Honesty

There’s one thing I’ve never understood about this unverified signup thing.

Anyone can go and make 100 accounts, get full access to the whole of what SL offers, crash the grid as often as they like, lie cheat and steal, and with a quick bypass of the hardware hash system, can come back time and time again and there’s nothing that Linden Lab can do about it.

However, make yourself an alt, and try to provide credit card details so that you can be a verified user, and you get slapped with a $10 charge for creating an alt.

So, not only does it harm you financially to actually provide real life login details, it actually means that you are traceable should you do something that the Feds would like to have a word with you about.  Rather, those most likely to do damage – those with free, disposable, repeatable accounts, are mostly untraceable.

Am I alone here, or does it really sound backasswards to you?

The Magic Million… now what?

So, sometime a few hours ago, we finally hit this fabled “million signups” that Linden Lab have been pushing for, for reasons unknown to the general population, thanks to SL being featured in a Yahoo news article about Reuters coming to Second Life.  Of course, over at Stratics, we interviewed Adam yesterday, but I guess as long as they catch up, it’s good that they give SL more publicity.

The question is… did we really need it, all in such a short space of time?

I see two problems so far.

Firstly, the SL infrastructure is creaking under the strain.  Earlier on, the forums failed completely, and there have been reports of corrupted install downloads and people having trouble connecting.

Secondly, the fact that most of these people signing in haven’t actually got a clue what they’re trying, except for the fact it’s free.

The Stratics Headquarters is designated as “Newcomer Friendly”, and some of the more intelligent new users have discovered us already through the Search facility.  Without fail, every one, dressed in their newbie uniform, has asked me two questions:

“So how do I make money here” and “So… um… what’s the point of this game”.

Typical newbie questions, but when you get asked 20 times in the space of an hour, it’s tempting to start pulling your hair out (although right click Detach would be less painful if it was a real life option).

Making money.  It takes time, skill, talent, marketing, finding a niche in the market, and lots of hard work.  That’s definitely not the answer they were looking for – and given all the LL marketing slant, you’d expect it to be growing on trees.  Ok, so in a few places it does – but only if you’re less than 30 days old usually.

What’s the point?  Well, forget every other online experience you’ve ever had.  Second Life is unlike anything else you have ever played.  There’s no point, no goals, no monsters to kill, no xp to collect, it’s entirely what you make it to be.  This is, I believe, SL’s greatest selling point – and biggest problem.  Your average gamer doesn’t want to spend weeks learning LSL, or figuring out the quirks of the build tool, they want to go and do STUFF.  It doesn’t matter what ’stuff’ it is, because looking at the joke that is the ‘popular places’ list, they’ll find *ingo, malls, camping chairs, casinos and laggy clubs, unfortunately missing out on so much of the potential that is SL. 

The question is… will they stay around long enough to actually discover these things?  Judging by the fact that less than 1% of this ‘playerbase’ is ever online, experience tells me that most of them won’t.

Another day, another shutdown

[6:23]  Brent Linden: Good morning Second Life. We’re sorry but we need to shut down the grid to investigate a permissions exploit. Please see blog.secondlife.com for updates while we work on this. Thanks for understanding, and see ya soon

Ten seconds after this pops up, you have been logged out by an administrator, and the world turns grey.  Great.  Just great.  So much for my plans to finish my new miniature railroad (it’s in my picks). 

 When will Linden Lab learnt how their product works?  If you’re in the middle of building something, you can’t just drop everything at a few second’s notice.  If you tried to save a long script, it probably got destroyed in the shutdown.  If you were in a sandbox, you didn’t get a chance to take a copy of your work, and it’ll be gone in the wipe by the time you get back. 

If it’s not an exploit, its a self replicating grid attack.  It’s happening almost daily.  It’s just not good enough, and even worse for those of us who pay for the privilege of being here.

Maybe once we reach the ‘magic million’, they’ll actually spend some time in making the grid more secure and resilient to these sort of issues. 

Second Life Railroad

Inspired by Nigel Linden’s recent competition announcement for ‘build a station’, I checked out some of the Second Life Railroad sites today, and came across a few people who are entering stations… there’s some stiff competition, but my entry may be considered suitable; we’ll have to see.

However, one thing that I did find somewhat odd was the fact that very few people actually seemed to consider the SLRR important enough to incorporate into their builds.  I view the SLRR like a Linden Road; something that enhances the value of a plot of land, yet it seems most people just consider it an inconvenience that means they have an odd shaped parcel of land.

If I had land next to one of the stations, I’d build access to it from the station, and take advantage of it – yet I’m seeing everywhere things like big walls and hoardings to even block out the fact the thing exists!

I never realised that the rail network crosses through 53 sims before; it’s huge, and these sort of things really need encouraging in SL.  For me, SL is being able to recreate things that, in reality, I could never do.  Changing the colour of a wall?  A few mouse clicks in a few seconds, rather than a week with a paintbrush.  Want to move that tree?  Click and drag, no need to hire a digger.  Whilst I can appreciate people’s imaginations, whimsical and fantasy builds, I enjoy nothing more than being able to walk along a street and look at the buildings and gardens just as if I were doing so in first life.

I hope that the SLRR competition is a success, and this valuable in-game resource gets the attention it deserves.  Ding ding!

No SL for three days :(b

No, I haven’t been banned or anything, I’m away with work and the only online access I can get here is at 28.8k through my cellphone connected to my laptop – and as the signal is poor I’m standing here, in the rain, in the middle of a field, typing this.

It’s amazing how much we take things like high speed internet access at home for granted – and how much we realise there is so much of our everyday stuff that we can’t do when we don’t have it. 

I’m here in the lovely town of Lyndhurst, set in the beautiful New Forest on the south coast of England.  Or, at least it would be, if I could see through the fog more than about 10 metres.  I’m sure some of the famous new forest ponies are out there somewhere in the murkiness.

Went in the swimming pool yesterday (might as well, its free) for the first time in about 4 years (i don’t swim well and I don’t like it much) but as there was nobody else around I thought I’d risk it.  I’m aching in parts I forgot I had.

I think I’ll stick to using Siggy’s swimmer attachment instead, much less tiring.

But, as I look into the fog, and the grey murkiness, maybe Second Life isn’t so different after all.

Lewis

More grid crashing

What is it with these people who seem to get their jollies off by crashing the grid and pissing off 10,000 innocent people?

You have a problem with Linden Lab?  Fine, you’re entitled to – in fact most of us are probably quite pissed off with LL over something or another – but why do you think bringing down the grid with a self replicating object – which in itself is about 6 lines of simple code – gets your point across?

You aren’t hurting Linden Lab, they really don’t care  about us on the mainland (why do you think all the major companies and events are being held on islands which are firewalled and away from the main grid, with often constant Linden presence just to make sure these things don’t happen to the important people – ie those who pay lots of money and come here occasionally, rather than the people like me who pay less money (although my $40 tier is not ‘chickenfeed’ to me) and come here almost every day, creating our world, our imagination, and providing a quality experience for others to enjoy.

You may find it “fun” watching the grid grinding to a halt as thousands of talking beachballs bounce across the grid – but just think for a moment what you’re doing.  Disrupting support meetings for people who SL could be literally life and death.  Ruining someone’s wedding.  Destroying their half-finished project as autoreturn kicks in.  Costing people whose real life existance is based upon their SL income money.  Is your vendetta against Linden Lab – who just have to reach over, click a few buttons, clear up your crap once more, and reopen login a few hours later to make it look like they did some hard work?  It wouldn’t be so bad if Philip Linden had to get out of bed, run down the street in his Superman pyjamas and fluffy slippers, to go and restart the servers manually, but all you are doing is giving some very bored Grid Monkeys something to do instead of watching the porn channel on the TV in the restroom.

It’s clear the ‘hardware hash ban’ isn’t working – pick up a crappy old network card on Ebay for $2, install it, and you’re back in.  And again.  And again.

I’ve never understood Linden Lab.  Those who are honest and try to create verified alts get stung with a $10 charge (with a maximum of 5 per card), those who enter fake information and don’t verify can create as often as they like for free.  It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone – except the griefers, who can’t even be bothered to try something impressive.  Self replicating beachballs preaching messages of doom are sooooo last month. 

In the normal world, honesty is rewarded.  Seems like the case isn’t so in the virtual world.  That’s a worrying insight into the future of the inteverse metaweb thingy.

Clarification

Clarification is never a bad thing.  Part of LL’s justification for closing the forums was the ’signal to noise’ ratio being too much for the poor little resmods to handle.  Well what’s the surprise there?  If you can’t handle the job, you either get a different job with the same company, or find another job with a different company.  If the company can’t handle the workload, you employ more people, and make sure they are well trained.

It’s not rocket science.  It’s what successful companies have been doing for hundreds of years.  Yet, instead of using time-honoured techniques for company management, Linden Lab simply decide to close down most fo the useful part of the forums.  Since when was closing down the company the best solution for an increased workload?

When companies have temporary workload increases, they might outsource part of it or hire temps, rather than spending lots of money on increasing the building size and buying new equipment.   Again, standard management techniques.  But no, Linden Lab decide once more to ignore what everyone else does, and just shut them down.

Then they give us the “Linden Blog”.  Contrary to popular belief, although I dislike blogs, they do have their place in allowing Linden employees to let us know what they’re working on, and to ask for our input at times.  But essentially, it’s just an online diary, somewhere for them to tell us what they want us to hear, without any real need to hear back what we have to say unless they specifically ask us (by turning on comments).  We can’t ask Random Linden how such-and-such a project is going, or whether this new tool is likely to be in a forthcoming release – because we can’t start a thread.

This is the main reason I don’t like blogs.  They’re sanitised, generally rather boring, and not an effective two-way communication tool.

So, my “SLAB” (Second Lifers Against Blogs) campaign is focused purely on getting Linden Lab to acknowledge that the forums, for all their faults (although mostly due too poor management) did at least allow residents to talk to each other, as well as Linden <> resident communication.

Without a central, official forum, you only get fragmentation, and a further distillation of voice amongst – at the last count – over 30 third party user run forums (Stratics, Second Citizen, SL Universe, SLHomepage, SLForum etc etc etc).

Second Life has no community.  It has groups of communities and cliques that do their own thing, and rarely communicate.  Goreans hate furries.  Furries hate goths.  Goths hate blingtards.  Blingtards hate ageplayers.  Ageplayers hate…. you get the idea.

With the forums, although there was of course disagreement, most people could put their group affiliations to one side and discuss issues without getting too bogged down into who was saying it instead of what was being said.  I’ve made some quite unlikely friends through the forum, including a transsexed vampire and a satanist… who are able to put aside what I am, and take me as who I am, and we get on just fine.

Essentially, SL is still “Philips Baby”, but I see no clear management structure at Linden Lab that’s capable of taking SL forward to be a profitable, functional company, with a reliable product to sell.  Whilst no doubt it’s a great company to work for – after all, who wouldn’t want to work somewhere when you can more or less do what you want, when you want, and get to send ‘love’ round the office for a job well done.  Funny that last one, every other job I’ve ever heard of , your reward for ‘a job well done’ was a pay packet at the end of the month and employment for the next month.

I know I’m not the only one who cares about wanting the forums back – prop 1781 was quite clear, and bought to the attention of King Phil himself at the last town hall – and a look through Linden Answers will tell you that many people are not happy with being forced over here to remember yet another login password. 

The need for the return of the forums is clear.  The desire amongst the active playerbase is clear.  All we need is for Linden Lab to get their head out of the sand and listen. 

Lewis

I so do not want to be here

It’s no secret I hate blogs.  I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for Linden Lab and yet another stupid decision.

First they dump the forums on to the blog – which nobody wanted.

Then they dump the blog on to WordPress – which nobody wanted.

Surprise surprise, it doesn’t work properly.  Just like everything else Linden Lab tries to do.  And it’s costing them money for it to be not working either!

Don’t expect there to be much – if any – activity on this blog.  I only had it because Linden Lab decided that because they like blogs and all have one, so should we.  Despite, of course, the overwhelming dissent amongst the community over the issue.

After all, if they can’t run a simple forum, or set up a simple blog properly, what hope have they got of this ‘future of the internet’ 3D metaverse junk they keep sprouting.