what has ll gotten right?

yeah....

but when people first get something (even if they paid for it), the are often enthralled with it. they go around telling all their friends how cool it is and how their friends should get one too.

that attitude is often invigorated when something good happens to improve the product. but that attitude simply erodes with the passage of time and erodes very quickly, if something bad happens.

so perhaps i'm asking... what would it take for people to start saying good things about sl in the volume and at the volume that used to be here. and this isn't a "good old days" comment. there really were more posts about how awesome some new feature was, or how cool sl was in general.

from a positive to negative ratio of comments point of view.. i think if ll got one new major thing right (or mostly right) it would help a lot.

people loved animations when they came along. and people were excited by it.
the same for private islands. and the client changes that helped people's clients deal better with "hoochie" hair and "blingtard" (please note that those terms aren't much used any more).

i do think "rounding out the path" is definitely the right thing to do... because it will give people less to gripe about.

I liked the old shiny better.

ha ha ha Siggy said "compelling" ha ha ha

The fundamental thing that LL got right was seamlessly integrating content development with some (limited to building) collaboration features and hosting, along with making it crazy easy for people to buy things with L$.
But that's just the core idea. The devil is in the details. LL refuses to do incredibly simple things for no reason. Let's take any aspect of SL at random, something really basic, like scaling:

- llSetScale can only scale ONE prim, and not the whole object. Why? The UI can scale objects very well, so clearly the functionality is there and all that's needed is to expose it through a llSetObjectScale function.

- llSetScale fails silently when trying to scale beyond the minimum allowed size of <0.01, 0.01, 0.01>, instead of scaling down to the minimum size. But it you try to scale it above the maximum size, it will scale up the maximum size without a problem.

- The building tools do not allow us to scale multiple prims without enforcing the aspect ratio.

- We cannot scale things using negative scale factors (flipping/mirroring)

- We can also not scale even a simple cube beyond 10 meters, due to low-level physics engine restrictions, I'm told.
Cadroe Murphy could build the ShapeMaker, why can't LL provide such a tool with the GUI?
Why not simply let us build giant phantom objects and define the collision mask separately with smaller, non-phantom, invisible prims?
Better yet, if we can do it, why can't they do it automatically when we stretch a prim beyond 10 meters?

Engineers are people with a can-do mentality. Their life is all about solving problems. They do not rest while there is a problem that could possibly be solved, or a suboptimal solution that could possibly be optimized. LL, on the other hand, is all about creating problems and leaving us to deal with them and whine about them in the forums.

i was thinking about this...

many of the complaints are at the level of what developers care about (content developers, service providers, businesses). but the user base is majority consumers (shoppers, tringo players, club goers, role players, etc), and they used to complain loudly about lag, hoochie hair, bling, inventory, tp, and other non-building/non-developing problem that affected the "immersion" experience. even now if you remove the the developer related complaints, you get mostly complaints about the update and the ibs-guy - and very few other complaints.

Good point, StoneSelf.

Good point. And those consumers represent the ultimate source of income, for both LL and the developer-types. Thus, it does make a certain kind of sense that LL has been concentrating on "quality of life" improvements as opposed to "new technical doodad" improvements, as aggravating as that might be for those of us who want new, fully functional doodads.

yes... but i think there's a feedback loop here.

the developer-types create much of the "quality" of life in sl. and i was really quite surprised when i was talking to one of my friends about shopping as an activity. he said that most of the stuff in sl was crap and didn't work. i wouldn't know this first hand because i hardly ever buy anything (i make it myself if i really want it), but i'd never heard anyone complain about the products in sl before in this way (though i might not have been paying attention).

which is really me commenting that ll may need to improve the quality of life for the developers so they can continue improve the quality of life for the consumers.

Well, I haven't set something to sale for a million times, but I have done it enough, and it is ALWAYS satisfying.

So is aligning textures. (Course, I'm weird that way.) I love that we can align textures, change the shade of textures, etc. - just virtually an INFINITE variety of things to do with textures. (And I have done that a million times.)

(I'm a tad disappointed with the planar thing, though; see Building forum for my comment on that.)

No - some of this stuff is just good, just satisfying, and just always is, no matter how often I use it.

coco

True. I haven't run into that, but most of my shopping revolves around clothes and really well-designed objects or avatars, since most other things I can make myself as well... and there, problems like bad scripting is rarely an issue.

... although I'd expect the old observation of "90% of everything is crap" to hold true in SL as it does in the flesh.

"Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass
of glory in the flower,
we will grieve not,
rather find strength in what remains behind."

cpcp

Hmm . . . I guess so! And if these are the complaints of all my customers, then I should stop being so cranky about building bugs. On the other hand, that gray squares thing, that affects the customers, too, so, well, are they just not able to fix that?

coco

80% of the money comes from the top 20% of people. The project I am working on right now is only 5 sims, but that still brings LL about as much money as 100 premium account fees, and that's not counting the island purchase price. The Wells Fargo project was even larger than that.
Any NORMAL corporation focuses on its best customers first. Try getting Microsoft to fix your computer when windows breaks - they won't. But if you are a corporation and have a large installed base they will gladly let you have special volume discounts and on-site support.
If LL can clean up after themselves and make this a true platform, they will become less and less needed as we can have greater and greater freedom of development.

fair enough

that's rather compelling anecdotal evidence. do you have harder numbers to back up your claim?this makes me think that ll needs two marketing groups and two support groups. one for the consumer end and one for the producer end.

Where Second Life deviates from the norm is that *we* - the end users (or a subset thereof is probably more accurate) creates 'the world'.

In other online enviroments the company does (see how I didn't say 'game!') - so the usabililty of the world and the 'technical doo dads' is more intertwined. If the world is to improve in usability - then the tools to make it so need to be fixed/finished/included.

There are certain things that can be done to improve things overall (in world physics - the rendering of the world - the communications between sims) - the 'underpinnings' of it.

But at the end of things a LOT of the ease of use comes down to us.. for an example of this see what a huge difference the inclusion of the HUD did for SL.

It's overlooked and by some overused - but by letting us essentially add to the user interface this way has made a LOT of things easier to use.. Addition of the HUD (a technical doo dad) I think greatly improved the quality of life in SL.

I can be, often am, critical of SL - there are things in it that need addressing.

But I entered SL 20 months and 3 days ago. I don't think I've missed more than 2 days spending time in SL since then. It might make me very sad of course, but for all its faults it's got to be doing something right to keep me grabbed like that.

Those things have changed over time. Some of them aren't unique to SL, but I am pretty sure the combination is.

That combination includes, for me:

The friends I've made
That special someone
The ability to build (prim-wise)
The ability to make and use my own textures - builds, clothes etc.
The ability to buy other people's textures (particularly clothes here)
The ability to script behaviour so I can get things that aren't just inanimate lumps of virtual stuff
Access to other things. I'm pants at anims but other's make them and I'll happily use them
The almost unlimited diversity - where else can you see a furry riding an elephant as you overtake them on your roller skates? Or swoop down to eat the elephant as a dragon?

Despite the bugs and flaws, despite the increasingly clear need for a total rewrite of the code with hooks for the new rendering engine and Havok 3 (and I've got to wonder just how much faster SL would be if they went through and cleaned all the code and undid 3 years of patches too) there are lots of us that are still here and are likely to stay here for a while.

Apparently nothing satisfies some. If you listen to some folks who pay recurring fees.

Shuffleboard anyone?

Or shall we keep at this wry (and self promoting- i am SO smart and I know better) criticism of something we all obviously love?

Yeah, they fuck up.

Too bad some don't understand that creating a new genre isnt an ice cream social.

Goes back to listening to Dave matthews South African visit.

You suck bitches.

StoneSelf are you kidding me?
You've never heard of Pareto's Principle? Also known as the 80-20 rule? It's pretty common knowledge that in any healthy economy the wealth distribution follows a power law...
I don't think LL should provide any support to "consumers". That makes about as much sense as asking Macromedia, the W3C or Apache to provide support for consumers.
Then again it doesn't make much sense that in this 3D world they should be one and the same.

people are hopeful for sl to become much more than it does. everyone sees that potential - based on what they see now. and what they see now is more in all areas than just about anything anyone else has.no one expends much passion on something they don't care about. the fact the people love sl is why they criticize it so much.

but that isn't the only reason.

as you note...
and that's fustrating and people notice it.

but it's an unbalanced view. sl has gotten some things very right. it's important to remember that.

particularly if you want any critique heard. if one only sees the flaws, then one's interpretations of the meaning of those flaws are suspects, if one can't demonstrate one has a good view of the situation by also pointing out what's working.actually it's exactly because people take the creation of a new genre seriously that they critique so severely.

and to some degree it may be the "we're all friends here"/"we're a happy community" attitude ll tries to project and reinforce that makes it seem ll isn't taking things seriously.

so how much of the complaining is about stuff that the users could do for themselves (and are too lazy to do for themselves), and how much is about ll making it hard/impossible for the users to do for themselves?

I'd say the worst is when LL borks somebody's thing they HAVE done for themselves - such as Gom'ing their business, such as the new deal that puts Weedy's service with small pieces of land out of business.

As forthe things they get right, another one is communication with residents and accessibility to residents. Now I know it isn't perfect, but I think people miss the mark when they say the communication is awful. Compared to other online arenas, the communication is wonderful. Just as one small example, how many CEO's have towl halls with the public and say stuff like, "e-mail me" and actually do read the e-mail?

I know that last town hall was a mess, but I'm just saying, the degree of accessibility of Lindens by us is, imo, phenomenal. And very morale boosting and loyalty building.

coco

pareto's principle is a rule of thumb... and whether or not sl would follow it is debatable. but it could be empirically measured.sl has to support the consumers otherwise there's no one to buy the producer's products.huh?