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

I don't know exactly how it is done but the people I know who are "one
with their cache" and have know how, have no need or interest in running
a shop because they are here to play they do it to have their computers load
faster and they make more programing in real life have no need or desire to resell
what is on their cache.

How many of you played The Sims Online when EA abandoned the game. No new content, no updates, yet they continued sucking the monthly fee out of every player.

How many of you played Star Wars Galaxies pre-CU. They held an open beta and asked all players to beta it for them. Resoundingly the feedback Sony received was negative, more than 90% of the players who tried the beta told them it was total crap. Protests were held on every server. The result....Sony still pushed the Combat Upgrade thru. Within weeks they lost a few HUNDRED THOUSAND accounts leaving their paying player base a shell of it's former self.

I know we've had our problems with LL now and in the past. In comparison to EA and Sony tho they've done pretty well.

EA's history of games is pretty good.... if it's consoles... but when they port them to PC, it seems disaster ensues, follwed by a very noticable lack of support... I recently rediscovered this in Mass Effect.... for which the graphics requirements are quite reasonable, but the sound is a bit silly (and worse after updating with random drop outs, or maxxed volume 'background' noises, and repetitive video problems related to memory leaks)

Yeah, I know...I kind of went and broke the unwritten forum/blog rule about not speculating on the motives of Linden Labs.

Counterpoint: So where ARE all the corporations? Do we even hear about them anymore? 2006, 2007 that was all LL seemed to be interested in, the potential for RL/SL crossover in business, both consumer-focused and B2B. But where are they NOW? Right, I'm sure setup prices went down...price of hardware being what it is we're STILL probably paying huge markups. But it's not remotely possible the huge influx of corporate money that was expected and never came to pass wasn't part of it, as a face-saving attempt?

And where's my "Second Life Hacks" book by O'Reilly? Another well-hyped thing that quietly went away.

As with the bank ban, I thought they acted a little bit too late. My only gripe about the bank ban was that it should have been done even before that Ginko scam.

As far with other policies, they were forced to enforce them there are people who are taking advantage the freedom in SL, and their residents are being affected. Times change, bad people, scammers, and of similar ilk come to SL. It's time to intervene. They have to protect themselves and the residents too. Like it or not, LAW will come to SL.

As with the SL5B nipple ban, it was plain STUPID. Others were just sad mistakes about them not really knowing what to do, not being careful enough, and of course...bad timing, and that includes the Openspaces fiasco.

Second Life is the most complicated virtual world, and not that I am defending LL, but I'd be more pissed if a company were to behave badly or negligently if they are a STANDARD SERVICE, ie: telephone, ISPs. SL is neither. SL has this complicated rep for being an MMORPG, VW, social network, and a new technology (3D internet) all in one. I don't think running SL like one of the above would work.

However, given those, I think that TRULY LISTENING and being cautious and making timely decisions are all that they need. They also need to improve on their customer service too. They make not be able to solve many of the problems on the technology, but it surely does help if they EMPATHIZE a lot and make some actions. It would also help if they also CLARIFY the BIG RISKS to participate in SL. That has been pretty much of a fail to me, and that is the one of the reasons why most issues in SL like the Openspace issue such an impact.

On our end, it surely helps to think that SL is an EVOLVING platform, and that issues will continue to come up, and we may or may not like it. Given that, if LL continues not to listen or do things that are detrimental to its residents, well the door is open for us to get out.

1 user completely agrees.

I always wondered why anyone would bother to do anything for LL after GOM got GOM'd. It was the single biggest factor in my personal decision to never assist LL in anything. It was also why I never really bothered to use this platform to do real business.

But those ignorant of history are destined to repeat it, which is why so very few people today even know what GOM'd refers to and yet are still amazed at LL business practices and the way they treat those who assist them in building thier platform.

Ya, I loved that. An it made sense to keep things inworld. Frankly, while I do want to see more web intergration, I don't want to lose sight of the fact that we're existing in a 3D world, and should use the tools of same to get all the information we need. SL can never be a truly collaborative business tool if you have to keep leaving SL to do business.

Anyway, the big blunders from my point of view are all kid related. No surprise there.

1. The initial ban on Sexual Ageplay related content. Rather than handling this upgront, notecards were sent to both abusers and non-abusers, warning of possible violations. Aside form a handful of LL staff, this policy change was not known. While the intent may have been to keep the issue of sexual ageplay (and removal of same) on SL quiet, this had the result of appearing underhanded. It also helped push it into visibility.

2. The initial blog post about the rule, followed by its clarification and the so-called "dob your neighbor" post. These teneded to hyave been written with an assumption that all involves knew what was being referred to as well as a further assumption that all would known where the lines were without having it spelled out. These still cause troubles for child avatars and others.

3. SL5B. The initial attempt to keep child avatar-based content out of visibility backfired completely, with SL and other media latching onto it as a freedom issue, and linking it to other affinity groups otherwise denied from SL5B. Further retractions, as well as trying to say there was "no ban on child avatars" while side-stepping that there was a ban on child-avatar-built content generated a lot of ill will for LL and the SL birthday's volunteers. This event also brought SL child avatars to a new level fo visibility on the system.

I should add, too, that there *were* Lindens who did their best to try to salvage this situation and make it better, including a couple who went well beyond their call. These ones kept *me* comin' back in spite of how bad things got there for a while.

4. Age verification. Not the automated system, but what one has to go through after being ARed for being underaged on the Main Grid. Requires RL intentifying information, but does not end up in that users records -- meaning they can then me ARed for the same thing again, and go through it all again, ad infinitum.

5. The "Age > Age play" AR category. Still, developing. Without a qualifier, and putting it with real-world age categories (including adult on Teen Second Life), this can lead to additional bused and additional confusion as to the nature of child avatars and child/family role play within Second Life.

On the plus side, it's not Legend City Online. I can be in SL an be a kid, and the majority of G-Team and Community Lindens nowadays understand where things sit with SL kids. Likewise, Burning Life's "Maturity Policy" is the model all LL-controlled events in SL should follow, and was very welcoming to kid avvies while also providing a good CYA for the event and its parents.

I had inner sense that The Sims Online when it was done with beta after first few months EA would abandoned the game and do very few updates or improvements and I was right they did very little of anything after that for five years.
At least I sort of know upfront LL is expecting the users to do their own thing they are just charging for canvas even if the canvas at times has issues.
I think with LL in order to keep their bottom line low they need to do as little as possible yet enough to keep their profits high.
It seems like common business practice every where not just with LL, that why US has less and less jobs, business send the jobs overseas or provide only minimum or cheapest they can so they can keep running cost can be low, then charge as much as they possible get for the services.
Also it is common business practice when it comes to computer games or virtual worlds
to rarely give the consumer what they ask for, here LL has to do very little as far as content
or anything beyond infrastructure if it doesn't want too since it just claims itself to be
web host provider nothing more and only made few changes because they know they can get more profit from land sells doing so until people quit paying 380 usd for 512m virtual lot.
Not sure what desperate measures they do when the profits start to drop and people begin to spend less.
Maybe we will begin to see soon?

Me being 5' 3" tall in SL really seems to upset a lot of people. I say more power to them if they enjoy being upset by something they have no control over.

Ugh I misread the title of the thread to mean what have I done instead of what LL has done. LL has done plently but I will stick with what I have done.

well ll failed to make the avatar sliders reflective of prim measurements in-world, so your gripe still has merit.
btw, i am also short and also seem to attract misguided moralists (theyre usually wearing a prim cock and looking for sex too!). i found a great hud at 'ruined' that will publically speak the _prim_ height of all nearby avs, or a selected av. its great to reply to those ppl with a button push:
nina stepford is 5'6" tall
dick ramrod is 8'11" tall
sally sleaze is 8'2" tall

Your camera is behind you. Without the 180 degree turn of the avie, it has to do a full 180 degree swivel to get the avatar front in the view. On less powerful sytems, a fast full 180 degree camera swivel can cause issues, and LL probably also thought it would be disorienting to do this swivel.
So rotating the avie instead of the camera seems like a logical solution.

A lot of more experienced players are not using the 'avie' camera a lot though, and generally use camera controls to find more logical/easier postions to put their camera. After some time in SL this 'moving the cam for a good view' becomes an almost subconscious process. This makes the 180 avie turn for those users useless and annoying.


On topic:

(Almost) every decision LL has made has had a negative impact on a smaller or larger group of users. It's hard to decide which are truely bad decisions as it's pretty common to speak up if a decision impacts you negatively, but people usually don't mention anything that has benefited them, or they just accept it as the norm.
As there are few objective analyses on any of the true impacts of LL's decisions, and the only thing to generally go by is the outcry of those affected, it's pretty subjective to call any deicision LL has made as either 'good' or 'bad'.

The only thing that can be said objectively is, that the range of decisions LL has made till say half 2007 has caused a major recognition and growth of the SL world and LL itself. And all decisions (or passiveness by not taking any decisions) after 2007 (or the lingering effect of the decisions prior to mid 2007) has caused this growth to severely diminish, and cause a general backlash in RL media and has caused a (re)emergence of the general idea that SL is a 'niche medium for the socially awkward' with the general populace.
In my personal opinion, that has been LL's biggest failure.

By the time I click that "appearance" button, I've already been working on attachments, and the camera is hardly EVER behind me. Therefore I almost ALWAYS have to do a full 180 degree camera swivel *again* when I go into appearance to counter the one it's just done.

This was already bugging me on the very first day I was in SL... so it's not a matter of whether you're an "experienced player" or not. I understand the logic behind it, but since it was an obviously bad idea for me three years ago I really don't understand why they kept it for more than a couple of days before everyone got heartily sick of it.

Agreed, both the camera swivel and the avie rotation should only be done if the camera is in it's 'default' position behind the avatar. Otherwise it's completely counterproductive.