What have LL done to upset the community in the past?

Everything LL have done has pleased me. Mostly because it upset everyone else though.

There was no charging money for Lindens in 2003.

There was a loophole for getting more Linden and that was to sign up an alt, pay for 1 month, and list yourself as a reference, thus receiving the 3,000L referral bonus. This was i think the initial primary use of alts in SL - a source of money.

Prim taxes were cool.

Let us say you were down to 30L and needed $500L to buy something. Just take off 50 prims worth of jewelry and boo-yah, 500L returned to you for spending.


But what really made me stop trusting SL was this OpenSpace price hike...too shady.

LL has repeatedly made major decisions that have significant impacts on the residents without consulting them first. Then they talk down to them when residents express their displeasure. And after everyone is good and pissed off, LL sometimes makes some conciliatory gesture and acts surprised that everyone isn't just thrilled with it.

Just like they have with OSS.

Bollocks. Completely talking out of your arse.

Their customer service and PR may leave a bit to be desired but compared to 2 years ago SL is a pleasure to use. They invested heavily (in time and money) to stabilise the grid and have succeeded, they have managed to keep a very stable economy for years now and provided a platform for me and many others to conduct successful business day in day out.

Sure there are problems. They are developing a new technology so it's to be expected. But to claim that LL has never given a damn about their customers is very short sighted on your part. They wouldn’t have survived much past beta if they weren’t committed to improving and expanding the SL experience for their customers. A few misguided decisions and a few hundred disgruntled customers (most of them are here on the forums) aren’t going to affect SL's longevity in the slightest and they will still be here when you decide to quit in July.

Oy! I didn't come here to do Math exercises, I prefer the current nethod of buying Lindens, than you very much.

They don't necessarily have to consult us, it is their product. I do think they can do better at THINKING about what they are going to do, consider the downstrean effects. And when they implement, tell us in clear and concise language. Be prepared for backlash, and how to deal with it rather than stumbling , keeping silent, and backtracking. I'd rather they said "This is our plan, this why we are following it". If they had a better system for dialogue, there wouldn't be a need to consult, the customers opinions suggestions and concerns would be already taken into account on a daily basis. A lot of the time it's not a bad decision, it's just that they implement it so poorly.

Okay, if we're talking policies, I'm game.

1. Opening the flood gates on 06/06/06. Without having the tools ready to help landowners deal with the new and extremely stupid griefers.

2. Closing the General Discussions because apparently, it made baby Lindens cry.

3. Not defining the difference between age play and sexual age play. Leaving the regular age players and G-team Lindens dealing with overreacting "ZOMG SAVS TEH CHILDRENS!!!111!1" types.

4. Banning banks, but not getting rid of 'stock markets.'

5. Banning gambling, but again, not defining which games are safe and which aren't. It's left up to the whim of whatever Linden you get in the draw.

6. Annoying, but not ire raising: After having pretty much ignored the forums for years in favor of the blog, now decentralizing the blog in favor of making it like Easter every farking day.

Meanwhile, what LL has gotten right is that SL does indeed run more stably than in the past. Not that it took much to make it better than in the past, because in the past, updating the viewer or server meant grid down time of at least 24 hours and they did this once a week.

And that was usually followed by several days of "fixing the fixes". So yes, in that aspet things are better.

Oh, yes. I forgot the several days of fixes where the grid would be down for at the min of an hour.

At least with rolling restarts, they can catch some of the worst issues before they hit all the servers. So lockouts via LL are getting fewer and further in between. And has anyone noticed that we don't have nearly as many asset issues as we used to? I mean, we'd have them at least once a day. Now, it might be every other day.

And gray goo attacks that hit the whole grid are almost a thing of the past. Probably due to the fact that there is more than one continent.

Can I have your stuff?

I kind of miss the wave sometimes.

Maintenance Wednesdays should be brought back..... Might save some of the borkiness and instability that happens from time to time.

lets not forget all the region crossing bugs that cropped up when they didn't test delinking the regions when instituting direct telportation (or the abandoned telehubs, and public works projects), really annoying forced UI/behavior changes (not even mentioning the forced upgrade to windlight), purposely disabling script functionality with no notice (breaking LOADS of existing content, because it wasn't a feature, it was a bug, even though they suggested doing it that way) havok 3 (anyone remember?) script functions that exist, but do absolutely nothing because they never got around to it....

they've also done alot to FIX and improve, much of it unseen, and far too numerous to list.

the major problems I see they have are lack of robust testing(rushing things to market), not soliciting feedback before major changes(poor communication with affected users), and several instances of added improvments that never happen (false promises)... not to mention retracting promised support (like GOM)

their corporate level openism is a bragging point, their user level openism needs a LOT of work

Wise words. What many forget, is that of the total amount of users, only a very small part is represented in the forumz.

And if I compare the stability of SL at this moment, with a year ago, I am stunned. More users, but also much more stability. How much downtime per month at the moment?

They do care about their customers, of course, but we are not the first priority. Profit is. We are beta testers, more or less, and they need us here, but we are not as important as some of us think we are. The OS drama does not help in believing they care though.

Yes. At least you knew Wednesdays were better left to other pursuits.

I liked Maintenance Wednesdays. It was a chance to catch up on the Forums (LOL) and get some offline stuff done.

yeah and those users didn't pay sqaut to get on, so I can see LL deprioritizing their experience, but frankly many people paid, and they didn't pay to be beta testers, they paid for a service....

don't get me wrong like I said there are obvious improvements, but there are some areas that if they just worked on like they do in other ares, they'd have a ton more positive press, and a clearly happier user base

YES!

What the gimbal-ratchet was the point of that?
Oh yes, and then they played games with the timing when people complained about it, as if the timing was the problem.
That's only because the "WHY ARE YOU CHANGING THINGS WHEN YOU HAVEN'T FIXED THIS BUG THAT ONLY I SEE" gang hadn't arrived yet.

No, that's not true.

Try "they don't have a clue about what most of their customers are doing". Apart from a few exceptions, I hardly ever see Lindens in world any more. You used to see Kelly around the welcome area sometimes, and that was cool, and Torley used to get out and about and rub elbows (or hooves) with hoi polloi, but apart from Frontier I can't recall the last time I've seen a Linden in-world outside their appointed office hours.

It's possible there's a lot of Linden Alts I don't know about running around doing things in-world, but I get the feeling that most of them have burned out on SL and don't really come in-world except when they're required.

I think there's a freebie gesture for it...

Oh, not THAT wave...

I'm kind of surprised at the items being mentioned in this thread, the only one that truly impacted me adversely was the security breach, when an intruder had access to our customer info.

Fortunately, aside from notifying my credit card company and keeping a closer eye on things, afaik there were no bad ramifications.

Discontinuation of the instructor program, previous price increases, reduction in account benefits, the gambling ban, identity/age verification, there have been many things with greater furor than this it seems to me, the previous ones affected nearly everyone and had more sharing a unified view than this.

One that seemed to cause the largest uproar (and mistrust) was when they talked beforehand with a few large "land owners" about a pending price increase, allowing some to act on inside information, which caused a promise never to do that again, but simply announce publicly to everyone.

Ironically one of the "answers" to this issue was...I wonder if Linden Research's company memory is as short as this thread seems to reveal our memories?

No that's not true. You asked about the bad aspects and people responded but there have been improvements, they just need an overhaul of their customer service principles. They have made positive changes it's just that people generally remember bad experiences more than they remember good ones but the place wouldn't be around if Linden Lab were that bad.

Here's my two cents, fwiw:

Prior to 2005, Second Life was an extremely tiny place. Contrasted with today, its like comparing a small village to a whole country.

Back then, Lindens were an active part of the community. Lindens actively participated in the forums along with us, and attended our events along with us. In many ways, there was this pervasive feeling that we were all in this together, and playing on the same team. Feedback to/from Linden was direct and instantaneous. There were still plenty of things to complain about, and decisions made that many disagreed with. But we had a very personal, and open dialog with them.

That changed as the population in SL exploded - and as the ratio of Lindens to Residents decreased, so did our collective relationship with them. Many policy changes set the stage, but the final decisions that effectively killed direct resident-to-Linden interaction on a personal level culmunated with the closure of the old General Forums, and the cancellation of Live Help. Many oldbie players were hurt or offended by this transition, which solidified their distrust of many of their policies going forward through today.

Personally, I think its unfair to say that 'Lindens don't care about residents.' Of course they do. I believe that most Lindens are very passionate about Second Life, and if given a magic wand that would make everyone happy, they'd cast it without a second thought.

IMHO - its not that they don't care - its that the world has become too large for Linden to be fully aware of all the day-to-day issues that affect their residents using their current methodology. When feedback is requested there are so many diverse opinions it becomes difficult to seperate the signal from the noise, and they often seem to make decisions based upon faulty or insufficient information. When resident outrage is sufficient, they often make a better go of it the second time - but for some its too little too late.

Yes. The Avatar Appearance 180 is definitely a head scratcher. I'd love to hear even the remotest reason why that has to happen.

can't believe I forgot the whole live help debacle.

like I said it pretty much boils down to communication, and specificly the lack of it before dropping major changes on users. if that occured at the business level they'd have lost all their corporate level sponsors long ago