Letter to the Editor: Doom and Gloom Not A Solution to Lindens’ Inner Stupidity
by Alphaville Herald on 13/04/11 at 12:18 pm
Hello, my name is Paola, I think you must be a very busy person and maybe getting lots of feedback and replies in your mail, I will try to be brief.
I read the Herald today (I do not very often), and I was pretty alarmed with your statement about the future of Second Life, as a clear downward Tendency Appears in the last two years of the graph.
But instead of make a discussion about this, I would like to make you think about a point: the need for happier and more healthy news, wanna hear my guesses? Second Life won´t last 2 or 4 more years, for multiple reasons, the most important ones: the render engine is obsolete, the second one: is an aimless sex game for hidden desires, and a third one: LL will run out of gas (their income will not grow if people continues to abandone it).
The tragedy starts when we remember SL is just an extension of RL: what will the investors (serious content creators) do when the rathole where their investments were the past 5 years (SL) sinks like the Titanic? I pick one: they will close their briefcases and they will start search for the "next" rathole for their investments, just like RL. is the poor average user who will suffer and drown in the process!.
I´m pretty sure no linden god will even read the post, and if they, they will only ignore it, but at the same time I´m also pretty sure many jaded residents and newbies will leave Second Life just by smelling the ship is sinking from your words.
Get my advice: add happy stories, people will smell hope, add hope to your mind even if you know Second Life won´t last too much, at least it will help to add happiness, even if the lindens want to destroy our happiness with their lame viewer remember this: we, the common users we stay here because we love the system, if we hated it really we were playing PS3 Sony´s Home or BlueMars just for their awsome graphics, incredible server stability and state of the art content creator safety. Everybody knows we have suffered many stupid innecesary changes from LL who bring down our numbers (the users), is true! but Doom and Gloom will only get you less readers as they will think this is a sinking ship, "a downward spiral kills even planes".
Please extend the optimism because pesimism and Doom is not the solution to the Lindens inner stupidity. and why all of this? because I´m pretty sure you won´t like reporting from BlueMars and start complaining for basic things like the camera movement, long waiting periods just to "move" between "sims", something in SL we don´t even think about it because it works like charm. I hope you understand.
Have a nice day and best wishes in what you do.
Horton Hoonoo
Apr 13th, 2011
>add hope to your mind
I love you Paola. Thank you for my new mantra
MilosZ MilosZ
Apr 13th, 2011
Yawns… People like you–predicting SL’s armageddon–are a dime a dozen. How long have you been in SL? I can tell you that in the six years I’ve been in SL, prophets like yourself have been saying SL will die every year–Yet we’re still here, and will be.
Ouchquack Stern
Apr 13th, 2011
She thinks the investors are the content providers? Wow.
James Freud
Apr 13th, 2011
English isn’t your first language, is it?
Gundel Gaukelei
Apr 13th, 2011
“Add happy stories – drown smiling”
Rule #1, instruction manual, ship of fools
Persephone Bolero
Apr 13th, 2011
“even if the lindens want to destroy our happiness with their lame viewer”
And we would have got away with it if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!
Pfft.
MilosZ MilosZ
Apr 13th, 2011
Paola:
Responses to some of your quotes:
“the render engine is obsolete”
True, but long-term residents of SL have considerable financial and emotional commitment to SL, which will keep us here despite the render engine. Look at WOW? SEVEN years old, still the most popular MMORPG despite an outdated engine.
“is an aimless sex game for hidden desires”
What do you think drives a huge portion of the SL economy? The answer pssssst is SEX.
Yep
Apr 13th, 2011
MilosZ
I read some of your threads on your forum. your logic was fascinating about condemming the people in SL who do not buy or build and just take free items offered to them.
Why would anyone in their right mind spend money in a SL store for something that is not theirs? Can people take their purchases to another grid? Can they even back them up on their computer? Heck, do they even own what they bought? If the answer to any of these questions is no.. then any money spent.. is just flushed down the toilet.
I would call these people smart and not “noobs”.
Hiro Pendragon
Apr 13th, 2011
… because optimism and sugarcoating worked so well?
I find it funny that SL is compared to two essentially-dead platforms, Blue Mars and Sony Home. What about comparing it to OpenSim? Or Facebook? Or other successful online communities. This letter is not only a straw-man in its arguments, it’s self-contradictory. In one sentence, the author talks about how “common people” don’t go to Blue Mars or Sony Home because they love the system, but somehow the Herald has the power to make these same people flee?
Pappy Enoch
Apr 13th, 2011
“add happy stories, people will smell hope, add hope to your mind even if you know Second Life won´t last too much”
Just drink more. That am easier’n tellin’ stories. All crap looks better drunk, I reckons.
I gots my SLgoggles on rite now, and that old fat man looks like Salma Hayek. Hoo Whee.
Reader
Apr 13th, 2011
Sony Home is far from dead. Call it meager, sure np, but as designed it works brilliantly. Think of it as a facilitator to the Playstation Network – a conduit if you will – whereby friends and strangers can connect and then port off to play games in multiplayer mode. There’s embedded advertising in it as well. It’s self sustainable as designed. It’s not fair to compare SL to Sony Home; two different cups of tea – totally. Sony Home is an adjunct to PSN. Period. SL however is supposed to be a complete, revenue generating service – albeit on a shaking biz-plan.
Can’t comment on Blue Mars – haven’t tried it.
Tux
Apr 13th, 2011
Religious blind faith applied to SL?
Orca Flotta
Apr 14th, 2011
Paola makes one crucial mistake here: to tell a news magazine (even if it’s a lousy yellow press paper like the AH), to bias more on happy stories is assuming they are in any way affiliated with LL or it’s their job to keep SL alive.
Well, it isn’t.
It’s LL’s job to keep us happy, not AH’s. With “us” I mean all of us, RPers, sexers, builders, event coordinators, n00bs, oldbies, you name it. Now that’s not an easy job, and LL are not very good at it either, so we should be grateful for discerning, critical blogs of any sort; even if they come acrross as warped as the AH (which I have to admit to love dearly).
By focussing on happy stories AH would send out a wrong signal to LL, dangerously wrong even. It would suggest to them “the kids are playing happily in their sandboxes so we don’t need to worry and can neglect them. And most importantly, we don’t have to listen to them”.
All in all I wouldn’t worry about the future of SL. It’s a great concept and well established now. SL will always be around in one or the oher form. In the long run it won’t be hosted by LL, might even go under a different name. New platforms, new technologies, new hosting services will take over, they will push LL to the wall, the users will migrate to other services … So be it! But some kind of SL will always be there. With braindead fanbois and overly criticising wannabe intellectuals. This is the nature of humans, no way around it and no sense in trying to discuss it away. We’ll fight, we’ll love, we’ll have fun and sorrow, we’ll be on SL, OSG, BM or whatever platform. And SL (or one of its many epigones) will be with us.
Emperor Norton hears a who?
Apr 14th, 2011
So if I read Paola right we should spend all our time obsessing over if SL or LL is going to fail instead of, you know, doing something vaguely fun like rezing giant penises under our friends or trying use sex huds with our Mecha avatars.
Yep, nothing says good times for entertainment than being a cyber emo cutting my virtual wrists over the bottom line of some computer game company.
Reader
Apr 14th, 2011
“Yep, nothing says good times for entertainment than being a cyber emo cutting my virtual wrists over the bottom line of some computer game company.”
F’n A !
Axel Oakleaf
Apr 14th, 2011
I used to remember when it was only Heavy metal during the 80′s,but it seems after grunge came all the stuff like screamo and emo came along.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DfYLar2QGI
smegma
Aug 31st, 2011
waaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahaahhaahahaha
Second Life was over the day that the lindens decided to side with basically a bunch of criminals that hacked a website – took a legitimate business down and did nothing about skills hak and co being able to perpetuate phishing scams unhindered
Its over ! end of story there is nothing in second life its as over as 4chan.org/b/
that died in 2009 and is just a mess of trolls and trolled
same as sl