Our Lindens, who art in the Labs,
Hallowed be thy prims.
Thy Grid-dom come, thy will be done,
On sims, as it is in the preview,
Give us this day our daily crash,
And forgive us our spammery.
As we forgive those, who grief against us
Deliver us from the n00bie ones.
And lead us not into nakie places.
Amen.
Age verification is finally going operational. First it’s going to be on a grid wide beta on the main grid, the impact of it is something to be checked out.
It’s unusual that a beta feature is going to be released on the main grid, but in that case it makes sense. I just wonder what took them over 7 months to get that feature ready; it’s something that’s going to make Second Life more corporate friendly in the future, that’s for sure.
The land prices have been going down, down, down over the last few months. Anyone who’s got a free parcel, either it is free for rent or sale, has quite some problems to find a new owner for it.
Also big players like Dreamland have lowered their prices to get new tenants or sell it. In addition the in world sales of virtual goods are not as quite good at the moment as they used to be, many people in this field are complaining about the lack of sales.
So how does it come? Well, the big hype over SL is over in most countries at the moment, it’s not so unusual anymore, now SL needs to show its value as a tool for whichever need. But end of the hype means also that the stream of newbies flowing into SL has ebbed down great scale.
So what’s next? I guess many landlords are forced to either sell their land now under value and/or just give up many islands. That’s what I expect at least. Not everyone has enough bucks in the background to overcome this time now.
I don’t expect Lindenlab to lower their own prices, though.
The next copyright lawsuit about in world theft has started. Virtually Blind has an interesting article about it.
What really baffles me is this quote:
“We originally tried to go through [Second Life Provider] Linden Lab,” said Alderman. “Everybody filed DMCA [takedown] notices. We filed support tickets and abuse reports. We even sent a letter to Robin [Harper, Linden Lab’s Vice President of Marketing & Community Development] and copied Philip [Rosedale, Linden Lab’s CEO]. We got nothing.”
Doesn’t sound like a good customer service, does it? And those are not your mommas designers from the backyard, but some of the leading in world designers and builders. Well, we’re going to see where this lawsuit is going to end.
Second Life’s very own Cassandra and most professional ranter, Prokofy Neva, has been banned at 57 Miles weblog Metaversed.com
This is quite interesting and amusing. Why interesting? Because PN and 57 Miles were on real friendly terms, they made together 12 lengthy podcasts named "Second Rant". And now they split apart – and it’s the usual picture, PN got banned on the whole website (if possible, that is).
Of course, another lengthy article by PN about this event on his own blog, nothing so far on Metaversed.com yet. The reasons why? Because PN called one on the group channel of Metaversed to "fuck off", the last podcast was way too critical or so, mostly because PN is not good for his business.
Well – whatever. This is not the last thing we’re going to hear from skipjack Prokofy Neva – just another finished act in the whole drama around this avatar. That’s all.
If you’re running a somewhat bigger group (> 1000 members or so) be careful if you want to use group chat. It’s still broken, meaning quite often message B shows up before your message A does. If you are able to use it at all, that is.
And – you still cannot disable chat for all except some moderators, so a group always tends to get "spammy" from time to time. Many people now have a very short fuse if reading messages from a group chat, too. Most times it’s just a waste of time, anyway.
Like Jenny saying "hi", Mike saying "hello", Jenny asking "wanna dance" and so on and on…
This is a feature that’s been missing since ever: the ability to backup the content of a whole sim externally.
For example, if you are a builder and building a whole sim from scratch (or with other stuff) and a forced to put the sim down, since you don’t have the money anymore to sustain it – or your customer, whatever – taking down the sim means taking down all the labour cost, all the work. If you want to put the work up later, again, you’ve got to start more or less from scratch.
In this case it would be very nice to have the ability to backup a whole sim and store it somewhere for possible future use. At the moment this isn’t possible, to this is a big, missing feature in the portfolio of Second Life.
If you take a look at the recent ban of gambling, you may wonder what’s coming up next to be banned or limited. If Lindenlab would be consistent with their intentions, one things really pops up mighty in my mind: prostitution.
Sex and, yes, prostitution, though most people prefer to call themself in an euphemistic kind of way escort and not prostitute, is one of the big driving motions behind Second Life at all. And, yes, like gambling it’s prohibited in many countries Second Life is available.
So if Lindenlab is really consistent about establishing a somewhat "cleaner" Second Life this must be next on their agenda: the containment or even shutting down of most prostitution happening in Second Life.
Either that, or as another consequence building up a new strictly, clean, separate corporation grid without this kind of business at all, like the Teen Grid is today. But then again, this would hurt their land sales, since it would depend on how many residents of course would like to visit this clean grid and you got more possible visitors on the main grid than on an own corporation grid. But for strict in house usage such a grid would be a heavy, good asset for Lindenlab to have.
This would of course hurt the in world economy great lengths since most of it is built upon sex, sex, sex, and many people come into Second Life to get laid and many females are working as escorts or dancers at least.
But it’s the next logical step in the development of Second Life at all. In my opinion the question is not if it is going to happen at all, but how and when it is going to happen. This is bound to happen sooner or later if Second Life should still appeal to big real world companies. A cleaner grid could mean better land sales to such companies and in the end it’s all that counts for Lindenlab. Sales, more sales, more and better income and profit to be alive.
When you take a look at the recent development of Second Life, then there are some things different compared to earlier developments:
So what does that mean? Well, for now the hype is over in most countries. If Second Life should prove its worth as a tool, it now needs to improve to appeal more for business usage and to be more stable to sustain the established in world economy and returning residents.
Premium residents are not enough in numbers to sustain SL at all, so most of the money Lindenlab makes has its origin in land sales and main land tier fees. The borders of growth have been reached for now, as it seems, so now it’s time for a consolidation of Second Life at all.
Since all are dependent on Lindenlab, this means of course more stable sims and clients, which is on the way according to them, a better scalable grid, too, better customer service – face it, most think it’s as bad as it can be and slow, slow, slow – and getting more in touch again with the community.
For many residents the relationship with Lindenlab is kind of love/hate. Love, that they made Second Life possible and hate, because of the high land prices, not stabilizing the client/server enough, being dependent on Lindenlab, slow customer service and many more of such things. Oh, and since you can’t see the Lindens in world often anymore, they became something like the spooky people running all of the stuff in the background.
Also the main focus of Lindenlab shifted from promoting Second Life to promoting the technic behind it, the grid. This is perhaps a good move for them, but of course also means that they’re now focusing more on the technic behind it than on the well established community in Second Life.
The official Second Life blog has today an entry about so called megaprims (greater than 10m at one side at least). Megaprims where never intended to be, but they happened some while ago and they are in use in different buildings, you can either get them just so or buy them at stores.
They are rumored to have a negative impact on the physics engine and to cause lags and such, but none the less many builders have adopted them very fast and used them in their buildings.
So there’s a discussion about it they should stay or not; at the moment they are only tolerated by Lindenlab, but they don’t really like them.
So what’s the sensible approach? Are they needed or not? I guess they are needed, because they fit into a gap. I mean, why would you use for example 9 prims (10x10m) to make a floor that’s 30x30m wide when you just can use one prim? Because they are needed, they’ve been used and there’s a market around it.
But of course too big megaprims are not right, so they should not be bigger than a whole sim, meaning 256x256x256m. In those parameters they could really enrich the building experience.
Bartholomew Gallacher