Open Letter to Appropriate Lindens:
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cinda Hoodoo
my 2cents worth
Join date: 30 Dec 2004
Posts: 951
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08-04-2006 00:37
That broke the "sit" feature, please fix that.
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Nowun Till
Anarchy in the UK Limited
Join date: 4 May 2006
Posts: 227
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08-04-2006 01:15
signed.
Until there is meaningful competition, I fear LL will operate as most companies with a virtual monopoly.
If LL was a UK based company, they would be well aware of what happened to all the State owned Monopolies in the UK as soon as real competition was allowed. Just look at any business model which permits itself to think it owns the customer, they are doomed to failure. LL has the lead but does not own the RL world. Many of your customers, despite it all, care and want it all to work. You will need that customer base on your side when the inevitable viable competition arrives, as they will be the ones who can refer or break your new customer base.
So learn from history and do something about it before the competition forces you to change.
LL take up your own mantra and 'Be the agent for change'. Listen to your customers and take the opportunity to make a difference.
Yes, the fun business model of 'let's do our own thing and party along as we go', was fine when you started out. LL has upped the stakes and wants to present themselves as a serious business. It's time to grow up and get serious about the business.
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Wendel Gascoigne
Registered User
Join date: 19 May 2005
Posts: 226
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08-04-2006 01:27
/signed
Great list Katykiwi, Cristiano and others.
I can only hope that it will be printed out and will appear in some management meeting at LL.
Wendel
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Zonax Delorean
Registered User
Join date: 5 Jun 2004
Posts: 767
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08-04-2006 01:47
I totally agree with the OP! Good points!
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Selador Cellardoor
Registered User
Join date: 16 Nov 2003
Posts: 3,082
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08-04-2006 02:21
From: Cristiano Midnight To the Linden(s) who think the Love Machine is a professional way to develop
I appreciate the desire to want to make developers productive by letting them focus on fun projects that they are passionate about. Who wouldn't want to work in that environment? The problem is, there are lots of not so fun projects that need fixed. A complex system like Second Life, at the stage it is at, needs a clear, profesisonal, solid development plan with milestones, rock solid QA, and community input in setting priorities.
Detachable menus, fading pie menus, and Matrix stop action photo modes are all well and good, but not at the expense of making current functionality more complicated (or just removing it altogether in favor of more complicated functionality with less functionality). No one is ever going to agree on the true priorities, but there are a couple fundamental ones that seem to be missed:
1) Quit breaking things that work.
2) The build tools, above all else in SL, must be fixed - they have been broken for far too long for such important functionality. Nearly everything in SL involves their use in some way, and there is no excuse for the number of bugs that remain. I stopped teaching building and building in SL altogether because of how unstable the build tools are. I got tired of prims moving, things resizing, disappearing, or just not behaving as intended.
3) Progress is not adding complexity - the snapshot UI is an example of techinical overkill. If you wanted to add all these options, they should have been put into an advanced settings tab - they should not be the primary interface. The origianl interface was clean, unobtrusive, and has worked beautifully forever. The new funtionality is not only more complicated, it lacks functionality that the previous version had.
4) The more you allow the interface to be customizable and interacted with, the more users will develop their own solutions to problems. I know this requires fundamental restructuring of the system, but it is a model that worked beautifully for World of Warcraft and could do wonders for allow people to improve their experience themselves while taking a load off of developers.
5) Do not add things that change current behavior, especially long standing behavior, without making it optional. The new chat changes are an example - you have people hopping all over the place because someone thought an arbitrary change was for the better. It wasn't. Give people choice.
6) Give more than lip service to user input. The users themselves are Linden Lab's best resource for development input - we actually use the tools far more than LL does collectively. Make things like the voting tool more meaningful, and let us be part of the process. You can't please everyone, but you can get a feel for what priorities are outside of Linden Lab.
7) Communicate - Linden Lab has always been open, but you can never have enough communication. I wish they would print this out, frame it, and hang it in their office somewhere very visible. |
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Alan Palmerstone
Payment Info Used
Join date: 4 Jun 2004
Posts: 659
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08-05-2006 14:04
/signed
Great posts from all.
The permission thing is just insane. It's three bits of information, how can it possibly spontaneously change? Yet, it does, and often.
I seriously have to wonder if there are any Lindens doing any serious building or scripting. A lot of these issues would be totally obvious to them. Hell, in addition to whatever QA team they have, maybe they could assign a building/scripting project to one of their happy employees. Some of them still have to want to build, right? Give them an alt and send them to the sandbox.
Isolated attempts to reproduce the kind of bugs we are seeing won't always work. When trying to confirm the some of the odd things I have come across, I can see nothing wrong the first few times, then it all goes to shit for a while, then works again.
If a bug is marked by a Linden as "Cannot Reproduce" maybe they could send out a Linden to discuss it with the user who reported it. They used to do this when the bug was intruiging enough, as I have had Doug and other lindens out to our sim when things started going weird.
I think some sort of structure and task lists will have to be imposed on the LL workers, since it is becoming obvious to a lot of people that there are some that cannot be relied upon to put the needs of their customers over their own.
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Visit Parrot Island - relax on the beach, snuggle at the waterfall, ride the jetskis, make a movie and buy a pool!
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SuezanneC Baskerville
Forums Rock!
Join date: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 14,229
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08-05-2006 14:20
From: Wanda Rich no, I got a mail from a Linden tonight regarding a bug I filed 2 months ago I guess I'm just a grouch but I would really like to get the responses to bug reports while the version the bug occured in is still in use. Also it would nice if they could respond while a person can still remember filing the bug report.
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So long to these forums, the vBulletin forums that used to be at forums.secondlife.com. I will miss them.
I can be found on the web by searching for "SuezanneC Baskerville", or go to
http://www.google.com/profiles/suezanne
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http://lindenlab.tribe.net/ created on 11/19/03.
Members: Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard,
Robin, and Ryan
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David Valentino
Nicely Wicked
Join date: 1 Jan 2004
Posts: 2,941
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08-05-2006 14:32
Above all, please fix the building tools. I just lost an entire build with things going haywire after I did a multiple select. Prims moving on their own, things resizing, things shifting angles. Textures flickering off and on. It was a nightmare. Now I'm back to starting from scratch and scolding each prim repeatedly so that it will behave.
Great list Katy!
/signed
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David Lamoreaux
Owner - Perilous Pleasures and Extreme Erotica Gallery
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Tikki Kerensky
Insane critter
Join date: 12 Aug 2004
Posts: 687
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08-05-2006 16:21
From: katykiwi Moonflower
TO THE LINDEN(S) WHO BROKE CHAT:
Before you broke this the cursor would stay in the chat field when you clicked your mouse on something else in world and all we had to to was type and the chat would be right where it belonged. Now the cursor leaves the chat field and you end up jumping in the air and having to click the chat field each time you want to chat.
It's been MONTHS since shift + home worked in the chat input. Still works fine in IM input. Put the cursor back at the beginning of your text, highlighting it all.. so you can delete it in one swell foop. Sure, there's workarounds... but why should we have to use a workaround when the original was so much more convenient!
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Pudding takes away the pain, the pain of not having pudding.
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Wanda Rich
Registered User
Join date: 22 Apr 2006
Posts: 320
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08-05-2006 17:49
From: SuezanneC Baskerville I guess I'm just a grouch but I would really like to get the responses to bug reports while the version the bug occured in is still in use. Also it would nice if they could respond while a person can still remember filing the bug report. well it was that old bug of a texture being skewed on one face of a cube when it was made into a triangle shape. I was asked if i was still experiencing the problem which after checking i could see i was.  |
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Bulldog Liberty
Bulldog POWEEEEEER!
Join date: 22 Nov 2005
Posts: 50
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08-05-2006 23:42
Great list! /signed BTW Lindens, I think there may be a bug in My bank account. This means that you won't get the correct amount of money from Me. Send a bug report to Me, and I'll fix it, one day... Seriously though, LL needs to pull it's socks up and look sharp. How long before another online world opens up? Once that happens, LL is so gonna crash and burn! As it is, I am looking for an alternative place as I am so sick of the bugs and lack of action.  Bulldog
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*X*Bulldog POWEEEERRRR!*X*
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Mike Westerburg
Who, What, Where?
Join date: 2 May 2004
Posts: 317
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08-06-2006 00:27
/signed
I want to add to this list if I may:
Stop adding new bling features. Bring on the updates that you have promised and teased us with for years now. Where is the latest version of Havok or a replacement physics engine such as the Unreal Physics engine? It is very tiring to limit a physics enabled vehicle to 31 prims while someone can have their manlyhood made of 254 prims. It is tiring to have to try and figure out new ways to texture stuff so my 29 prim plane doesn't look like Cubey's 29 prim plane... Has anyone even pondered that even if Havok 4 doesn't have all the super cool stuff, it will at least support Physics LOD and perhaps better colision detection that we could use to build structures that are more griefer resistant. (there was a post regarding guns and barracades and why the physics engine sucks at detecting collisions which allows bullets to fly beyond a prim wall) and correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the physics engine responsible for the actual creation and in-world management (collision detection) of the primitives? So with an improved physics engine perhaps we could get some prims we want such as a box with rounded corners and the great torus perhaps can be less of a physics hog?
Bring on the new rendering engine you have teased us with snapshots of in-world renders, even an in-world snapshot hunt game where all we got for it is a bit of drool over vaporware. Perhaps then we could find more solace in an overly complicated snapshot mini-game as the final boss fight would be worth it.
Bring on Object to Object communication-may be used as a griefing tool but so what, lack of tools don't stop them now.
Bring on MONO- We are told to manage our scripts better and that bad coding could be a source of lag, give us the proper coding tools then to do it right, we are stuck with a cheap form of BASIC while the rest of the world is using .NET (and others, just an example)
Bring on the promised HTML on a prim-the in-world help browser is cute but not what we (I at least) were expecting, a big deal was made to help fix some bugs including winning an island with full years paid tier for the first one to kill a major bug in the open source of Mozilla, by now someone has to have stepped to the plate to solve this one, a free island for a year, I would sell both of my ummmm manly twins for that...
Granted, a lot of nice improvements have been made, the recent push restriction and the UI customization ability is nice, especially for those who may be visually impared, I do like a lot of the features in the snapshot tool, the ability to choose resolution is good, no more verifying Hi-Rez is turned off before trying to do 30 things at once, therefore crashing. The new sim to sim data exchanges are nice as it improved teleport speed, I do like the speed at which I can arrive at my destination even if it is all grey textures when I arrive. I think that instead of promising major features and posting those plans in the forums and in-world only to have them not happen is a big let down and in bad taste. Heck, I don't even expect the new puppetterring to be integrated at all, just more vaporware...
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"Life throws you a lemon, you make lemonade and then plant the seeds"
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Alex Fitzsimmons
Resu Deretsiger
Join date: 28 Dec 2004
Posts: 1,605
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08-06-2006 01:53
I'll sign this as well.
Up until just recently, I've considered the updates to be acceptable. Honestly, I even like flexiprims and the lighting thing. But the latest ones have been extremely poor, almost nothing but a steady stream of breaking one thing right after another.
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"Whatever the astronomers finally decide, I think Xena should be considered the enemy planet." - io Kukalcan
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Yiffy Yaffle
Purple SpiritWolf Mystic
Join date: 22 Oct 2004
Posts: 2,802
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08-06-2006 13:30
2 more bugs!
Sometimes i lose control over my character and cant move it (no i didnt accept any dialogs). Then when i try to sit down, i notice i can't stand back up.
Yesterday I was standing around (not wearing anything that would have caused this) and all of a sudden random animations started playing on me like Spaz, Stupid_Walk, and worst of all Kiss_Fem! One of my freinds saw that and decided to kiss me back and snapshot it. Also i was stuck in the tying animation to some people for nearly 30 minutes.
I bug reported each of thse but from my experiance they won't be looked at or it will take them a month to even reply.
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