Katt says hi

There would be few people left posting in the forum if electric shocks were given for insults.

So, she is Katt Kongo, then?

I feel comfortable asking, since (if so) she does not seem to be going to great lengths to hide it.
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she is not, as far as I know-

Katt is a person I've worked with and have a lot of respect for- and I really hope that LL will give her the space and support she needs to make "communications liaison" actually mean something.

If anyone can do it, I believe she can.

I can't imagine what it's like to have one's job performance evaluated in such a public forum, and there's a good chance she'll say to me: "thanks for the support, now stfu"-

I just wanted to communicate that she is very much "one of us"- and a real sweetheart.

a tough, smart, kick-you-in-the-pants sweetheart.

and now I'll stfu.

But I've yet to see somebody give solid proof that traffic bots really contribute to problems on the grid, especially compared to something like a land bot which pounds the crap out of search->land 24/7, or come up with a better solution than using traffic. I don't think honest traffic is a bad way to determine the popularity of a place - people who have built areas that do get honest traffic should show up higher in search.

I'm not interested in a yet another religious war about bots or traffic or anything like that - just saying that this may not be the best cause, if you're trying to rally the peasantry.

Personally, I'd rather see them expose more real-time (or semi-real anyway) metrics on the state of the grid - I know they've got a lot more data than they share. Maybe seeing things like TPs/minute or transactions/time or some metric to do with asset server queues/load or whatever would be helpful. I know that if they published them, I'd certainly check them before going shopping or rezzing anything expensive...

edit: Katt, if you're reading this, can I have a bear???

I asked f'r one in the blog, jes to see if she was still readin. Would be a nice addition to my collection.

Anyone wanna donate a few thousand prims so I can actually display my collection?

Jurin Juran has a Linden Bear museum.. Maybe she has some extra prims available for displaying rare bears?

I might hafta ask. I've got a few unusual ones.

No ... but it would be pretty easy to write a script that would rez a different randomly chosen one from your collection once an hour. You could use hovertext to say which Linden each of them is from, too!

edit: now i wish i had a collection! this would be a very cool thing to have at the place-which-shall-not-be-named.
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I was under the impression those things weren't copyable. If that's the case, you don't want to do the "rez one an hour" thing...

I too collect bears, one thing I did when I was displaying mine was do a snapshot of each of them and display them via the snapshot

(had a little shelf display unit thing and all, still have it in my inventory somewhere LOL)

need to pull that out again and update it (finally got one from philip when I was talking to him awhile back, but the little sneak did not make it himself, he was not the creator) pfffft

I have noticed that with a few bears, another linden being the creator

ah. true. no "llTakeObject!
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Unless a traffic bot is the same as someone who is not logged onto the grid at all, I'd say it is a safe bet that they contribute to problems on the grid.

coco

Do an inspect on the bears: many use the basic bear that I think Nicole Linden made, and as it is often the root prim, it gives dat information. Phillips was pretty hard to get, but the holiday and special event ones can be tricky t'get.

I'd be spending a lotta Lindens to take piccies of each of mines.

Anyway, this is a talk about Katt: My only worry is that we'll end up with s'more ""this is for your own good" changes. The thing is, this forum actually does work, most of the time. More than the average web-based message board. It could use some fixes, some additional moderation (not a lot, but enough to take care of some of the hassles. IMO Strife did a good job with this, by and large), and some expansion.

Not like what happened here before, please.

Mari

I know that many/most bots have a negligable impact on sims and the grid, but I was using it as an example of LL's history of non-communication. People have been shouting about removing traffic for long enough, and the only response that we've had is that they are looking into it. Imo, people don't want that sort of communication. We want something more informative, such as "we have decided to keep it becuase ....", or "we've decided to remove it when we get time" - anything rather than meaningless statements like, we're looking into it.

But if they're trying to figure out a better way to rank places aside from traffic, what else could they say? I think they just haven't found anything better yet, but are still looking..

The point I was sorta trying to make is that if you (or anybody) is going to try to start a movement, find a better pain-point. Traffic, IMO, works more often than it doesn't. New people may fall for the traffic-bot-campground numbers that some owners use to exploit the system but I think that's more the exception than the rule - new people figure it out before long anyway and move on, if there's no real content at the place.

With the grid problems lately, I thought a better thing to push at was more openness on the state of the grid..

Well if you're looking into some thing and somebody asks what you're going to do about that thing then the only thing you can say is that you're looking into that thing!

You crazy thing!!

I really do feel for Katt - this is a no-win job.

That being said, it would really be a good idea for someone to COMMUNICATE what is going on and when we can expect some stability. The past month has shaken even hard-core optimists like myself and made them wonder if they've made mistakes in expanding recently. The successful roll-out of Havok4 should have been a monumental achievement heralded far and wide; instead it became a blip on the radar amidst massive failures. Someone needs to be out there reassuring people 24/7 that things are being worked on.

For the few minutes this morning that my crystal ball was actually working I saw the most likely scenario is that, overwhelmed with inane commentary by the usual morons who assault every blog entry, she realizes that nothing will keep those people happy other than LL changing every single policy to suit their desires and she eventually shuts down and stops communicating just like everyone else at LL has.

This is a set up for failure if ever there was one.

Wow, Isa, I guess it *has* been a rough patch for your optimism. I'll pitch the "glass half full" side of this for a moment.

By analogy, consider the role of a corporate turn-around artist: be tough as nails but otherwise just have average management skills. When a company is badly broken after years of entrenched management infighting, just taking a hard-nosed look at the situation and simply acting responsibly is all it takes to be heralded as a savior.

Communications between LL and its customers are broken enough that Katt simply can't fail to make things better, as long as she's given the authority to go with her responsibilities. All she really has to do is make a little progress every day on any of a host of problems, and before long things will improve.

Anguishing over priorities would be a luxury here: it would be hard to find an insignificant problem in the forest of towering troubles, so just picking one and starting to chop away at it is good enough. It needn't be that hard to create "Katt's clearing" and make her mark.

never thought of doing that (don't remember if it was nicole or not as the creator, could have been heh)

I do not try for the holiday and such ones, I just tend to get the ones of lindens I have met in game (I do not just search out a linden and try to get their bear)

Marianne answered the part about starting from the basic bear, but quite a few of the newer Linden are indeed giving out a bear some resident made for them instead of creating their own .

Few "office Lindens" seem to have one at all as well .

Ironicaly my bears were ate by the asset server when I lost the majority of my invo. I had quite a few. I may start IMing them for them again, but haven't gotten around to it. Was kinda bummed my collection was gone and figured it wouldn't be the same the second time around.

There was a forum I mod'd at (sl-forums.com now gone) and I posted a pic of the couple bears I had. Next thing I know Hermia sent me one, then Spike and after that quite a few Lindens sent them out. I put the pics up as I got them. It really showed me though how much the Lindens were reading the forums lol.

Ya know, I hafta agree with everything ya said here.

IMO, the Windlight/Havok4 releases should have been high water marks. A massive improvement in SL graphics and SL physics, taking the world into new sand better territory both in terms of "prettiness" and functionality. Add to this the LDPW improvements, the ad farm ban, and the promise of Mono and a revised interface.

Then the wheels fell off the bus.

The implementation of Havok 4 led to a number of content troubles -- now one can agrue, effectively so IMO, that the content creators affected should have been more aware of these issues and tested their hearts out. At the same time, I think that LL could have done more to encourage this testing: some main grid regions set aside and promoted for Havok 4 testing woudl have been good -- I had to hunt around for privately-owned locations with public H4 sandboxes to test. On top of that, a number of objects people might not have expected would be so badly broken (huggers, for instancea) were not that well known about by the team until post-implmentation. So now the team has to scramble to make fixes while 50k regular members gripe about targetomega, hugging, trains, swimmers, and waterslides.

Windlight, which not only makes for a "oh, wow" sky, also improves the way the client handles some other graphics. Unfortunately, many were not ready for the changes in visuals (the "Windlight makes my avvie ugly" issue), the new graphics pane, avatar impostors, and the simple issue of system requirements. I *love* Windlight, but I was quite surprised to see it go from RC to main so quickly, and suspect that things could have been communicated much better to the end user.

Mind you, I think the project leads on both of these have done a good job, but there have been troubles and pitfalls -- many fo which they could not avoid.

At the same time as these both, you've had near-daily issues. The asset server(s) have been dying on a daily basis, leading to a lot of downtime and frustration. The affects the fun people have inworld. This also leads to people not spending money, which affects store- and landowners (trust me, I know). This ups the frustration.

Finally, too, you have an environment where LL is not trusted by the end user. Heck, it was listed as "the enemy" in an LL anctioned book! Communication has long been an issue, and we expect to have to yell and scream. Of course, the yelling and screaming tends to have the affect of turning away any attempts at commuinication from LL -- we all end up stymied.

I would love to see more than just [RESOLVED] and [UPDATE] in the blog. I want to see more post-mortems. I want to know what is going on, and how it is being fixed. I want to be reassured that paying my tier out of pocket this month will lead to getting my tier back in sales next month, ya know? Right now, I am not seeing that, and I am worried that the hole will only grow deeper.

I hope Katt is up to the task, and can see how much work she may have to do to simply get to a status quo level. The history isn't necessarily all dat good.

Mari

Regarding something Mari Said.. about content creators should have been testing more.

I'm a content creator. I sell jetpacks, and cars. They're fun jetpacks and cars. well, they used to be.

When Havoc 4 came out in beta, I went into a building phase. I really wanted to tune up my jetpacks, and get something special released finally. But just as I was making my plans to see if I could BUY a decent flight engine... a friend reminded me that Havok 4 was coming, and apparently Flight Assists were all behaving badly.

I went to an H4 sim, and this is what I saw "everything" about all my vehicles, was broken. I was repeatedly told by programmers that the problems would be fixed. So as a content creator, adapting my work to their broken physics engine would be stupid. So a refresh, and things are broken, in a different way. Again, "this will be fixed" so again, don't adapt to H4 yet. Again and again, this is what I saw, and this is what I heard.

Vehicles unable to move after one refresh, flying at warp speeds across the sim after the next refresh.

Jetpacks that flew you a million meters in the sky, and then jetpacks that couldn't hover or fly in a straight line.

How the hell, as a non-programmer, am I supposed to contribute? all I can say is "it's broken yo"... I can sit and work on trial and error for days and get my car back into shape, ONLY to have LL refresh the beta with some fixes that break everything I spent my time "repairing".

In the end, the ONLY sane advice I could offer my friends, was to wait.. and see what Havok 4 looked like once it became official. And then, scramble to adapt, after 1 or 2 "upgrades" to the system to fix post-release bugs that people discovered.... once H4 became "stable".

I even handed one of my cars to Sidewinder. He said it worked fine, but of course, he didn't know how it worked BEFORE. Havok's been official for a while, and my partner is STILL tweaking on it, trying to make it safe again. And with the new heavier graphics load of Windlight, and all that going on, there's so many new variables to diagnose and repair at once... it just seems so overwhelming that we're actually considering getting out of the vehicle business entirely.

Breaking the huggers.. is the most vicious insult LL has ever dished on my life. After all the drama we've had in SL in the past.. and Mari you know precisely what drama I mean... With all the heavy handed "thought policing" going on from LL.. "oh, and you can't hug your partners anymore" just felt like another subtle jab from the morality police. (even though I do understand, it's just a bug).

With inventory failing, transactions going haywire, search being... well... weird, vehicles breaking, skins looking aweful, lights behaving oddly, windlight getting all weird on me, and people breathing down my neck because I won't use Voice...

I could really use a hug.

I'm not trying to start a movement. It really was just meant as an example of LL's failure to communicate.

Well that's my point. I don't believe that they are looking into it - not for one second. It may or may not be something that they intend looking into at some stage in the future, but I don't believe they are looking into it now. I believe the response is just fobbing us off, and I don't see any reason for it.

You asked what they could say if they really are looking into it, so how about something like, "It's not as simple as it may seem. A good for keeping traffic is that provides a small income for many people, and a good reason for removing it is that causes our Places results to be skewed though bots. We'll be having a meeting soon to discuss the situation and to decide what we can do about it." Anything that indicates theor current thinking, or the current state of play, will do. "We're looking into it" is fobbing people off, and it almost certainly untrue.

I think your post really sums up the frustrations we have all been feeling.
May it all get better soon...