Open Letter to Linden Lab
by Pixeleen Mistral on 30/04/07 at 7:09 am
Metaverse residents ask LL to fix the game
by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk
In an attempt to entice game maker Linden Lab into fixing problems with Second Life, an open letter asking that long term problems with the virtual world be fixed before more new features are added has been signed by over 600 players and virtual world entrepreneurs.
The open letter comes in response to both stability problems with the world and Linden Lab’s retreat from contact with their customers – the world’s residents. This retreat has been in progress for some time as the Lab has removed resident forums, and most direct customer contact – apparently in an attempt to cut support costs.
The cost cutting measures and focus on new features at the expense of stability may exact a toll as Cristiano Midnight points out, “it is much easier to retain customers when things work as promised”.
However, the social network effect – or wanting to hang with your friends – tends to blunt criticism of the Linden’s product, and those with significant investments in the game are not likely to migrate out of Second Life in a hurry. This platform stickiness may be what the Linden game gods depend on as they continue to rework their world despite the protests from its residents. It should be clear to all that Second Life is a never ending beta test – but it is significant that residents are organizing large scale protests of the way in which the beta test is being conducted.
Here is the text of the open letter:
In the past eighteen months, Second Life has expanded, growing from a small community of early adopters to a platform supporting millions of users. Linden Lab has created a world that inspires a deep level of passion in its users and provides unprecedented opportunities to share creatively, socially, and financially.
With explosive levels of growth often come unexpected problems. In keeping with your company’s policy and rich history of resident involvement, we the undersigned would like to take this opportunity to address some concerns that we feel have gone unanswered for too long.
There are some consistent, ongoing problems that are getting worse under heavy load, not better, and are not simply irritants but problems that are causing financial loss in some cases, which is unacceptable. Here is a brief list of the main concerns:
* Inventory loss – this is a devastating problem that is worsening. We have no ability to protect our own inventories through backups, and are trusting you to protect that data. This is the highest priority. Sensible inventory limits (on non-verified accounts only), combined with better management tools and ways to protect our inventory ourselves would help to mitigate the problem as well. Regardless, this cannot continue – we will not accept financial loss as a feature of Second Life. It is your responsibility as service provider to ensure our data is not lost, and you are failing us.
* Problems with Find and Friends List – we continue to see search outages on a far too regular basis. It is bad enough trying to get anywhere without being able to use search, but many users are also paying money for classified ads. Our friends lists just do not work reliably any longer, after years without an issue with them. If America Online/MSN/Yahoo can provide presence information for hundreds of millions of users, surely there is a way to make our friends lists work again.
* Grid stability and performance – teleports fail quite regularly, especially under heavy load. Attachments end up in places they did not start out in, and sim performance varies wildly. None of this makes for a very pleasant experience for users. Long promised improvement to physics and scripting would help dramatically to reduce these problems, but there are a lot of other scalability issues as well. It often feels like the grid is coming apart at the seams. The promised use of limiting logins of non-verified accounts during peak load has been severely lacking. This would be an effective interim solution to load issues, but Linden Lab seems unwilling to use it.
* Build tool problems – the importance of build tools that actually work as promised cannot be overstated enough – we rely on them to create content. Prim drift, disappearing prims, imprecise placement, problems with linking and other issues with the tools need to be addressed. Too much time is being spent trying to work around the problems.
* Transaction problems – inventory deliveries are failing with an alarming (and annoying) frequency, leaving merchants with the burden of replacing missing content and having to try to confim the transaction in the first place. We trust that our L$ balances are accurate, but given recent problems, that is a cause for concern as well, and one we place our full trust in you to ensure its accuracy.
We remain fully supportive of Second Life and are more than willing to continue doing our part to help, but our confidence is steadily being eroded due to a general lack of communication and the apparent failure to successfully address the many issues detailed above. What we are asking for is that these problems are addressed immediately, ahead of new features, and that we are able to see tangible improvements. We accept that this will not happen overnight but it also cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely either.
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.
Sincerely,
Sterling Whitcroft
Apr 30th, 2007
where do I go to sign?
Sterling Whitcroft
Apr 30th, 2007
DOH! its in the first line of the article! LOL
http://www.projectopenletter.com/
marilyn murphy
Apr 30th, 2007
i pray this is a significant development. i hope LL pays attention. i hope that if they do ignore this, the corporations do not.
Lordfly Digeridoo
Apr 30th, 2007
Thanks for posting this on the Herald. I was wondering if you guys were going to pick up on it.
Prokofy Neva
Apr 30th, 2007
I couldn’t possibly sign this latest offering from the corporativist privileged class of Second Life (which I call the FIC)! It’s completely untenable and I’m surprised at some of the cheerleaders of it like Tony Walsh, given that this letter urges further loss of rights and privileges for other classes, like the unverifieds. I could never call for a cap on inventory of the unverifieds, who don’t make up most inventory holdings in SL, when it fact it’s the top content-creators and top verified consumers who do. I could never call for a cap on non-verified log-ins when they don’t even log-on, and a cap on them prevents new growth of people who eventually become consumers and even verified customers.
Surely some of the people who have signed this letter to vent their frustration didn’t also mean to adopt the corporativist plank of the Platformistas: end verifieds or severely cap their rights and privileges, so that they cannot teleport, hold inventory, or sell goods.
In fact, if the Lidnens were now to engage in a round of ceasing and rolling back this FIC-sponsored idea of having “hide my status on line” and simply ending that feature, it would do more to stop lag, data base, and presence problems than many other things these privileged content-makers promote in Second Life like restricting the unverifieds. Think about *that*.
I also find the list of issues, while issues many of us share, like inventory loss, not to be representative of the issues most people share in Second Life. To be sure, the most vocal and most privileged now sound off about them in this limousine-liberals’ protest, but the issue of lag, FPS, avatar room, insufficient prims, and mainly jobs are more important issues for many people.
It’s also incorrect to say, in the preamble to this piece, that this particular corporativist class in SL, the most privileged in many ways, are now protesting that new features are coming at the expense of stability. They most certainly are not. They are the ones who embrace every new feature that offers them more variety for their content-making, whether open-sourcing the client, which has not yet led to further stability, but threatened it further, to adding flexi prims or camera features or now these sculpted prims. They’ve constantly told us that the Lindens have to innovate and keep adding stuff like this for them as content creators to succeed or they will lose out to their competition. They’ve never said, hey, could we have even 90 days of nothing new, just fixing the bugs, that’s something the ordinary non-content-creator urges.
What’s also insupportable about this letter is the lack of a list of demands to Linden Land that would help remedy some of these problems, other than the indefensible and elitist notion of capping unverified inventory or log-ons.
A more sound approach is to make demands that would help mitigate some of these conditions without banging on the growing end of SL, the unverifieds class.
o re-opening the forums so that important customer feedback can be made without having to resort to dramatic open letters
o a seat on the board representing tier-payers so that tier-payers form part of the decision-making process of LL on issues like these raised in the letter
o a moratorium on new features on all hands on deck are put to fixing existing severe performance problems
o reconsideration of the “hide me online” feature which may simply be too expensive and unworkable an item
o an “inventory loss” page with a list of remedies that must be tried first (clear cache, disaggregate Lost and Found, etc.) and a template for filing effective complaints that have effective review, just like the island rollback and sim down pages.
o 24/7 help desk inworld staffed by Lindens live — they should be taking the lead in eating their dogfood and using this platform in the way they imagine other companies should be utilizing it. The helpdesk could even offer paid levels after a certain time limit or for more protracted problems.
In short, once again, the weekend warriors and limousine liberals have spoken, and while it’s always nice to see them stop prostrating themselves before LL and each other in their own feted class for a brief time, we would find them more authentic when they begin to challenge not only the company on a few issues, but the company’s privileging of them at the expense of other classes they don’t like.
Further discussion on my blog:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/04/originally_i_co.html
Artemis Fate
Apr 30th, 2007
Well, if Prokofy hates it, it MUST be beneficial and potentially workable.
I’d sign that, I do agree, while god knows I LOVE shiny, and having new features like flexi and dynamic reflections makes me squeal with joy, that having stability is the most important thing, without that those other features are just about useless.
marilyn murphy
Apr 30th, 2007
i sign because, i logged in last night. i could not fly up to my personal space, i sort of rose 4 ft in the air and hung there, my hair finally appeared tho. my friends list was empty. i re logged, empty friends list, still there. can’t get to my room, yup. so i sign the letter, not because i promote whatever the issue prok has with the writers, but because i want this crap fixed.
Nacon
Apr 30th, 2007
All the thing in their list has to do with lag and stress performance on their database…. It’s not like they didn’t know about it. They already spend more money than you had to put up with their servers. Geez… try waiting till they got Mono back-end support working on their servers. Not forget to mention that they are trying to do multi-treading, which tend to have a lot of bug to begin with. Try being patient. Ever notice that all other old bugs got fixed?
Onder Skall
Apr 30th, 2007
Prok: true, but what did *we* do? We complained, we wrote articles, there were even those awesome view-from-the-map signs… but did we ever actually give people a plan of attack? Did we ever give people something to do?
I’m not crazy about the whole “obviously it’s all the newbs faults so squish them to make it all better” add-ins in the open letter either, and this is far from a definitive “top 5″ list by any standards (I’m certain Christiano is looking at the list now and thinking of things he would change – it seems a bit rushed)… but I LOVE the fact that we’re at least doing something that will **possibly** get the Linden Lab folk to snap out of it and just fix the damned thing. This is the best “FIX SL” movement we’ve seen, and it’s not like we’re ever going to get an item-by-item response anyhow.
Bottom line: we’ve been complaining, but they’re doing something. All nit-picking aside, kudos to them. If we don’t like it, we have to start a “FIX SL” group and give people a way of bringing the issues to the Lindens that’s as compelling.
shockwave yareach
Apr 30th, 2007
I disagree, Prok.
I am not one of the “inner circle” or anything of that nature. I’m not (yet) part of the super secret developers cabal, may never be in said group, and LL could lose my money and not bat an eye.
I’m also one of my island’s three developers, and I teach newbies the ropes whenever I come across someone needing help. I teach scripting and building to anyone who wants me to, in or out of my circles.
But just as I have limited time to spend doing so, and limited patience with people who don’t really want to learn, so also does SL have limited resources. And those resources should go to the people who pay the bills, plain and simple. While sure, one could say that empty airplane seats should be handed out for free, the fact is that the extra weight would cost the airline more in fuel than if the seats just stayed empty. So why would any airline do that? Simple – they don’t. And neither should SL. If you don’t pay, you get no service. Simple as that.
And who knows? Maybe requiring either account verification or a 20$ new account charge would end the griefer’s revolving doors, making SL a more stable and pleasant experience for all.
Corporate priveleged class… geez, you interpolate an awful lot, just by looking at a bunch of user names. Not everyone who can build or script and wants to see some improvements in SL is a shill for some company, you know.
Boss Melnitz
Apr 30th, 2007
Prok…you make some valid points, although I completely disagree with the negative and mean spirited way in which you categorize the people who initiated the letter. Perhaps you could try working with someone, instead of always being the “negative nancy” with the bullhorn. Your superhuman ability to ALWAYS find some minutiae to nit-pick makes you look like a blow-hard, and people simply tune you out. And this means that your message never gets across. I would go so far as to say that the astute eye you have for pinpointing issues and often times being dead on target is completely negated by your appalling lack of social skills and decorum.
The major issue here is one that you pointed out on your blog: There is absolutely no way to validate the signatures on the letter. And while, in my opinion, the letter makes excellent points and is strongly worded enough for the Lindens to stand up and take notice, it’s not worth the pixels it’s printed on because no one knows if the undersigned are actually who they say they are (my signature is real, for the record). As you pointed out, your signature appears there, yet you did not sign it. Without some form of validation, the Lindens will ignore this letter as they do every other call to action by their user base, and this effort will be sunk before it gets out of the harbor.
One of the issues I think you’re getting wrong is the inventory. Both here and on your blog you make reference to people needing to go through a list of “fixes” on their own to try and remedy the problem. While that may be a good stop-gap solution, bottom line is that inventory should work. Always. Period. The Lindens have made a big deal about IP rights, and a selling point of the Linden economy is that you “own” your creations. If your inventory can and will go ‘blip’ at any moment, you don’t own diddly-poo. And to your point that the Lindens already have a backup system in place call the central asset server, that thing isn’t worth the hamster carcasses it’s made of. The creators of the letter have it absolutely right, in my opinion: Inventory loss is NOT a feature.
marilyn murphy
Apr 30th, 2007
well said onder. if u can’t agree with the letter, and think you can do better, then do so, please.
as to a call for patience. hrmmm. i was being told to be patient in 03. how patient am i supposed to be?
Doc Nielsen
Apr 30th, 2007
I read the signature list.
Well, well, well… So, a few of you bastards and bitches finally grew a pair and decided that the advantages of toadying to Philip & Co were being outweighed by the coming true of what I tried to warn you all, and Linden Lab, was going to happen?
Those of you who were SO kind to me – you got what you deserve. I hope you choke on it.
The rest of you? Sorry people – WAY too late. Things have gone too far from what I’ve heard and seen recently. Too bad. It could have been so good.
I hope another ship appears to rescue you before this one finally sinks.
Cocoanut Koala
Apr 30th, 2007
I feel your pain, Doc, always did, since I got the same pain, and still do. And I will never forget this treatment, either – couldn’t if I tried. “Choke on it” is pretty much my response, too, to those who have done this.
But I did sign the letter.
coco
Cocoanut Koala
Apr 30th, 2007
P.S. I don’t think I stressed that enough. Let me say it again. CHOKE ON IT.
Cristiano Midnight
Apr 30th, 2007
Pixeleen:
Thank you for the support, and for the coverage, it is greatly appreciated.
Prokofy:
How kind of you to post an open letter that i can’t respond directly to, though actually my response mirror’s Cocoanut’s eloquent “CHOKE ON IT”. I think Negative Nancy will be your new name from now on, I love that – it sums you up perfectly. I love how you try to minimize the importance of people suffering financial loss through losing inventory. I am getting several requests a week now from users who have lost items and need to replace them, and cannot get any remedy from Linden Lab. It isn’t the content creators, who can generally replace their own items. It is the average user who is buying money of the Lindex to satisfy a shopping addiction in SL, then loses their stuff. This is happening constantly. Why should they have to rebuy the stuff they’ve lost? Your post is ridiculous – you blame everyone on someone else, and pretend the rest of it isn’t happening. Yet god forbid a grid problem causes people to move out of your vaunted rental business, then you whine like a stuffed pig. Is your financial loss more important than the average user? I love how you try to to claim that the grid actually working somehow only benefits the FIC. Regardless, your negativity always provides a good sign that something is working as planned. Thank you again for using the word hella, it never ceases to make me laugh.
Doc Nielsen:
All you ever did was bitch in the forums – there was never anything constructive about what you had to say – it was always how stupid LL was, how everthing sucked, and how you knew so much better than everyone else. Yeah, that’s effective – and about as mature as now claiming how you told us all so.
Doc Nielsen
Apr 30th, 2007
I’m not CLAIMING I told you all so Cris – I DID tell you all so. Many times. Too many times maybe…
I predicted exactly this mess if Linden Lab didn’t improve QC, if they didn’t fix outstanding bugs, if they didn’t stop piling on ever more new shiny that either didn’t work, or broke a couple of existing functions.
And it wasn’t just me. There were plenty of others. Many now gone. Either driven out, or given up in despair.
What we were trying to do was EXACTLY what you and your influential friends have finally been driven to do – whip up awareness that the path Linden Lab was, and still is, fixed on was a path to disaster, and try and get the same message through to Linden Lab.
Ok, you and I fell out, it was inevitable. No way was I getting into the tent to piss out, so I stayed outside and got pissed on.
As I said to you earlier, it’s all water under the bridge now. In essence we are, regardless of our mutual dislike, on the same side now. So just read on a bit. I promise it’s worth it.
If you simply send that letter to Philip it’ll wind up in the Enron filing cabinet before you know it.
Just for once, please, listen – that letter needs to be CC’d to the board of directors. You must realise Philip & Co just bullshit them, they have very little real idea of the state of SL from our perspective. Give them the truth. Let THEM put pressure on Philip & Co for you.
If you don’t, the best you can expect is a portion of Philip’s charm, that boyish grin, a slap on the back and a helping of meaningless platitudes.
At worst you queer your pitch with Philip for good and gain nothing.
Involve the directors and there’s an outside chance you may achieve something.
Please Cris – consider that?
And for what it’s worth – good luck.
Onder Skall
Apr 30th, 2007
Cristiano – as long as you’re reading the thread here… think there might be a future iteration that emphasises grid stability a bit more? It’s just… well… WEIRD having it as a single item among many, and having it not even the FIRST item. That just seemed like an odd decision and I didn’t really get it.
You have to sympathize just a bit with Prokofy here. After all, you listed a LOT of opinions and asked us to sign off on the ENTIRE thing. For those who believe in saying what they mean and meaning what they say it’s not so easy to just pop your name up there.
Me, I just figure they’re not listening close enough to really get the specifics anyhow.
Prokofy Neva
Apr 30th, 2007
Onder,
I don’t know about you, if you mean by “we,” the Herald, it’s not the job of the news media to offer solutions, it’s the job of the society to offer them, and the news media to uncover the problems critically and report on the solutions. I’m not for ascribing the media any sort of social role at all.
As for me on my blog, I’ve had no shortage of solutions, from asking for a collective tier-payers’ seat on the board to having more inworld community meetings with key constituencies with panel discussions to having inworld 24/7 real help desks, even for money.
Boss, I appreciate your sentiments, but I don’t perform to some specifications that maximize my effectiveness by someone’s lights. People will disagree whether I’m effective or not, but I simply speak out, by the light of my conscience, as best I can. I think it’s very important to whack very hard at people who try to influence the feature set (as this bunch is doing again now, burying a decided anti-verifieds campaign within a more generic protest, giving the Lindens an easy out). Why whack hard? Because with their collective media control, on the AOL-sponsored blog, the Lindens’ own sponsored blog and forums, Hamlet, the bourgeois corporate media like Reuters, etc. — they have a voice all out of proportion to their actual numbers and actual tier payment and productivity in SL.
If my style of making critiques cancels out my valid points, then either they aren’t valid, or those who are reacting to the style perhaps have found a shoe that fits. It’s a very entrenched, nasty, brutal class of people we are dealing with here, and I think nothing but the most harsh critique will do on them. If somebody else wants to go gentle and cooperative, good luck!
Cristiano, I sure do minimize the importance of a tiny handful of whiney content-creating prima donnas losing inventory. I have yet to hear a coherent story of how moo (and for that matter, Forseti) lost their inventory — there are indications in the podcast that this isn’t an ordinary inventory loss. And it’s THAT which got a lot of you all salivating and desiring to play weekend liberal hippie and go out with your protest banners.
The problems that my tenants face are things like sims being down and not rezzing stuff, the inability to teleport, severe lag. Inventory loss is not a common complaint, as important as it is. People come and go out of my rentals all the time for all sorts of reasons. I’ve long since learned to try to read these tea leaves in all kinds of ways, but try to address any concerns I can fix, and hope for the best on ones I can’t fix. Each time SL stops working in a major way, I get dozens of people who refund who think “Prokofy’s land is laggy and not working” and are surprised to learn when they move to their new rental that “all of SL is laggy and not working” and then sometimes come back. People develop all kinds of folk wisdom about this. Some people swear by islands as being non-laggy and less crashy. Others swear by mainland as being non-laggy and less crashy but all of SL is in a bad way.
Furthermore, I have never minimized financial loss, that’s just a tendentious reading of what I said.
I still don’t see a single bit of awareness dawning on your halo-surrounded brain, Cristiano, that your collective demand for things like p2p and especially “hide my status online” is what has given a lot more database problems. We’re really all now dying for the sins of “hide my status online”, courtesy of Flipper. There’s probably no turning back on that, but it’s a huge problem and a dbase suck.
Your collective claim to wish to want stability over new features would have a lot more credibility if your blogs and forums weren’t filled with you all giddily nattering on about sculpted prims and Voice.
Basically, Cristiano did all his organizing for this right inside SC, not even stirring his electronic stumps to come inworld and hold a public meeting, or get some consensus on the priorities. That’s too much hard work. He capitalized on the fact that moo had lost her inventory and that he was feeling whiney about something on his own land to gin this up.
Everybody, at some point or another, can say any of these issues Cristiano raises have effected them. But the priorities aren’t straight; the blame is not properly apportioned (the demand for Hollywood features rests with the FIC as much as anybody) and the remedies not stated.
I’m with Doc on this much — “growing a pair” is what you all desperately need to do.
As for CC’ing the directors, that’s perhaps made unnecessary once Reuters covers this, but now that these feted and cossetted fanboyz have gotten some attention to their tantrum, let’s see what their positive proposals are for changing things?
Are they really willing to KEEP LOBBYING the Lindens to stop Voice?
Are they really willing to FOREGO something like “hide me online”?
Are they really willing THEMSELVES to cap their inventory or pay tier on it?
Cristiano Midnight
Apr 30th, 2007
Doc Nielsen:
I never had anything personally against you, I just never found telling people you think they are idiots to be a particularly positive way to get them to cooperate with you and bring about change.
As far as the board of directors, if anyone happens to have a list of contacts, I will send it to others beyond LL that are involved.
Onder:
With all due respect, Prokofy gets no sympathy. She is just doing what she always does – being as contrary as possible, blaming everything on people she hates, and criticizing – it is all that she knows how to do. Those who can’t criticize.
The grid stability issues are addressed in the letter – actually almost all of the items listed ultimately come down to grid stability problems – asset server problems, teleporting, attachments, etc. It seemed more important to address the fact that it is failing under the heavy load – when you have high levels of users, then it all starts to come undone.
Obviously, one letter could not encompass the wishes and agendas of all involved. The letter was stripped down to the bare essentials. Some people have expressed concerns about inventory caps and login restrictions during heavy loads as being why they were uncomfortable signing. Believe me, I understand – but it was also important to bring some interim solutions to the table instead of just demanding “FIX THIS!”. Depending on the response from Linden Lab, future responses to them can encompass additional issues. This is about a starting point. Thank you for your thoughts.
Prokofy Neva
Apr 30th, 2007
>With all due respect, Prokofy gets no sympathy. She is just doing what she always does – being as contrary as possible, blaming everything on people she hates, and criticizing – it is all that she knows how to do. Those who can’t criticize.
I’m not being contrary, as I gave this letter a serious read, and even thought at first, oh, this might be something we could all get behind despite our differences.
But to my dismay, I discovered that it had a huge streak of elitism and hatred toward the unverifieds, offering the removal of them as a solution to the problems that in fact are not caused by them.
Then I see the usual tendentious crap, with both moo and Cristiano ducking my pointed and correct drilling on the exact circumstances of her particular highly-publicized inventory loss, and trying to distract from my drilling by crying falsely that I care nothing about financial loss and inventory loss, which of course, is stupid as I have my own inventory loss, and deal with tenants’ inventory loss all the time. I’d just like to get an ACCURATE and REAL description of this problem, rather than see it through the haze of special machinima interests.
I also found that this letter had no awareness of the need for the chief consumption class, the FIC, to accept solutions that involve restraining their own entitlement-happy excesses, like not demanding new features or even rolling some back like “hide me online”.
Without any proposal of what this group is asking the Lindens to do, it’s left for LL and their board to grab at the concept of curbing verifieds as the only solution to make this particle feted constituency shut up. And that’s not a solution I think they can or should make.
Cristiano Midnight
Apr 30th, 2007
Prokofy,
I’m not ducking anything, just not paying attention to you, as you do not deserve the slightest courtesy of any reply.
Cristiano
Cristiano Midnight
Apr 30th, 2007
Doc Nielsen:
I just sent a copy to Mitch Kapor, I am off to track down the rest of the email addresses of the board members.
Cristiano Midnight
Apr 30th, 2007
Ok, email sent to all five board members individually.
Doc Nielsen
Apr 30th, 2007
Ok, so, now we await developments. Let’s hope they are in the resident’s interests. And thanks for giving my suggestion consideration Cris. I just hope it produces favourable results.
Prok – I appreciate your points, but let’s be realistic and give this a chance shall we? It might just be the jolt Philip & Co need to get them in touch with reality – OUR reality.
Just getting them to set aside this headlong drive for more and more gimmicks and gadgets, and spend their time sorting out the mountains of long outstanding bugs and issues we ALL share with SL would be a tremendous improvement.
I don’t care if we have to sit down with the devil himself to improve things, but improvement in the situation is what we all must have.
I think it’s called being pragmatic?
Let’s judge this effort by the results it produces shall we?
Allana Dion
Apr 30th, 2007
>”Basically, Cristiano did all his organizing for this right inside SC, not even stirring his electronic stumps to come inworld and hold a public meeting, or get some consensus on the priorities.”
Many of us have been to and even tried to hold public meetings in SL to deal with this and other issues. There is value in that when it can be accomplished without griefing, sim failures, borked group IMs, and crippling lag.
What happened here was simply another means was found because the above doesn’t work anymore. A project was considered, discussed, and implemented in a matter of days whereas otherwise people would have spent weeks trying desperately to meet in world with all it’s problems and scheduling conflicts.
As to getting a consensus on the priorities, or the content of the letter, that was done as well as could be expected. It simply isn’t possible to make a list of concerns that everyone will agree to. Some are going to disagree with one while agreeing to another and eventually settle on a compromise. People who may disagree with one or two or several points in the letter are still signing it because they agree with the basic premise.. that premise being to get the attention of a company which has chosen to put us all on mute.
>”But to my dismay, I discovered that it had a huge streak of elitism and hatred toward the unverifieds, offering the removal of them as a solution to the problems that in fact are not caused by them.”
Nowhere in the letter does it state that anyone wants to get rid of unverified (free) accounts. I don’t want to get rid of them. I just want to get what I’m paying for.
I wouldn’t try to speak for anyone else, but I personally feel that it is perfectly reasonable to have certain limits in the system based on price. It already does to a degree. You can only own land with a premium account. It’s not such a huge leap to say a premium account can have access to a larger inventory and a free account should limit their inventory appropriately.
That isn’t discrimating against “unverifieds” (I hate that term, there is nothing wrong with choosing to have a free account). It is simply limiting access to parts of the system based on whether or not a person wants or needs to pay for it.
I am currently using a free account and I’ve had a paid account in the past. It is only my partner who is the premium member. So by requesting these limits I am choosing to limit myself as well, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable.
[Disclaimer: My views do not represent those persons behind the Open Letter project nor anyone who has signed it. They are merely my own views.]
Gorean Furry
Apr 30th, 2007
THIS JUST IN. Prokofy Neva supports grid instability and inventory loss. You heard it here first folks! If that’s not supporting the terrorists, I dunno what is. Did you hear that?
Prokofy supports terrorism! Oh noes.
Nacon
Apr 30th, 2007
Well here’s an idea to actually grab their attention… use mega prim to cover the whole sim (if agreed with sim owner and land owners) in blue (for water as drowned sim) with yellow message “Fix SL” placed up in the sky. (no higher than 400m or it won’t be rendered on map) That would be a big movement to LL’s view.
Having a list of people name is not “powerful” since anyone can forge in a name, which is kinda dumb.
Start making more mega-prim signs in the sky. Otherwise… there isn’t really other way to “forge” in a sim image in the world map. I’m sure LL would take more notice than a list of name.
It seem to work when we had copybot, people forced to close their shops. That kind of action seem to work much faster than making a list of names, No?
Try to see if you can get Azureisland/Anshe Chung agree to cover all their sims in blue with the yellow message.
(Although, LL is ALREADY trying to improve their database and network, seem getting silly.)
mootykips
Apr 30th, 2007
I don’t see “over 600 players” as a very big number, but it’s currently at about 1000, and it should perhaps hit over nine thousand at the rate it’s going. Perhaps you should update the article, as it seems to be growing fast.
As for Prokofy, she’s using the old “i am the underdog, you are all in the corrupt inner core of corruption and money laundering” technique. “chief consumption class”? Why not just say the bourgeois? Are you seriously thinking this game is some sort of Marxist class struggle, Prok? You’re delusional.
But perhaps you have a point. The reason why your game sucks ass and has so many problems is because the developers are cashing out on your trading real money for fake money, as they are very well entitled to do. They play around with your economy to maximize their profits and screw you as many times as they want. If you truly believed this game was some sort of social experiment, a “metaverse”, an “Internet 3.0″, you’re wrong. This is a business. It’s a piece of pay-to-play software. Second Life is World of Warcraft in the future and with buildable objects and no quests. LL is entitled to make as much money as they want off you. The only way not to lose is not to play.
Don’t like it? Too bad. You can protest to quit but you cannot protest with nothing. Money is worth more to LL than a bunch of furry apologists whining about their grid going down and their precious objects being lost. That’s how the real world works. So the organizers of this letter had better say explicitly that the signers will stop investing or quit altogether, because that’s what it’s going to take if you want your game not to be a bug-ridden mess. Nacon’s idea won’t work because the developers are still ROLLING IN CASH whatever you do.
p.s.: Prok, learn to spell “fetid” plz.
Nacon
Apr 30th, 2007
“Nacon’s idea won’t work because the developers are still ROLLING IN CASH whatever you do.”
Uhh… you don’t seem to realize the idea yet. Let’s imagine this… everywhere on the map, you see a lot of blue sim with yellow message saying “Fix SL”… how’s that going to look good for Linden Labs when other business like… Honda for example… looking at SL, thinking they should run their business in world? Also, large companies that already in SL are going to notice that as well. They would just figure it’s a waste of time and leave.
That would hurt Linden Labs incomes, so think again, Mootykips.
mootykips
Apr 30th, 2007
I disagree. The average player won’t care enough to stop investing. You might ruin the corporate investment, but you’ll still have buying/selling/trading among regular users going as usual.
One Song
Apr 30th, 2007
I remember a long while back when I first joined Second Life there was a particular slogan I remember vividly:
“Your World. Your Imagination”.
That was something I thought was really attractive about what was being made in the virtual platform we call Second Life.
Years passed and then I realized that those words in that slogan were not much more than a marketing ploy holding very little truth in its content. You find similar slogans using the same type of psychological tactics belonging to most corporations. Unfortunately for us, it’s an industry wide spread accepted common marketing strategy.
I am really surprised people like Prokofy Neva and Cristiano Midnight are still hammering the same broken and bent nails to that plank of wood that Second Life has become for as long as they have. By now surely they must realize that the slogan above hold very little weight to it; and that needless to say doesn’t matter how much they will bitch Linden Lab will always do what they want anyway it’s their world not yours.
I got to admit I used to be guilty of the same crime I used to try and persuade them to operate differently. Occasionally on the odd issue I even succeeded. Not to turn this into personal bashing post but I have to make a few personal statements.
Prokofy Neva, as I pointed out to you in the past, words are not the cure to all problems despite how much you and a lot of us wish it were true. If that really was the case we wouldn’t have wars, pub fights, murders, etc… This much surely should be obvious to anyone. You are wasting your time; it’s sad and tedious reading all the negative junk you write. How about for once you write something positive about Second Life.
Cristiano Midnight, I must admit I never liked you and I still don’t. Everything you do always seem to have 1 clear purpose: that is the evil manifestation of your flawed ideology and propagation of your name onto anywhere anyone care to read. You are just another bad politician and I find really hard to believe that anyone really gives shit about what you have to say. I mean this truly.
Instead of bitching endlessly and pointlessly, let’s be frank with ourselves and admit that it’s their toy, their vision, their world, their imagination when it comes to anything of global importance in their platform. Let that be political, social, moral, or platform developing issues and priorities they will always have the ultimate and final say.
Conclusion:
If you don’t like you don’t have to play/use it … no one is forcing you to. And for those who have any common sense, continue to enjoy what they are providing us with. Second Life is a very unique service it may have its flaws and controversies but it’s still filled with fun and creativity. That is unlike all the other MMORPGs in the gaming industry.
Cocoanut Koala
Apr 30th, 2007
Well, Onesong, I think people just want it to WORK.
coco
Prokofy Neva
Apr 30th, 2007
>What happened here was simply another means was found because the above doesn’t work anymore. A project was considered, discussed, and implemented in a matter of days whereas otherwise people would have spent weeks trying desperately to meet in world with all it’s problems and scheduling conflicts.
This is just bullshit. It’s completely hysterical exaggeration. On Saturday with a mere hour’s notice or so, with the groups not working even, I got 30 people from all over to come and discuss sign griefing and extortion. It’s just plain laziness not to hold meetings in world. You always accomplish at least something by merely posting the meeting so some people merely see there’s an issue and contact you later.
If Second Life doesn’t work well enough for you to use it, then perhaps you should just stay on SC and trade pictures of kitties and giant penises, since that gives you more rewarding socializing than SL anyway.
The entire thrust of this letter is about getting rid of verifieds, or at least capping and restricting them. To try to pretend otherwise is to be tendentious and actually brain dead, as the text of the letter says:
“Sensible inventory limits (on non-verified accounts only), combined with better management tools and ways to protect our inventory ourselves would help to mitigate the problem as well.”
“The promised use of limiting logins of non-verified accounts during peak load has been severely lacking. This would be an effective interim solution to load issues, but Linden Lab seems unwilling to use it.”
Two anti-unverified clauses to this letter, giving the only solid proposals to the Lindens one can extract from this manifesto. It’s wrong.
One Song, I appreciate your points, but they aren’t original or very wise, really. The old haughty MMORPG gamerz board “If you don’t like it, leave” is no more bright than somebody screaming about America, “Love it or leave it!”. Of course you don’t leave your homeland, and you fight to make it better. Of course you don’t pull up stakes in a place you are invested in, you fight to the end.
I don’t believe the job of the press or blogs is to be “positive” about Second Life, although I’ve had my share of “fun” and “positive” pieces. LL has its PR department and agency for that, it doesn’t need me. It also has the legion of paid-for blogs and papers to do that.
I’m going to hope that people understand there is a word in the English language called “feted” along with another word “fetid” but that may be too much to expect out of today’s educational system.
Cristiano Midnight
Apr 30th, 2007
One Song:
It’s ok – the feeling is more than mutual – I always found you to be one of the most repugnant pieces of garbage I’ve ever had the displeasure of encountering online. Good riddance. You contributed absolutely nothing to Second Life – at least I have made an effort, and also provide something that people enjoy using. You provided prostitution, scamming, griefing, and were an open supporter of racist idiots like Death Grace (while claiming not to be a racist yourself because you are mixed). I can safely say I don’t give a flying fuck what you think of me – anything is high praise coming from you. Garbage in, garbage out.
Cristiano Midnight
Apr 30th, 2007
Yay Prokofy broke the comments again.
Cristiano Midnight
Apr 30th, 2007
Prokofy,
Expecting unverified accounts to have limitations on them versus paying accounts is not preposterous – in fact, it is common place in nearly every environment to have different levels of service and features for free vs. subscription. One of the incentives of being a paying customer is to receive perks that you don’t get for free – more space, more features, whatever. Allowing paying customers access to a service they are paying for ahead of those who are using it for free is also quite common, and there is nothing wrong with it. You can try to paint this as some kind of classist warfare, as you always do, but that is simply not the case. Keep on banging that drum though. You really do have the midas touch when it comes to inadvertantly helping the cause of others you are rallying against.
Rugal
May 1st, 2007
How about the big problem of people not even being able to LOGIN to the game that keeps climbing higher and higher?
1.14 was an utter disaster. With that new viewer many could not even get to a login screen, let alone actually log in. Was it fixed?
No.
Instead, they went around in a circle, ignored the damn thing, and went straight on to 1.15 KNOWING similar issues would occur because “shock and wonders”…they were never fixed before. Meanwhile, LL continues to charge those with paying accounts cash for a game that in fact, they cannot play. (In essence, robbery) Oh, but there is support, right?
99.999% of the time, trying to send a support ticket on that issue results in an error that closes the window, and sends no ticket. Posting it on their support board, despite a few attempts at this by multiple people….
….this has been ignored.
What amazes me to no ends is, that people will go ape if a person fires prims at them, or lags up a sim, but when others are basically being cheated here because 1) they can’t get on the game…and 2) they are still being charged for it but can’t get support because it *doesn’t work*…
….they are met with silence, no one cares.
The more people are silent, the more those in control see what they can get away with. Get the picture? Raise an issue, NOW.
Prokofy Neva
May 1st, 2007
Cristiano,
>Expecting unverified accounts to have limitations on them versus paying accounts is not preposterous – in fact, it is common place in nearly every environment to have different levels of service and features for free vs. subscription.
All games have at least a trial account. And a world like this that has such a steep learning curve and this open-ended a nature simply has to accommodate the need for try-mes and free acounts. The Lindens have shown over and over again that they’re not willing to end free accounts or unverified accounts. That is, perhaps they will inch toward verifying them a bit more with real emails or something but that’s still not a significant curb.
Your notion that everyone has to have a credit card identity to be in SL is corporativist and elitist.
>One of the incentives of being a paying customer is to receive perks that you don’t get for free – more space, more features, whatever.
Then…make it be about more space and more features, not by capping and restricting others from the basic set. And paying accounts get a 512 m2 free tier level, and $300 a week in stipend. They could get more, but that’s not the worse thing to be getting as a package of more perks than the free accounts.
>Allowing paying customers access to a service they are paying for ahead of those who are using it for free is also quite common, and there is nothing wrong with it.
Well, we’re always being told this is “the Internet” and “like the Web” and all the rest. NOT like a game. In WoW, I might have to wait in a queue to log on to a busy shard, let’s say. In the Sims Online we used to have to wait for log-ons. But we don’t do that on Yahoo Groups, or MySpace or a thousand other things. Granted, this is a 3-D streaming video world. Still, I don’t queue up to use CNN and its streaming videos, either, come to think of it. I don’t think log-on restrictions are rational, given that it stops new growth cold.
>You can try to paint this as some kind of classist warfare, as you always do, but that is simply not the case. Keep on banging that drum though. You really do have the midas touch when it comes to inadvertantly helping the cause of others you are rallying against.
If the cause resonates with people, if it is just, it will grow. If it isn’t. it won’t. I think you’re a cynical and manipulative asshole who just likes to seize on causes now and then to get attention to yourself and you have no follow-through or willingness to put up with the downside of being a dissident the other 50 weeks of the year.
I wonder what could be considered an effective number of signatures to reach. 10,000? 3,000? 100,000?
In any event, the only “ask” to the Lab here is to end or restrict verifieds. I find that despicable because it caps growth and convenience, it goes against a stated policy that LL has said repeatedly they won’t change, so it dooms a social movement to failure in advance, making the society appear weak.
I think an open call to stop Voice and refuse to accept any more new features, backed by massive log-on boycotts, refusals of businesses to log-on, might really work. But that’s the sort of thing a supine limousine liberal like yourself is afraid to call for, as you can see from your sniveling to CNET.
avenging avatar
May 1st, 2007
An Open Comment on an Open Letter
Theres this open letter to LL making the rounds.
I share the sentiments – just the other day i wanted to smash my keyboard due to the frustration [scroll down a few posts] – LL needs to be more transparent with details of whats going on, …
reeneebob Birmingham
May 1st, 2007
Leave it to Prok to make a good thing something bad.
I’m not a content creator, I’ve had my inventory go belly up. Friends have as well. Not a FIC (as you so pompously spew ad nauseum) but I would love to hear you spout fucking garbage about how my lost money isn’t important.
Sounds like Prok is jealous that others are getting the attention she feels she deserves.
You know, we had a discussion about you and the Rolling Stone article on a board that has NOTHING to do with SL, and the consensus? “She sounds like a bitter old hag who is still angry she wasn’t one of the cool kids”. Coming from people who don’t know you? I find that scarily right on the money.
Cristiano Midnight
May 1st, 2007
Prokofy,
Can you ever just debate something without attacking people or labelling them? No one fits into all the narrow little boxes you try to put them in as part of your generic repetitive criticisms. A major difference between you and I is that I don’t imagine myself to be a dissident or a freedom fighter, the way you laughably paint yourself. I am simply doing something that I felt was the right thing to do. In your paranoid, cancerous world, everyone has some ulterior motive. what would we ever do without you telling us what we are really up to?
As far as the “only ask” being about limiting unverifieds, that is your ridiculous and false spin on it. We have clearly asked for the problems outlined to be addressed immaediately, ahead of new features (yes voice chat and sculpted prims need to be back burnered indefinitely,). We have asked for open communication from LL on the status of these issues, something that has been severely lacking, and for tangible milestones as to these issues being resolved.
Carry on Negative Nancy.
Cristiano Midnight
May 1st, 2007
BTW, it has already gotten an initial response from LL:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/04/30/project-open-letter/
Io Zeno
May 1st, 2007
Anyone who wants to know exactly how the nefarious corporativist plot behind Project Open Letter came about can read it all right here, from conception to final product. Come to your own conclusions:
http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showthread.php?t=11294
Io, who is hardly the elite of anything.
Prokofy Neva
May 1st, 2007
>Can you ever just debate something without attacking people or labelling them? No one fits into all the narrow little boxes you try to put them in as part of your generic repetitive criticisms. A major difference between you and I is that I don’t imagine myself to be a dissident or a freedom fighter, the way you laughably paint yourself. I am simply doing something that I felt was the right thing to do. In your paranoid, cancerous world, everyone has some ulterior motive. what would we ever do without you telling us what we are really up to?
No, not in any debate in which I take part with the Toxic Twenty, no. Because in fact you are what make the world cancerous with your refusal to cease not only the Big Lies that you perpetrate about your critics like me, but also your unseemly hold on power and the economy.
If you are the sincere, good, and decent types you imagine, you wouldn’t all be cackling and gleefully plotting to grief me through FlipperPA’s buying a plot of land in Ravenglass. Juvenile stuff, surely, and something that you preside on and clap along even if you don’t physically appear in the thread. The day that you kids can grow up and stop obsessing about me and getting involved in some actual positive creation is the day that in fact your own lives will be happier, not only the rest of SL’s.
And no, you never do things because “they’re the right thing to do” or you’d be doing a lot more right things, Cristiano. You are a vain, posturing creature looking for attention and glory, and you do things to maximize your profile and your reputation, and also your class economic hold over the economy. It’s impossible to take a single thing you say as sincere, given your long and dishonourable track record behaving in terribly bad faith, on the old LL forums, on your own forums, and any other place you appear, doing completely despicable things like minimizing the attacks on me from griefers even calling my home, as you did on Second Cast, to harping endlessly on false equivalencies like my innocent mistake about someone’s RL gender, which was hardly harm done to them, and the constant clubbing to death I face about my RL information, and have faced for ages ever since sluniverse.com got into the act.
The “ask” and the “solution” comes out barkingly clear: get rid of verifieds.
And the answer you have is yet another ominous sign of how bad things are.
I’m reminded of a task I’d put aside and shouldn’t have — the Lindens are replicating this awful concept of “voting only yes” and “having no no vote” in this new JIRA. Rob quickly deflected my vote to have a no vote, claiming it was a feature that had to be requested especially from the makers of JIRA. And imagine, I go to those people, and they are just as sectarian and wacky and wierd as the Lindens, and tell me they can’t make a no vote, unless I join their cult and post proposals that collect “yes” votes for there to be a “no” function (!!!). This stuff is deadly, and I await the awakening and awareness of many bright and intelligent people out there to this cultic stuff that the Lindens are mind-meming now around the budding Metaverse.
If voice and sculptured prims are to be “back-burnered” then I fully espect all you feted ones to start really consistently protesting about this, and not browbeating people who have spoken up against these features. In fact, it’s always been a hallmark of the fanboyz’ approach to these issues to sneer at anyone claiming that new features have to wait, telling them that LL has to maintain a competitive edge, they’re a business, they have their own interests, blah blah blah.
>Leave it to Prok to make a good thing something bad.
I can hardly make a “good thing bad” if it is good. I’m criticizing an open letter which I think is poorly written, badly organized, and not effective. That’s my right. If it works to make the Lindens right Yet Another Blog about how they have JIRA and office hours, wow…that’s progress *cough*.
>I’m not a content creator, I’ve had my inventory go belly up. Friends have as well. Not a FIC (as you so pompously spew ad nauseum) but I would love to hear you spout fucking garbage about how my lost money isn’t important.
Because it’s not? Because it’s not the norm? Because most people don’t have lost inventory? Because Lindens work overtime getting it back, even when it is lost in a tiny minority of cases? Because moo Money, who started this whole fandago, got most of her inventory back (something I found out by pestering her for answers on my blog).
So…um…bite me?
>Sounds like Prok is jealous that others are getting the attention she feels she deserves.
Hardly. I get way more than my share of attention, and I get it with substantive comments. Whether I’m effective or not is for others to judge, but I feel that I have made my mark and that the issues I’ve raised just wouldn’t have gotten raised unless I was willing to go out on a limb as I have. I do this all the time, however, consistently, and I follow up, and I don’t just tool around in my liberal limousine on weekends.
>You know, we had a discussion about you and the Rolling Stone article on a board that has NOTHING to do with SL, and the consensus? “She sounds like a bitter old hag who is still angry she wasn’t one of the cool kids”. Coming from people who don’t know you? I find that scarily right on the money.
So? I’m hardly a bitter old hag. That’s evidently something that people are jealous ascribe to me? And you cannot always affect the way you are portrayed in the media. It seems to me that what emerges from the Rolling Stone piece is that there is a signifant challenge to Philip Linden’s cult. That can’t help but be a good thing. If others can be more successful at doing this, let them?
Needing to be “one of the cool kids” isn’t a thing that I suffer from, thank God! It makes me free, and I’m all the happier for it.
Prokofy Neva
May 1st, 2007
BTW, this statement on the Blingsider is incorrect:
“This is the first time I remember Linden Lab responding to such a letter, although they have, in fairness responded to a number of major issues in times gone by but never to an open letter.”
The landowners who joined together to protest the Lindens’ handling of the telehub removal also had a letter to the Lindens, which in fact was open, despite constant attempts to spin it to the contrary on the hate-filled forums. They requested and got a meeting and several follow-up meetings with the Lindens, and eventually compensation for the telehub land.
Some of the main, generic planks of that open letter of June 2005 included things like publishing a policy regarding the behaviour of Lindens themselves, a kind of code of contact. So we got something like that finally, but it was unsatisfactory. The Lindens soon instituted the “community round table” process as a way of co-opting all the protest groups that got started back in June 2005 with the Metaverse Justice Watch. Then they fizzled out as Lindens found themselves suffering griefing and overflow at these events and being unable to institute normal Roberts Rules of Order type of procedures.
In general, the history of protest movements in SL is very interesting, because only one, the prim tax revolt, is accepted into the official revolutionary history and hagiography of the Lab, and everything else, whether Copybot or island price hike revolts are minimized and not acknowledged, including by the paid-for blogola around SL.
reeneebob Birmingham
May 1st, 2007
Oh yeah, the lindens work hard to get it back……..after ignoring calls and messages for 2 weeks.
I forgot, if it doesn’t happen to Prok it isn’t important and therefore doesn’t matter. You are such an obnoxious holier than thou prig.
reeneebob Birmingham
May 1st, 2007
Oh yeah, the lindens work hard to get it back……..after ignoring calls and messages for 2 weeks. WHile you walk around Ruthed wondering if all those things you paid real money for are gone. But it sure is nice to have voice chat and shiny!
I forgot, if it doesn’t happen to Prok it isn’t important and therefore doesn’t matter. You are such an obnoxious holier than thou prig.
reeneebob Birmingham
May 1st, 2007
Hey look, the blog must be LL too, it’s busted as well!
Cristiano Midnight
May 1st, 2007
Prokofy,
You are such an blazing idiot. How you can blame someone for something they did not take part in is beyond me, and patently absurd. I will gladly take responsibility for anything I say or do – but I’ll be damned if I let you attribute some bullshit to me by proxy. I didn’t participate in any thread about Flipper buying land near you, in you, on you, wherever the hell it is. I could give a care, honestly. Talk about juvenile. As to me needing to stop obsessing – um, Prokofy, which one of us is writing blog entries about various people ad nauseum – it’s you old girl. You also could not run here fast enough to type up a response and direct the unitiated to your blog. As to the rest of what you had to say, it’s just your typical bleating – nothing new there to respond to. Thanks, this clusterfuck managed to make me tired enough to go to sleep.
Cristiano