what has ll gotten right?

i've seen a drop in "gosh i love sl" post in the forums. and i've seen a drop in "ll! thanks for feature xyz" in the forums. and an increase in complaints. and i've seen some of the biggest boosters of sl go silent or move toward a more neutral position. this doesn't bode well.

is ll incompetent? or do they have an unstated agenda? it's not clear. the latter is preferable to the former - it means sl has a future. but the former? it's going to be very disappointing.

I think what you're seeing is human psychology at work. SL made such a huge impression on a lot of the early adopters that it caused them to have pie in the sky expectations. Remember the "will SL become the next WWW" threads? How can you satisfy people who can even posit such silly and unrealistic questions? So, like a marriage, it doesn't turn out to be the magic panacea. It makes a lot of noise when it chews and it leaves the cap off the toothpaste and it sometimes farts in bed. People aren't victims of LL's incompetance. They're victims of the inevitable bringing down to earth of their wholly unrealistic expectations.

ok...

where did those unrealistic expectations come from? and who should/could have corrected them?

What planet are you living on? People create their own expectations and you can't teach common sense to people who don't already have it. We've all known from the beginning that LL is making this up as they go along and that it would be anyone's guess how it would all turn out. Whatever expectations people piled on top of that basic premise are their own doing.

sl has to support the consumers otherwise there's no one to buy the producer's products.

i don't know. ll has press release that say, "Virtual pioneers settle in first true realization of the Metaverse" http://lindenlab.com/press/releases/01_06_06

when two entities are involved there are two entities involved in setting expectations.

ll has been saying certain things that imply many of the implications users have established.

You still don't get it. Who do you contact when you're browsing the web and the website has a problem? The website's support contact. Not the people who made your browser, or your ISP, or the website's hosting company, or the people who made tools like Dreamweaver to produce websites, or the people who came up with HTML.
I don't have any products, I have projects. I don't care about "consumers" or "producers". My clients bring their own audience with them.

*snip*

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.

This thread is not about me (or you for that matter).
The web grew explosively because anyone could setup a website, and there was no central control of anything. LL knows this, and has repeatedly said that they will "eventually" have to give up most of their control over SL.
It's been three years, and I'm tired of waiting. Our lack of control makes us seem unprofessional. Have you ever had a large project in SL?
People generally ask you things that would seem very easy to do but are in fact impossible.
Creating a relatively simple form takes 5 minutes in any programming language, but with HUD prims and LSL scripts it can take you a week to do it.
I can buy an account on a website for $5/month, and send all the email I want, but in SL I am forced to wait 20 seconds.
My current client doesn't understand why it takes so long to make a windowed user interface. He doesn't know why I can't simply reuse existing buttons and sliders, and instead have to build things with prims and textures. Well, neither do I. We were promised UI features in 1.2 and they never arrived. HUDs are not a good substitute for a proper UI toolkit.
Why is it so hard for LL to act just like everyone else in the world?
Content development is nothing new. There's lots of people making money off their websites and flash movies. They didn't need a crazy startup with a nanny-state mentality to coddle an audience for their content. Their audience is, potentially, the whole internet - they do not have to live inside a closed, proprietary system that requires an account and has weird constraints on *development* tools to protect someone's social experience.
Why do we have to have one single world and one single set of rules controlled by LL?
Why can't Anshe setup her own grid with her own ToS?
Why can't *I* setup my own grid and remove the silly delays from LSL functions and distance limits and whatever.
Philip says Linden Lab is "fast", and "bring on the competition". Well, I say WTF, 1.9 brought us camera features so they could better manipulate us into creating machinima and doing their marketing for them. The little estate tweaks must have taken what, an entire day to do? And the camera controls sound like what any Comp Sci sophomore does for their Computer Graphics project.
Bring on the competition indeed. They have guaranteed monthly income from tiers, so it's almost like the government - there isn't much incentive to be efficient as long as you have guaranteed income.

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.

Some of them seem downright miserable, and I just don't get why people pay for something that brings them so much grief. It's a cancer on the community, plain and simple.

Good Q, but understand SOME PEOPLE Don`t have no other choice because the are home bound or other life factors. They have no other ways to enjoy, VR games are their only outlet of enjoyment. Grant you they can "try" to do other things but if they have no control over them then how can they? a little food for though

No choice?

Bah.

There was a world before the net you know.

I seriously doubt that the non-able bodied people are the ones who's goal is to make others life miserable.

Afterall, they truely understand the real trials and tribulations of life, rather than pontificate about inconsequential matters.

Weedy My point was NON ablebodied people HAVE not choice at time how they can have fun..........What nash said about "NON ABLEBODIED" people was really not nice and heartless.

Weedy My point was NON ablebodied people HAVE not choice at time how they can have fun..........What nash said about "NON ABLEBODIED" people was really not nice and heartless.

You're missing the point 100%.

That's great, I HAVE non able-bodied friends in SL, and it's wonderful for them.

The point is, there are ways to critique without being an ass. Some folks simply are unable to do so, and those are usually the loudest, and most persistant ones. In fact, of all that type who come to mind, none of them are disabled to my knowledge. They're toxic.

Your argument is a straw man.

No choice?

Bah.

There was a world before the net you know.

That was not aimed at them, it was aimed at you for saying "no choice", which is simply untrue.

Who made you the spokesperson for all disabled people anyway?

I'll exit here, because it's clear you're not going to get it.