Why Linden Lab is Heading In the Right Direction

Right sorry, mind was fluttering.

valid point and we agree and our difference is in opinion then.

cheers.

I've exhausted my points on Second Life right now, since I've said all I feel need be said in other threads.

However, this one is getting a well-deserved *bump!* because it raises a lot of valid arguments.

Carry on.

Well in general never winter nights is not a static game, as it does support user contect creation and its own scripting language as well as a rather intricate dm interface that allows for the insertion of things like encounters on the fly, as well as online adjustments to the characters involved.

You will note that I did not say that SL was not a complicated game, just that there may be more complicated games out there. Paticularly those involving significant AI's or complex physics models. Even a simplistic wind-effects models in a flight sim invovles an intricate bit of programming.... And strategy games with adaptove AI's, like Rome:Total War have programming complexities all thier own, beyong just putting a image on a screen.

SL is a techincal marvel, and I don't under estimate it, I just think you were quick to pooh pooh the complexity of many other games.

An assumption, and a rational one I'm sure.

However, in the end I think comparing complexity is a subjective thing as SL is in a completely different category than standalone games.

Any common markers for comparison would be moot as they'd fail to completely grasp the complexity of each system.

I'll testify to the fact that SL definitly lowers your standards for content.

After a while you get used to the idea that car simulations are supposed to be a jittery experince of lag and low fps that randomly and abruptly ends at a sim edge where you can either fall through the world or end up with half of a car. The experince of flying around interrupted because you managed to go faster than the simulators could keep track of your position. The joys of sitting around talking to fellow content developer friends and comming up with great ideas only to say a few minutes later, "Oh, that wouldn't work because we would have to work around the fact that Basic Functionality XYZ hasn't worked since the begining of time."

SL costs so much for a enviroment that is essentially, closed. Its in my opinion impossible to advance the technological state of SL content right now due to the fact that the basic framework is rife with hardcoded limits.

Limits?

What a negative word.

I see new and interesting things all the time. Heck, quite a few people have made things happen in SL that weren't "theoretically possible" at one point. (eg: Jeffery Gomez using animations to control prims or even his model importer. A while back someone came up with cell-shading. At one point XyObject was unheard of.)

Limits hold a mind in bondage.

Hm. I do pay a monthly fee. But my tune is remarkably similar to Hiro's.

In fact, unless I'm mistaken, Hiro has quite a bit of land (seems to me I bought a kimono from a vendor on some of his land), so he has a monthly fee, too.

I agree, there are ways in which I hope SL will improve. Opening up their bug prioritization process the way they have their new feature prioritization process would be a good step, and they seem to be heading that way.

Oh, wait, this is the General forum. (How'd I get here?) Never mind.

neko

I apologize for any disillusionment that resulted from reading my post.



I think we will agree that there is a fine line between surpassing a limitation and creating a kludge. Not that the use of kludges is particularly bad, but they're still kluges around the existance of real limitations.

I'm still curious how one gets a functional vehicle above 31 prims without wearing half the parts as clothes on an unanimated body part. That's a limit I'd like to see the end of... Unless people have solved that problem but it's a top level government FIC secret and anybody who finds out dissapears in the night...

be careful what you wish for. they only let me out a few days ago... naked and without food or water to survive.

It depends on how you want to categorize it. There is a large class of bugs that exist in SL which are the result of race conditions (for example: ghosting, L$ lost during land sales, thrown from vehicle, etc.) The behavior of these bugs is susceptible to changes in performance - but only because of poor underlying implementation.

Technically you could categorize failed logins/failed teleports as "performance" issues too, but that would just be sweet talk.


If by "discussed" you mean there's been an open, honest, two-way conversation between LL's engineers and users about how to fix these issues, then yes, you could say that there haven't been any of those. But that's not what I meant (nor is it what I expect). What I meant is that none of the "discussions", if any, have led to tangible results.


Perhaps it's a matter of perception. I think actions speak louder than press releases.

In the time I've been subscribed to SL, the number of sims has (I'd estimate) approximately doubled, while we're still struggling just as hard with what should be elementary technical issues. Linden Lab obviously has priorities, and what their history of behavior has shown me is that their top priority is to milk as much money as they can out of a system that's woefully unprepared to scale.


If you want to argue numbers, SL has always been outmatched next to the likes of EverQuest or WoW. Why is this? Because those games appeal to dumb audiences far better than SL ever could.

SL has already, for better or for worse, typecast itself as a content creator's MMORPG. Its only real selling point is that you can, theoretically, create and script whatever you want. It's not just a game - it's a platform. And like any shitty platform, when people realize it's not going to enable them to do what they want, they won't bother or they'll jump ship immediately when something better comes along.

I can name plenty of people who've come to that realization, but I suspect that wouldn't accomplish anything.


Perhaps. The way I see it, you're lost in your own Linden apologist world. For such a cutting-edge concept, I think SL's technology is amazingly stagnant, and the last thing Linden Lab needs right now is yes-men telling them everything is A-okay.

i'm not sure that ll sees itself as a platform. if it doesn't, it should.

is there a better platform?

the attraction of sl is exactly the power for resident to provide content to the other residents. that is it lets the residents give the other residents something to do. it may not be hack and slash, but there is plenty to do. and there will be more as the platform improves.

Yes, it's a useful goal, although one million would represent a rather small slice of the massively-multiplayer market by the time they get there. Still, it's a start. The problem however is that they're not in a position to scale even to that small number by any means at all.

Nothing has changed since we last spoke about scaling, Hiro, several months ago. The SL grid architecture is still totally non-scalable for mobile objects, ie. they'll only get to 6 figures if the vast majority of players are forced to stay at home during public events. There has been zero movement on this. Although Philip did acknowledge when pressed that there was an architectural issue and that dynamic resourcing would be needed, it was almost immediately swept under the carpet.

Well I'm sure that they're working tirelessly, but the rate of improvement is catastrophically slow. Even worse though, it's not heading in the direction of an open metaverse akin to the open Internet of today, but in the direction of a closed one-world universe akin to the closed and proprietary AOL of the early days.

So while I agree with many of your points, I'm afraid that despite LL's quite remarkable list of virtues, they are *NOT* heading in the right direction at all, as far as we can see from our vantage point outside the company.

I agree... a 20% positive growth rate since inception is not good enough.

When will they learn. LL sucks. SL sucks. And nobody will think it's good because it barely works.

Once they release the next major release and totally destroy SL for everyone (as is their plan), everyone will go to EQ2 or WoW en masse.

Or maybe someone will actually make an SL-clone that is better than SL itself. Then everyone will leave because LL is a bunch of dolts who don't know what they're doing.

I have mixed impressions of how SL will turn out in a couple of years. I agree with most of Hiro's first post. I also think they really do care about the bugs even though some have been around a long time.

What I don't see is ways they are promoting community. Things as simple as changing the events calendar to be filtered in a number of ways so I could take out parties and tringo (or alternatively select only parties and tringo) so I can find the things I'm interested in. I would think it is a fairly easy thing to program and so critical to the world. It needs to be well thought out; not just some dumb set of checkboxes a Linden dreamed up in five minutes that says Parties, Tringo, Everything Else or something.

They don't have people on staff who have a good idea about building community, or their ideas aren't implemented. The events calendar is just a small but important example. The dwelloper awards was a particularly bad example since people who care about creative communities are not so much motivated by money as people seeking ways to make a profit. I've seen exceptions but mostly I see the awards as a dismal failure.

Even if they figure out all the technical issues, if the world is a bunch of generic houses, and some creative places most people won't find, then SL will fail.

So basically you sidestepped all my rebuttals and restated your original point without alteration or addition. Whatever.


I am on the 4k+512m tier, tyvm.


Heh, you confused me with Protag.


No, i'd categorize them as bugs. You were confusing cause and effect. It's not a matter of what we'd "like" to call them, and it's not "sweet talk", it's using the English language correctly. if you want to talk implementation, then speak about the race conditions, not what the race conditions cause.


Again, refer to my first comment. If you claim there's the same amount of problems with logins as say, 12 months ago, and there's 10 times as many players, well that would indicate to me that we would expect there to be 10 times the amount of login problems. So, if as you say there is the same amount of login problems, that would indicate that LL has improved login performance by 1000%, or reduced the problem to 10% of what it was. -- there's just 10 times as many active users hitting it.

Does that mean it's not a problem? No, it's still a problem.
Does that means it's not being dealt with? Clearly, not.


And have huge companies like Blizzard and Sony behind them? And focus marketing efforts on a broad scale? And have very limited user-created content?

These games also, if you look at their stats, rise very quickly in users, plateau, and then struggle to retain users by releasing expansion sets.


*coughs* per month, not per year.


Nobody. Right. Except all of the people who subscribe to a monthly fee in SL? ...


Way to completely destroy any validity or credibility in your arguments with hyperbole and outright chicken-little-ism. Bravo.

I pay a monthly fee, quite happily.

I make items and scripts and sell them moderately successfully. I don't have a SL as a job - I make things that I want or others that know me ask me to make for them, and I also sell them because other people might want it too.

There certainly are bugs, I moan, and criticise LL. I'm certainly not a simple "Yes-sayer" for the world.

I just don't recognise the dark and terrible place that some of the people here are describing. Some things get better, yes some things get worse sometimes, some things remain as on going problems. Given we have seen things get better and solved (as well as sometimes revert) saying they have no itention of bug fixing doesn't seem reasonable. They might not fix the bugs that hassle you - but since they do work on it I'd guess that 'but XXX must be an easy fix' is just wrong otherwise it would probably have been fixed (and maybe broken again) by now.