor Linden covenant with Her people — not have vicious fucktards covenant out others with long, winding, excessive, vindictive rules, which is what always happens in Second Life, but have Governor Linden lay out 3-4 very very simple concepts like “don’t put spinning crap in the sky” or “don’t block the view behind you with a giant tower; be considerate” and then have people optionally, voluntarily sign on to those covenants either as they buy on the auction or later inworld, if 2/3 of the property owned on the sim has that box clicked off on it on the menu.

People endlessly reject such simple solutions already implemented without any scripts in SL because they always look at it in the literalist, tekkis, all-or-nothing fashion. “If we can’t get 100 percent compliance it can’t scale.”

Dastardly Dealings in 2nd Life – our man Dark Harlequin reports:.

Back in May real life contract law started to impact 2nd Life (see Wired article for example) as sharp practitioners and sharp practices (allegedly) moved in.

However, seems like 2nd

You ever considered this, Lindens?? Perhaps you should for once, and create a mainland where people do not feel the need that they have to flee from all this, instead of trying to force them back by this kind of outrageous “policies”.

WTF is that suppose to mean? Whats the difference when people can teleport anywhere they want freely. “Rational”, oh yes please do be rational Philip and realize we are not your little pawns to be moved around as you see fit. For what purpose? So we can better see the Coca Cola billboard as we pass from one sim to another?

How does the community lose anything when an island isn’t visable?

Just when I think I had heard it all, they come up with some more crap I can’t stomach.

Cat

My story is not a “leak,” of course. What happened is that there were leaks out of the FIC camp and out of Kremlinden Lab itself from what essentially was their internal memo not meant to be seen by the public. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. They made a business-as-usual announcement to their inner core — something they then later tried to spin on the Blob as a “sounding board” kind of thing. I doubt sincerely that it was any kind of “kicking around ideas”. It was an insider’s announcement, meant to let people know new prices were in the works to give them a jump on what’s left. And because this same bunch may have crabbed a bit about the sudden notice of $1500 a year for what amounts to a domain name — something quite a few bitched about (getting your own company’s name as a last name inworld) — though if they read the much-maligned forums, they could have seen the names discussion in the feature suggestions thread going on for more than a year, probably longer even than “Is War in Jesse Upon Us?”

LL didn’t “leak” to the Sheep; they *told8 them. Yet among the inner core there were leakers. Zee Lindens’ initial response was to say the leaking was “unfortunate” — as if they should have kept better discipline and not broken ranks. That’s outrageous. There is no reason at all they couldn’t have announced this normally, or “kicked around the idea” with at the publicly-open Concierge Round Table on Friday, 27 October. They didn’t — though all those people had many concerns and all own at least one sim.

More to the point, they could have put the announcement on the Blog itself when they decided to make the increase.

Time and again, we’ve been through this horribly harsh cycle. First, the Lindens in their own camp, with their own inner advisors from the core, make some dramatic or harsh decision, sometimes because they are driven to it by economic or technical necessity, sometimes merely because they feel like it or wish to have an experiment. Remember, they are not called “Lab” for nothing.

Next, they then float it in town halls, community meetings, their own blogs, whatever — making it have the patina of democratic discussion, though it is a done deal. That’s only the massaging and adapting of everyone to the reality. Everybody freaks and screams; they pretend to ponder.

Remember that time in early 2005 when Ryan Linden sent out a letter to everyone asking what they thought of whole sims being auctions for $1000 opening bids?. The auction sunk like a stone for the next two days — nobody bid, and stuff went for a song to the only bidder, Anshe. Everyone felt it was going to have a dramatic impact (it did when it was then in fact implemented in June — it caused huge inflation and devaluation of the Linden — and that’s why Zee’s very partial memory of island or mainland sim price increases not causing shock is fake — it did.)

And then with these chanegs, they then wait to see how huge the outcry is. After 6/06/06 when they announced the unverifieds, people howled, and they quickly coded a solution — land-banning by payment status. And they said openly that they used this very method of forcing themselves and the community to prioritize through outraged agony like that. This is appalling. I don’t know where they get that concept — Stakhanov? We can’t keep serving as guinea pigs for that approach.

So they do it now — throw it up, see how they react, mitigate, look good for abating the misery, think up the next thing.

Is this how software is normally developed, even in games?

The quote you chose from Delicious Demar was something I read earlier on that hit me the hardest.

As for Hiro- Me, my gf, and our very good friend have been renting with him. I think his actions say a lot.

IMO- People have been growing their own business yes, but while doing so have been forming what is like a partnership with LL, if you will. LL has now destroyed it. Great sims that made SL a worthwhile place to be for some, will now be gone. LL is destroying the very substance which kept them running.

While I understand there are still SIM owners who can easily afford the 195, there is a good chunk of development that barely gets by with the 195 fee. They, Linden Labs, have shot themselves.