I know you are amongst those who are doing the RL/SL thing and thats cool and all that, but when it gets to the point that its not workin up in here – yall can just move on to the next application.

If you think the workability and functioning of SL is the same as it was in 2003-2004 then you might want to take a peek without those pinkish red tinged spectacles yer wearin.

SL can chug along as its been going – downhill – and chug along forever, but it won’t be the smashing success, better than sliced bread thing it was dreamed up to be.

happy chugging!

And Doc: Werd.

The investors have been ready to pull out of SL since 2003.

People have been gunning for a replacement to SL since 2002.

Welcome to 2007, I’d like an order of more of the same please.

I agree with Doc.

coco

Can the Lindens save SL?

The answer was:

The wall collapses into the moat.
Regroup with allies.
Rebuild and start a new cycle.

Maybe, but I think $20 million has a stronger personality than that. Yes, SL is in deep, deep shit.

And the investors are definitely aware of the developing situation now. They – well, the bulk of them anyway, are not prepared to see their investment pissed away by poor management leadership.

As I pointed out in my article earlier this week, LL has as near as dammit no recoverable assets. The choice is stark. Either write $20 million off, or remove Philip and his crew’s control of SL, put in some professionals, prioritise stabilisation of SL, appoint an independent third-party development team to build SL2.

Might be possible with a further $10 investment.

The investors DO know that a WORKING SL has a proven draw and an excellent retention rate. So throwing another $10 million in isn’t quite as mad as it seems.

The huge danger now is that the investors only take half measures. Something like replacing Philip with one of the VPs (who I’m sure a now eyeing him with that famous ‘lean and hungry look’ while running a thumb along their dagger blades). That will simply result in a prolonged and very expensive death struggle for SL.

The only workable solution is that SL’s entire association with LL has to be terminated. All the staff are effectively ‘contaminated’ by Philips ridiculous excuse for working practices and simply won’t accept normal ‘I pay your salary so you do as I direct’ management – Philip told us that himself at the last town hall!

So SL cannot possibly be rescued without a new broom. Let’s hope the investors realise THAT.

It’s actually very sad that things have reached this point – oh, I predicted stormy waters in the past if LL didn’t get it’s act together, but I never really and truly expected things to come to this. Still, SL remains recoverable – IF the right people make the correct, maybe hard, but necessary decisions.

The sad part is, for thier fluff, the accounts that cannot be accessed anymore, whether it be time lapse, ban, deletion or otherwise still show up in the total accounts, and the assets are still stored in the db, but you can never access that account again.

Prok thats called legacy coding, its unfortunately the nature of the game when patching. If this were a single player game it would be hard. Since its essentially an MMO it gets 10 times worse as you have to attempt to factor in load into your equations as well.

This is not to make excuses for them, they should have rolled back when they realized that the patch broke too many items.

You have a platform that is buggy, has been for YEARS, has seen no dramatic improvement or stabilization since, well I can’t remember when.

After 3 years of this, 3 YEARS, they cannot update their own code without hosing the system. They are still weeks out from an update and haven’t returned the system to its pre-update state of wonkyness.

In a world where computer speeds and graphic cards are becoming insane and changing rapidly you cannot run their crappy code efficiently and the laughable graphics are getting worse by the month.

So this is where LL decides, hey, lets get some bitchin PR that will drum us up some business, increase our userbase, and make this thing work. Which in a way could have worked, but it’s a gamble, you are gambling that people are going to like a laggy as hell, graphically bad, crashing, breaking, sandbox.

And we have seen the answer, people sign up, look around, say “Meh”, and leave. PEOPLE WON”T EVEN STAY FOR FREE! How insane is that? If SL was the end all shiznt that the PR hacks are saying it is why aren’t people staying? My god you can make a million dollar inworld, you can go to tree lightings, etc, etc.

So I say SL is dead. I’m happily awaiting until the day my avatars deletion can lower the population by 1.

There is no way they can go to a new engine without a total rewrite, and the haven’t the manpower. Hell the guy doing the mozilla integration is doing it in his spare time in the evening. Over a year later, still no inworld browser to speak of.

And I’m sorry Uri, but this is a joke, please tell me it is.

“When they hand out awards for the founders of the metaverse Philip will definitely get one.”

Philip kludged a graphics engine onto the back of MUSH/MOO code and called himself an innovator. That is what he truly will be remembered for. That and driving a product with little competition and shown demand straight into the f-ing toilet.

Yes, it’s both.

Of course it was an incubator. The FIC was the way to reward the fanboyz, and not just with 4096 m2 tier-free for life and winning all the building contests and having Jeska pose for your shopper ads, that was just small beer. It’s about letting all these guys sherpa in the gentlemen explorers. They realized that if they were generous about this, letting people like Reuben or Sibley take care of the big companies, they’d keep a distance, they’d focus on trying to keep the plane flying rather than on marketing, and they’d also keep themselves at a distance from any big distaster. If SL really flops, these big spenders on campaigns and “development” in SL won’t so much be staring at Philip Linden across a table in RL or SL, they’ll be stairing at Reuben Steiger or Fizik Baskerville or whatever. And what can they say, “Sorry, the Lindens are patching today? Oops, there’s a bug now on that feature, we can’t do that?”

so they get energy, free labour, then press coverage, then plausible deniability — what’s not to like? And far from feeling set up for failure, these folks are polishing and polishing their resumes. They are the only ones with portable knowledge, yes. I’ve written about that many times, Uri. They will come out on top. Because they don’t depend on land stuck on servers or on dresses stuck in inventories and meshes and behind log-ons.

And no, I don’t think they are going to sell or close. You know how everyone thought TSO would die? It’s still there. My god, my rare little puppy ADogMorePreciousThanLifeItself is just fine. The pool table is a joy to play unlike the crap in SL. And people still make groups and do stuff there. Perhaps it will all die next month? No, they’ve been saying that forever.

Remember that time Philip said impatiently to me, when I bitched about how there were no flippable books after 3 years of this stuff, “Someone will make everything.”

Yes, “someone will make everything”. I think probably his brilliance is in that he was able to let it go and not assume he’d do all the making. He got a lot of other people lifting the bricks.