Should GMs get so involved?

These observations are not the result of any recent action, just thoughts I've been churning for several weeks.

Having been a subscriber to a number of online worlds, I have always disliked the direct meddling of GM's into everyone's business, especially when they are seemingly random and oftentimes directed towards the same people over and over again while ignoring the TOS violations of another group of people. Inconsistency and favoritism are not easily hidden in forums and in communities like Second Life, where "Six Degrees of Separation" translates to about 2 or 3 degrees from anyone else in the world.

Now it's one thing for a GM to show favoritsm and inconsistency in a fake-money world -- the most a player could lose is their account.

The problem with favoritism in a world like Second Life is tied to the fact that we are not just monthly-subscription playing avatars battling it out with axes, staves, spells, blasters or lightsabers. We are creating this world and are encouraged to make it our own, and to indeed make money off of it. If a GM in Second Life, yes, a Linden, were to grow to dislike a player, they could make their life a living hell, and even hurt that person financially. On the flipside, a Linden could also offer favors to their favorite players, giving them an unfair advantage in a market or helping to "discourage" their competition.

Like I said, these thoughts are not the result of anything I've witnessed, just overall ideas I've had. Which leads me to my question:

What protections are in place to prevent any Linden from getting too much power? Seeing that Second Life is growing so quickly, and with the upcoming influx of minors into the customer service and technical support departments, are there any systems in place to protect the population from a wayward, disgruntled or asshat Linden?

I would like to be more protected from disgruntled and/or asshat Users.

Well that kind of goes along with why the GMs here enforce punishments against SOME abusers, but no where near all of them. Whether because there are not enough Lindens, or because they choose NOT to enforce rules against certain people is another question.

One form of favoritism is letting a user get away with something another user would be suspended for.

While it seems you need protection from the abusing user, you actually need protections from both the user and the Linden who refused to do anything about abusing user's actions.

You know, it's funny. Back when I was researching top picks for this thread, I noticed that "Route 66 Demolition Derby" is still listed as a top pick, despite the fact it's never even been functional. While Luskwood is no longer one. Is it any wonder why I, and a lot of other people, didn't choose "top picks" as a method on this poll?

Anyway, having spent some time on the short end of the Linden favoritism stick, I can say that their policies only serve to degrade player opinion of them, and degrading player opinion will limit what players will want to do (and more importantly, how much they want to spend).

I'm one of those people who can easily get obsessed with something. Kelly has, as I am quick to point out, even admitted that I am "hardcore". And despite my repeated and loud distaste for SL's land use fees, I make enough money from SL in a month to pay the full sim tier and then some.

But I made a conscious decision, back during the 1.5 upgrade and rollback fiasco, that I was never going to own land. I've decided to spend my SL income on more rewarding things. The only reason I even have a Premium account now is because I'm required to. Technically in order to use Busy Ben's I am required to own a tiny 32sqm plot.

I know SL isn't exactly hurting for new players, with people clamoring left and right to buy new sims to put giant clubs on. But this favoritism has a funny way of turning off some of your smarter players. This is always, what I think, has differentiated Second Life most pointedly from other MMORPGs. Even before I signed up, I always regarded SL as the smarty-pants MMORPG, for the kind of condescending people who also write "blogs" and such. I wanted to hate SL players because of this, but in the end you can't really hate people for simply caring about what they do.

You can dumb down SL if you want, but remember this. Sims Online and There will always have you beaten for dumb.

There should be a firewall between Linden Labs and the players.

I have seen entire online communities completely ripped apart when certain players are treated with favoritism or the appearance of favoritism exists.

Unfortunately, LL seems to want to go down a path where there are 'community leaders' and 'advisory councils'. Doing that would be a very dangerous thing. They'd tear down a lot more than they build up.

Regardless of how much justice they dish out, no matter how fair they are, you're ALWAYS going to get cries of favoritism.

Would you prefer no justice?

LF

We have Game Masters??!!

AKA Lindens.

communities of people who can't function in a pefectly normal system? does anybody participate in any real life community anywhere that the people in charge don't display a bit of favouritism and alienation? i'm not asking this flippantly. i'm dead serious.

how do the people in these online communities function in real life if they don't know how smooze and politic a bit. grade school children learn that they have to please their teacher even when they're being "silly." jobs, churches, civic clubs, families, neighbors (especially apt dwellers) learn who to praise, who to talk to, and who to avoid to get what they want and stay out of trouble.

i don't mean to sound insulting, but royal court politics are just not hard. speak kindly to the lords and their staff, carefully pick your battles when you're going to ignore rule number one, and stay off the radar otherwise.

The problem with Linden favoritism is favoritism in and of itself. I agree 100% with Khamon you have to schmooze and befriend people to get anywhere in life. The problem, to me, a burn-out SL coder who's mostly left LSL to go play with real languages, is that the Lindens are the ones doing all the schmoozing... And their schmoozing the wrong damn people.

They're giving favors to the club owners and the casino owners, the people who seem to draw crowds now. That's all well and good, but two years down the road when people are bored with casinos and clubs and we don't have a community ready to develop anything new... Linden Lab is screwed in both ends.

I've read articles where language developers have said, "Don't limit what you give your developers." Microsoft and Apple''s current political platform seems to be, "Give users the ability to do neat stuff" -- there's no other way to explain the free .NET SDK, Visual Studios Express, XCode, Apple Script Dictionaries, and the new Dashboard coming out with OS X 10.4. They're giving their dedicated users little, simple tools to do neat stuff. Second Life's stance on this kind of philosophy seems to be, "Well, we'd give you this cool feature, but it might, theoretically be used to do something that could be maliscious to a certain demographic."

That's crap of the highest order for a software development platform company to be spewing, in my opinion. That's like the Apache Group saying, "Well, we could give you secure, encrypted connections, but then someone from Iraq might buy fertilizer." That's fertilizer right there, and it's the fertilizer that we keep getting from the Lindens.

I'm not against favoritism, and I'm all for being a two-faced opportunist, but quite frankly... It's not worth the effort in Second Life when all my attempts to be friendly are going to be squashed or ignored because my sole purpose isn't to strengthen the Linden.

To be very petty and give an example, I wrote the first in-world blogger six months before we had XML-RPC. I kludged together a crude MP3 player with LSL, Perl, and Internet Explorer before XML-RPC. I consider myself to be someone who is an advicate for SL/WWW integration. However, what's the first web-integration app the Lindens fawn over: SL Exchange, a site designed for selling in-world items on the web.

I want to go up to Cory Linden and quote Milk-chan, "You dumbass!" We've had stores in SL since day one, this is just a step backward. Now people don't even have to play SL to play SL. I'n no genius, but it strikes me as counter-productive to encourage users not to bother using your interface software to interface.

So, getting back on track, schmoozing is worthless. The Lindens will fawn over anyone who can promise a get-rich-quick scheme. They have no idea what to do with their own software, except to use it as a magnet for get-rich-quick schemes.

No, the GM's shouldn't interfere at all, can you imagine how suck-tastic Perl or Python would be if your ability to use them relied on how friendly you were with Larry Wall or Guido van Rossum, respectively, almost daily? No one would use those languages; they'd use Visual Basic where Bill Gates happily says, "I hate you, give me money."

If the GM's see Second Life as a community, then, yes, they should interfere and direct things until their heart is content. If they want SL to develop into a platform -- LIKE THE FRELLING WEB -- that is a rough tool that individuals will beat and hammer on until they can fashion a tool for their community, they need to back off. Ultimately, it's a question of short-term versus long-term. Philip and Cory's happy-happy-utopian-technocracy talk aside, they are focusing on the short term.

That's always a bad idea.

I find there's more favouritism in who the Lindens wish to praise, elevate or advertise. There is one particular product (and yeah, it is a great product, no denying that) that seems to get pushed by every Linden under the sun and has been for months. I don't honestly remember not seeing it in the top picks - it seems to have been there for ever. I've seen it mentioned time and time again by different Lindens, it appears in the screenshots on the front of the site etc. I have an awful lot of respect for the creator, and this is not a slight on them at all as it is none of their doing (I wish to make that clear), but it does highlight how the Lindens can influence the community according to their own favourites.

Yeah... speaking of favoritism, that Seburo is a dangerous greefer tool. Fran really oughta make something peaceful for once. I'd say her and Launa's Hug Attachment constituted that, but TOO MANY HUG CRUSH MY AVATAR BONES. *sighs softly*

On a more serious note, situations like this are a tuff thing with many potential hazards and pitfalls -- a lot of flipsides to be considered. For example, if one creates a truly superior product which is enjoyed by a majority of the community, would it not seem odd if the Lindens denied knowledge of it? That would be even more disrespectful to certain content creators. We don't want to end up in a Harrison Bergeron-esque situation (Google for the story by Vonnegut to see what I am talking about ) where the achievers are crippled.

Lindens, IRL, are human beings like us. They have their personal preferences. I feel openly stated bias is better than hidden bias, and I don't relate to the word "unbiased" a whole lot, since humans are known to have favorite colors, favorite gunsmiths, favorite plywood prims, etc.

Moreso, it's important that LL promote what they believe to be "cool" in their marketing materials. Many times, I have heard a newbie come into the world looking for X weapon or Y vehicle they'd heard about earlier. I actually came into SL looking for many of these because I was studying a lot about what could be done in SL before I ever came inworld.

I think that if there's a great product out there not getting mass attention -- then heck, I hope it comes to that, and that it gets promo'ed the heck out of (in the best of ways) and draws Linden attention. There are definitely some diamonds to be dug up! The community speaks loudly though their personal choices and living their Second Lives as to what they enjoy, and as Lindens travel inworld, even passively, they can see this. Of course, the Forums are a source of this, which is why there have historically been threads about naming stuff we like.

Another example of a Linden favorite would be the Gravity Space Station club. I like Foxy, Jimmy, Team Bedazzle -- friendly, creative folks. I like the work they've done into taking the generic framework of a "club" and pushing it that much further, aesthetically. Obviously, there's been lots of complaints about clubsaturation on SL. They've addressed this, shot the big prim-arm with a yummy shot of antidote, and heck: not only does the place get packed, it also looks pretty. It's downright cool, like a technolounge for the cyberhipsters within. It's not rocket science (or quantum physics, for that matter) to figure out why it's featured on the SecondLife.com front page and more.

And as for many popular clubs, they get listed on Popular Places. And word-of-mouth spreads too. Sure, there are things overlooked, but one thing I've heard time and time again is that solidarity concerning things like implementation of a new feature or suggesting something you really like -- en masse! -- makes a difference. So it works on different levels with different approaches, a diversity I like.

A lot of people come here and don't know how the underlying technology works, but when it works, they know when it's working. Coming full circle, they may not know how Fran scripted her gun or how Cubey put an airplane together or even how Lumiere built what he builds. But heck, on a very simple, fundamental level: techtalk, while important, is not a prerequisite to enjoyment of a product, and furthermore, tends to turn off people if it's not connecting. I had this experience myself, while trying to convince ravers of the technical excellence of certain cascading resonant filters or the unaliased quality of wave generators. Pfft. Those intricate details didn't matter to them, but seeing them shake their collective booties on the danceloor and "get down" with it -- that did. I can rest secure knowing that all of these "depths of the ocean", and MORE, matter to me.

You like what you like... and if you like something, say so!

Torley, I'm not sure if you've misunderstood me or not. I'm not saying that the Lindens should not be free to push those things they like, it's more the length of time that it goes on for for some things that probably could be seen as favouritism. I'm probably one of the few people who actually use the Top Picks to go find something new, so it kind of irks me to see the same picks in there week after week, month after month. A few change, but there are some that seem glued on.

Oh Moopf! Pardon, I wasn't responding to that of yours.

I strongly agree that Top Picks should be updated (rotated?) more frequently.

I use Top Picks a lot too.

I'm very much in favor of the "freshness" -- of course, there are also certain institutions within SL that new users may not know about yet. FairChang Island being one of them, Tribal Drums another. Kewl stuff that Mesede Skate Park is on there... one of my personal faves, including your most excellent skates.

Cheerio.

Jarod, if you hadn't used the word "frell", I'd ask you to marry me.

I'd have preferred "fuck" but Lindens don't like it when some people curse, so I was hedging my bets.