Questions not answered

I see that the thread in which residents were invited to submit questions to Philip for the town hall meeting has been closed, so there is no opportunity to bump it. So now it can sink into the well of obscurity.

There was no thread in which residents were invited to submit questions to Philip.
There was no thread in which residents were invited to submit questions to Philip.
There was no thread in which residents were invited to submit questions to Philip.
There was no thread in which residents were invited to submit questions to Philip.
There was no thread in which residents were invited to submit questions to Philip.
There was no thread in which residents were invited to submit questions to Philip.
There was no thread in which residents were invited to submit questions to Philip.
There was no thread in which residents were invited to submit questions to Philip.

Ok - move along, please.

Post another thread with the link to the closed thread and bump that one instead, it's as simple as that.

Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia.

It probably wasn't a great idea in the first place, they usually only get through about twenty questions in a town hall.

Maybe it would have been better to answer the questions in a regular "Letter from Phil" answer which we could read on the forums at our leisure would be a better way to deal with the amount of questions we asked? I'm sure many could have been consolidated into the same general question too.

Having said that, I'm sure that we could have happily lived without hearing the philosophy of 'sharing the love around the offices' and had answers to things that actually concerned residents and the game we are paying to play instead.

Lewis

I think posting on a thread is useless anyways - you'll only get the questions of some of the people who use the forums.. and those that do will always be thinking whether their question will be shouted down by the folks here anyways.

I'd have it on MOTD - every log in for a week before the town hall - and let folks drop notecards at an Info hub.. isn't that what they're supposed to be there for?


- el info hub script then gets the notecard - reads it - generates a list of questions and emails them whatever linden is on tard duty to collect.

What closed thread is this you are talking about? I know of no closed thread.

This one

/108/50/92790/1.html

You are requested to attend an appointment at two o'clock this afternoon at the Ministry of Love.

That thread wasn't a solicitation for questions, it was a clever ruse to find out what was of greatest interest to the the community so that the topics could be studiously avoided in the flufffest.

But then again, if there was substance to the townhalls, we would have missed gems like:So maybe I'm reading too much into this, but a firm that is demonstrably incapable of tracking support requests, bug reports, customer assets, or even adhering to their own declarations on how customer feature voting should work, has a corporate mechanism for the internal distribution of love? Maybe that's all you really need - or so I've heard somewhere.

And we did learn that they will "stay the course" and be "caring and compasionate" and work toward "inclusion not devisiveness" and "work hard because it is hard work". I'll decline editorialization on why someone, given a possible a world of rhetoricians to follow, would choose such a great orator to ape, but will note that a recent poll has found his approval rating at an all time nadir.

<send Introvert love> </send Introvert love>

I'm only disappointed in myself for expecting anything productive. One should just learn to accept that "There isn't anything different or changing at LL."

This and other threads indicated some unhappiness with the fact that although I solicited questions from you for Philip's Town Hall, he didn't answer them directly. That's partially my fault -- when I asked for questions I thought he was planning to use the format we've used previously for Town Halls. Instead, he wanted to have a more casual conversation with people. He did address some of the overarching questions but not directly.

So...I'm going to provide answers to some of the questions. In this installment will be answers to some key questions that were asked by several people. First is my summary of the issue, then Philip's answer. In the next installment will be more specific questions and answers.

- why have you been less visible over the last few months, and does this signal some significant change for Second Life?

No change - I've just been remiss in not being as world as much as I need/want to. We've had a huge amount of media attention that I've been the focus of, we've been doing more hiring, and we've also been doing some great work designing how the company is going to work internally as we grow - I've been staying ahead of that stuff, and that is what took me away from in-world time. But I spent like 4 hours the other night, I'm here now, and I'm going to pick up doing these town halls regularly again. I'm back.

- it looks like LL is deserting the mainland in favor of estates. Is this true, and what does it mean for residents with major investments on the mainland?

We need to add better tools for groups and governance to the mainland, so that some of the things people are doing in the islands can be done without leaving the mainland. Robin is working on those group features right now, including improved communication options, the ability to have more groups and 2 person groups, and a completely revised system of roles and permissions. So I think once we fix those problems we'll see the islands used for those cases where you really want to isolate yourself from the community because you have a real need to do so, and not because you want some feature that isn't yet there on the mainland. Also we need to add more mainland features like reselling land correctly to the islands. I'd like to see the functional difference between the islands and the mainland be reduced as much as possible. The contiguous community feeling on the mainland seems like a big part of SL's magic.

- there is increasing frustration with the perception that we are wavering in our commitments, and moving forward without enough planning. I'm hearing the word 'vaporware' more often with respect to Havok implementation, improved rendering, and HTML.

We have 22 developers, and as an example, last month we completed 263 substantial development 'tasks'... as measured by the internal system we use to track bugs, new features, and general company tasks. I think we've moved priorities around appropriately. Take Havok 2/3 for example - the major benefit of getting the next version in place will be the elimination of server crashes associated with complex physical objects. Out of the gate there will be few or no user-visible benefits beyond eliminating those crashes. But right now server crashes are much less of a problem than servers running slowly, so we have shifted to focus over the last few months on improving the server FPS and eliminating non-physics crashes, where we've made lots of progress. I think that when you tell everyone very early what you are working on (like HTML or Speedtree or Havok) and then re-prioritize to correctly match what you are really seeing, you are going to run the risk of making the people angry expected you to stick to a strict schedule. But sticking to a long-range schedule is dumb when you know that the conditions of usage have changed, so I think we are doing the right thing. The alternative of not telling anyone what we are working on until it is ready to ship would also not be a good direction, because there are probably 5000 or so really good software developers in SL, and we will move faster if we get their input early. Hopefully as we begin being able to make the source of different parts of SL available to users we will get additional benefits from all those developers.

- people are worried about the economy, and in particular the L$ valuation

there continues to be this idea that we have a 'price target' for the L$, which I think comes from a quote I made at the time of the LindeX launch about betting that the L$ would go back to around 250:1 because the Lindex would increase demand. But we don't have a price target - we instead are just trying to keep the market fairly stable by looking for whether there seems to be a sustained upward or downward trend, and then changing the amounts we put into the money supply to reverse the trend. So the goal is stability, not a global target. Big difference.

- one interesting new request that has cropped up and was echoed several times in the question thread is the desire for more recreational space. This would come in the form of void sims with reduced prim counts. Waterways in particular of are interest for boating and sailing.

We are looking at selling "void" sims, which are in effect a 4 region:1 server option. The purpose would be to allow island owners to place ocean/water around their private islands and island chains to allow recreational activity and transportation between islands, and to allow Islands owners to place open space sims around their continents. If this idea is successful, we will look at the possibility of extending the 4:1 voids to the mainland.

Please stay tuned for installment #2.

Yup people are - a small subset of people.

Most vocal are a small subset of people 'tweaking the market' to get as fat a wad as they can before trying to get you to tweak it back down.

I know you can check their L$ balance

Prove me wrong

Thanks Robin Would love to see more of this kind of thing. Only a very small subset of residents can attend town hall meetings. For the vast majority of us it's transcripts or what you've done here. It's appreciated.

Thank you for getting answers for a few of the questions asked - mine not among them unfortunately. But thanks anyway for making the effort.

I agree with Siggy about the small group of people who seem to have Obsessive Capitalist Disorder. I am slightly disturbed that you are dealing with the concerns of these OCD sufferers, and yet still ignore the very large number of people who are appalled by the Resmod program, and the way it has been handled.

Here here!

I'm surprised, wouldn't it also more or less automatically produce more realistic physics?
How reduced are the prim counts on "void" sims? 3000 prims per sim or so? What about the possibility of selling rural land at a similar discount, with a 117 prim per 2048 square meters cap in "rural sims" that would have (of necessity) more open space?