Further Conversation... with M Linden

I agree with some of the sunshine comments. SL *has* been getting more stable (at least for this user), and great new features have been added.

I'm concerned that LL has not yet clearly understood who their "customers" are. M divides them into "consumers, businesses, and educational institutions". There are at least two distinct families of "consumers", however. The first are the fantasists...the people who come to SL to live a *different* life...maybe as someone very different from themselves in RL, maybe simply as someone who is able to make some different life or lifestyle choices. These are the people who put "None of your business!" in their First Life profile tabs.

The second group, the realists, want to use SL as a social network like Facebook, an extension of their Real Life. They're the "A/S/L?" crowd. They're the ones who want to make their avatars look just like themselves.

The needs of these groups overlap, but they are NOT the same. SL must take both viewpoints into account if it is to succeed. Ultimately, the realists outnumber the fantasists...but it's the fantasists who made SL the success it is today, and they will always be the creative engine that makes almost all of SL's content. Lose them, and you will lose your world.

Regarding the "first hour" experience: I'm happy to see the registration process and the viewer itself become more user friendly. I still remember how confusing the whole "getting started" process was to me as a raw newcomer. Having spent a lot of hours on OI and HI helping new residents, I'm increasingly convinced that the whole "funnel" concept, OI-->HI-->Welcome Area, is flawed. The new Direct SLURL capability provides an alternative. Just dump the new Resident at some more-or-less random sim...but provide some readily accessible resources. For example, how about part of the registration process being a visit to a page that links all of Torley's video tutorials, with a prominent label, "BOOKMARK THIS PAGE! Open your browser to it if you have questions!" Or write up a "First Hour in Second Life" blog or diary that walks a reader through the initial experience WITHOUT the confusion of actually being immersed in the SL environment. Some central areas like HI Public, where Mentors can congregate to provide live help, are also needed, and information about them and how to get there should be prominently displayed to new residents. (But do NOT make them like the current HI...something more like a cross between an NCI campus and SLVEC, please. Provide areas for groups to congregate and talk, and areas for building and demos, and a nice selection of freebies.)

I said bring them in "more or less at random"; obviously, some sims are a better choice than others for a new resident's first hour experience. Perhaps provide something a little like the OI HUD...an on-screen interface or window that would contain a selection of landmarks...to places like Svarga, or Greenies, or the Spaceflight Museum. It doesn't even need to be a HUD...just a notecard, containing key information and some landmarks. But it DOES have to be open and on the screen. If you hide it in the Library, a new resident won't find it until it is no longer needed.

Or maybe keep it from cluttering up the screen at all...have a browser window open automatically along with the SL window. On the first page, it could say something like "Help for the New Second Life Resident!"...and suggest that the page should be bookmarked at once, minimized to make room for the SL window, and then referred to as needed.

It heartning to see a consistant direction over a period of time from LL management. M, I believe we should keep you, talking to us in normal non selling terms and then observably heading off in the direction you say we need to go bolsters my confidance. Starting to see the mainland cleaning up with views reappearing is wonderfull, it's like the sun breaking through the clouds. Now just keep pushing the extortionists, bot runners, etc. out the door and life will be good.

And going to Burning Life with incredible builds everywhere showing off the beauty of SL also reminds me by the crowds, and the lag, what every day was just a few months ago when I crashed as a NooB every day just walking across my land. Now I can barely remember the mile long walks from taking a step.

Thanks M for tightning up the ship and welcome Mr T. Seriously, you guys need to be a little more inventive on the company names.

This is mostly an exact duplicate of what you said earlier in this thread.. Back at /352/13/284537/1.html#post2165650 .

Might be a good idea to read the respose to the earlier version before posting it again.

Thank you for the blog post M, I do hope to see some followup posts here in the forums too.

Personally, my concern is almost entirely with stability. While some of the new features and functions are nice and may add to the overall quality of the SL experience, for me, it has to be about stability.

I'm a content creator, with a shop that has been successful since March 2007. I'm also a small estate owner, with a 9-region estate that has also been in successful operation since March 2007.

Earlier this year, specifically from February through May, stability was so bad that I nearly packed it in. No, I wasn't crashing all over the place (crashing has never been a problem for me.) What I am referring to, were the near-daily grid-wide failures of the asset server, transaction system, teleports, search, et cetera. At the same time, there were decisions made by LL that I felt were poorly-made, if not bordering on deceitful. One in particular I will mention because to be honest, I still harbor an amount of bitterness and resentment about it.

Earlier this year the rules regarding Openspace regions were changed. Instead of coming in 4-packs, they were available individually, and the prims per region had doubled. There was a huge surge of sales of Openspace regions. Many estate owners who had been unable or unwilling to take four of them, were happy to take one or two or three. I talked to one of the Concierge Lindens and was told that they had a huge rush of sales of Openspace regions. Then, about 6 weeks later, the prices were drastically cut. Whether these two actions were independant, or there was a deliberate decision, is irrelevant. The feeling was very strongly one of betrayal - LL had made Openspace regions very attractive and had sold a great number of them, then promptly slashed the prices after the surge had slowed down.

Back on the topic of stability, the latest greatest features, concurency peaks, and other such records become irrelevant if nobody is enjoying themselves and the in-world economy has been crippled by yet another ambiguous 'network issue' or 'unhappy server'. When people can't search, can't teleport, can't purchase, or can't rez their purchases -- or even be reasonably certain they'll receive those purchases -- it puts a huge pressure on all of your customers.

Which brings me to another point. While it is warm and fuzzy to refer to us as 'residents', we are in truth your customers. It would be refreshing to be treated as such, from time to time, particularily through support channels.

I used to be inworld between 4 and 8 hours per day creating content, spending money, socializing, and in my own small way, contributing to SL. From the day I joined in December 2006 through May 2008, not a day went by that I didn't log in. When I couldn't log on, I was reading and participating in these official forums. As I said, the constant technical snafus nearly drove me away completely. My hours in-world have since dropped precipitously, and rarely participate in the forums any more.

I'm trying to rekindle the excitement and I am hoping that the new direction you are leading the company will help. However, in the almost two years I've been part of SL, I have heard the same speaches about focusing on stability quite a few times.

In the greater scheme of things, I know I'm too small to really matter - what's 9 regions compared to 25,000. What's my small shop, compared to the big names. At the end of the day, I'm nothing more than a customer of Linden Lab. Still, it'd be nice, once in a while, to get the sense that LL does appreciate their customers. Words, we've heard before. I'm holding out for some actions.

-Atashi

I have to be honest here, I have noticed a great deal of improvements from Linden Lab, and believe me I know it is hard when a company gets so big. I think over all I have seen support improvements, the concierge team is awesome I have no problems at all on that end, I just want to thank everyone for everything they have done and hope to see continued improvements.

Regions are much more stable now not seeing the problems that I used to see as much.

I am still having some viewer issues " which are already in JIRA " hopefully some day will be fixed I know there is a lot in there that needs to be done.

I really think that overall pricing has been a pain for me, I still think pricing should come a bit down on full sims but I mean hey we do get excellent service we are not responsible if the server breaks and a lot of people don't understand that. And there is a lot of Maintenance done on Linden Lab's end which really is awesome if you really think about it. As of right now I am happy with the grid, and just hope that pricing doesn't get any higher then it is.

Thanks again for all the changes and work that has been put in to Second Life, with out the awesome staff at Linden Lab, we would not have Second Life nor would we have a near stable Virtual World.

There are enough languages in SL without creating a new one. Why can things not be said as they really are! please define:
Experience Localization
Product Focus
--major strategy project to define the areas of focus for the next 18 months and we are in the process of translating those strategies into tactical action plans.--

To me, using big words with vague meanings is an indicator of a snow job.

M is not using any private LL lingo here. These are pretty common industry terms; he's just using the words he uses every day in his job.

"Experience Localization" -- To "Localize" a product or service is to make it usable by people from all geographic locations (e.g. countries). That includes translating the UI into languages other than English, accomodating chat by users who have keyboards supporting different alphabets, letting users set their own time zone for the forums, etc.. M is just talking about making the entire SL "user experience" work for more people, no matter what language they speak.

"Product focus ..." -- All he's saying here is that the Lindens have had a bunch of meetings where they figured out the bigger projects that they want to do over the next year and a half. The "tactical" bit is just him saying that they are now trying to figure out exactly HOW to do them.

Ugh. I hate seeing them.

M_ _ _ T_ _ _

MORE TIER?

Jesse, thank you for your kind words. I read every single comment on the blog and in the forums and deeply appreciate everyone's passion for Second Life. It is heartening, inspiring, and yes, sometimes, frustrating. But it is the incredible vitality of the Residents of Second Life community -- our customers -- that fuels Linden Lab. It's powerful and we feel it.

To all, keep bringing your comments, ideas, suggestions, criticisms, frustrations and words of praise.

I think it would be useful for there to be an offline New Resident tutorial program that could be downloaded separately so people who have just signed up can learn and practise - chose their starting avatar, and so forth, in the privacy of their own computer.

Then, confident that they can walk and talk (and change skins, alter their shape, and know the UI layout), they would log into SL proper feeling much more in command. The tweaking done in the tutorial would be carried over to their SL avatar.

Thank you Christos. Search is definitely on the hit list. Finding, discovering, exploring all that is great in Second Life is an essential part of the experience. We are on it!

Or if you have any questions you want to ask, feel free..

Cocoanut, thanks for your comments. Showcase is something we are thinking a lot about so your thoughts are appreciated. Indigenous content creators are essential to the inworld economy and it's growing because you are making great things. We want to bring you more consumers so your businesses can continue to grow and we want to make your content creation tools ever better.

QFT !!!! there's a heck of a lot of SL experience here !!

LOL.. I didn't really mean things like "why is there a box on my hand?" type questions..

II was more thinking about questions like "so, what do you all think about issue X?" or "in 50 words or less, what are your top-5 gripes about SL?" or even "what do you want to hear more about?" or anything like that. We love to type, M - ask away.

actually I knew what ya meant

I've been in SL for 2 years. And since then have 'lived' through many problems with SL that at times it have not been too amusing (gross understatement) - but at the same time, the good times have been very good.

I started 3D virtual world 'life' back in 1995 with one of the very earliest of them - Habitat. I owned a house, bought stuff for it with the local currency, and could meet people in other buildings or invite them to my house...sorta like the 3D chat rooms that currently abound.

The ability to use SL as a creative medium is the main reason I've persevered through all the issues - that and all the hundreds of friends I've made along the way - many of whom are now RL friends.

All this said -
1) M - you definitely have the lingo down pat - it's a shame that it's so opaque that you're probably speaking total gobbledegook for the non-English speaking population, and probably not much more than that to anyone who doesn't live in the corporate-speak world .... if you're going to say anything KEEP IT CLEAR AND JARGON FREE. We are NOT members of your staff or your corporate market.

I work in a corporate field - and I hate this sort of jargon. It's more fluff than substance usually.

2) I seldom come to the website any more because there's little that interests me, the site takes forever to load and the only thing I use it for is to check my product transactions - which declined seriously following the inception of the 1.19 series - and have bottomed out now with the 1.20s. The blog no longer has anything interesting to read and has died a death - I miss Torley's fun - and the forums are not particularly inviting.

3) I'd like to draw your attention to a bit of LL history - the nightmare results of LL's global push to market SL in 2006 - you got the audience - but you'd forgotten the structure couldn't handle the load - SOMEONE FAILED TO THINK OF THE CONSEQUENCES - LL should have built the capacity to scale seamlessly FIRST!!!!!!!

If you're going to concentrate on the first hour's experience - be a little more long-sighted and consider the first month - it takes a month for people to get really hooked, not an hour. Most people are expecting to be disoriented to begin with - start any new computer game and you feel like a total idiot for the first few hours. But you know that it's just a familiarity thing and that the feeling will go away once you get the general idea.

With SL, the constant issues with things not working, grey regions, the inability of sims to handle more than a few people, and the constant need to upgrade hardware means that you have a reduced chance to get really familiar with the place.

I doubt that, if I'd come inworld now rather than 2 years ago, I"d have stayed around because of the time it takes to rez most things. In fact I now spend a lot less time in SL than I used to because of the problems.

3) Regardless of what concurrency is - and what your numbers get to - how many regions are there now? must be close to 20,000 - and how many online? - 70,000 max. That's how many per region??? Doesn't take a genius to realise why there are a lot of empty sims. And when you take out the number of online bots - that's even fewer people to spread across the grid. No wonder there's a ghost-town feel to the place.

Extrapolate from this - if you got rid of all the bots, and just had active users - keeping people around for more than the first hour would possibly create a more dynamic atmosphere - and could be possibly supported with the current technology you have. But bots don't have inventory, or create stuff, or move around, or change clothes, or talk, or chat - these new people will and this will create added strain that should be anticipated - but given LL's history, probably won't be.

Why is it that those servers which have capacity (due to non or low use) aren't configured to support on-demand, those which are getting a heavy use - thereby allowing for increased avatar support?

At the moment, if you got even 10 people per sim - I doubt your current capacity would cope, but at least there'd be someone around to talk to.

Anyway
These are my thoughts - I'll probably get deleted - did off a previous blog because I criticised LL...
Shai

Yes and I remember those days, only 2 years ago, when 80 on a sim was possible (with a bit of lag and the occasional crashed sim). now we are maxed out with loads lag at 40 on any sim !!!!

You're comparing apples and elephants there, I think.

He said 10 people per sim, which is, err.. about 300,000 people online at once.

Chaos Mohr Said:

I don't really think landbots themselves cause people to loose money. They don't use an "exploit" or trick people into selling their land. If someone makes a mistake and sells their land for cheap (L$1), sooner or later someone will TP in and grab it anyway. Bots are just faster at it.

The problem is that when mistakes do happen, LL has a policy not to reverse the transactions. When someone does a major boo-boo, the fist thing they do is run to LL and it's LL's complete lack of apparent empathy for their situation that turns people off.

I think there should be a "grace" period of maybe 12 -24 hours where a land transaction can be reversed when someone makes such a mistake. For that to work, any newly purchased land will have the "sell land" options disabled until the grace period is over so the new owner can't quickly flip it to make matters worse.

I don't quite agree that landbots give an unfair advantage. They do give an advantage, yes like any tool, but not in an unfair way...

I took the time to train my skills and learn the languages needed to create land management tools. Anyone can do it if they took the time and effort as I have. I'm a scripter and I have never trained my graphics arts skills. My texturing skills are limited to drawing stick people in paint. It would be silly of me to say that people who use photoshop have an unfair advantage over me...they have a "fair" advantage since at any time I desire, I can train those skill sets too.

But I think that the problem is that there is no "grace period" or do-overs when someone makes a mistake. To the person who looses their land, it matters little "who" or "what" bought their land...the fact is that they made a mistake and have no-one to turn to to help "fix" it. It's that feeling of dispairity that makes people quit.

zg

PS, I'm one of the ones that DO give ppl back their land and I'm not here to defend anyone who selfishly takes advantage of other's mistakes (in any form). I do agree that something needs to be done to assist people who make expensive land mistakes, but a blanket ban on bots isn't it.

Thank you for your earlier reply!

As long as you are bringing up Search, I would like to point out that as they change over parts of Search to . . . whatever it is that is supposedly "web-based," I'm not sure . . . then more of us become unable to use Search at all.

THE PROBLEM:

It's a serious problem, and it isn't just mine.

I am not able to use the new Search All portion of the search at all. I can put in a word, and get the first part of the first page. That's it. No scrolling, no nothing.

Same thing with Showcase.

And now groups don't work for me, either.

I can't search all to find, say, a particular texture (I get only the first part of the first page of returns), and I can't search to see the standing of my own store (houses) in the list!

I can't see Showcase, either, beyond the first few entries (though I can look that up on the website), and I can no longer find groups if I want to join a group.

And this problem isn't new - it's been there since these new Search things were first put in.

THE LINDEN RESPONSE:

I have contacted Lindens about this, was shown a JIRA, and got the answer that, "We know it doesn't work for a percentage of people, but we don't know why."

They suggested running SL in windowed mode, as that is known to help sometimes, but it did not help me.

Now I live in fear that the People portion of the Search will be similarly "improved," and I will no longer even be able to find PEOPLE, at which point I might as well quit.

What they have done is remove something that worked for everyone (in terms of being able to see and use the thing), and put in instead something that only works for most. And apparently plan to keep converting more to the same!

I absolutely fail to grasp how anyone on earth could replace something that works with something that doesn't, for a number of people, and think that's okay, or even an "improvement."

____

This has led me to wonder, on other forums, just who is at the helm in Linden Lab, so I'm hoping you are, and I'm hoping to bring your attention to the problem. And I'm hoping it doesn't strike you as "all right."

It simply isn't acceptable to remove something that works and put in something that doesn't, for a number of people, and leave it at that.

That, to me, is not putting out a decent product. That is playing around and putting in something you personally think is neat, and not caring that it doesn't work for a percentage of your customers. (Not you, personally, but whoever did it.)

I hope you will consider these absymal quality control standards, and think about re-instituting some sort of search that works, and when I say works, I mean at the most basic level: That everyone can even see and use it.

coco

it seems the issue could more easilly be solved by doing somthing like that grace period idea, or having an option (enabled by default) of requiring the seller to confirm a sale before the transfer of money and ownership actually happens or sotmhing, instead of trying ot ban the bots

What would be great is when your paying 100 dollars a month for a service and it isnt working that you actually get a response when you file a support ticket. Especially after spending 300 real dollars buying inventory that disappeared and the support people just close the ticket and patronize you, repeatedly.

Making the people who are paying tons of money feel some what valued might make more sense than trying to import a ton of free users and making them feel welcomed, just my opinion though what do I know.

Two years ago would be October 2006, which was probably one of the worst times in SL history. That was the era of "Missing image" avatars, of griefers taking down the grid with "gray goo" attacks every weekend, and "update wednesdays" that would become thursdays and fridays of downtime.

That was the "good old days" of two years ago. They *really* weren't that good. Are there improvements to be made? You bet. But I'd definitely not want to go back to those days.