An Open Letter To Linden Lab

No wonder development priorities are such a huge and confused mess. There aren't any.

No wonder features promised vanish without a trace or comment - there's no accountability for the individual team members.

No wonder features unasked for appear in the release notes, and bug fixes long asked for don't. There's nobody at the wheel.

No wonder the Residents are so confused. The developers themselves are even more confused!

The don't do so - because they can't. There isn't any planning to report on!

hahha - well you can't say I don't speak my mind

Personally I like the 'reverts to Govenor Linden' thing - but I can see how it piles more work on LL too.

If I understand it correctly, a good deal of the problem stems from people accidentally releasing land - would a popup 'You are about to release your land holdings - ARE YOU SURE?' yes/no help?

Is there already one there? (I've never released land) ... maybe a 'are you really really positively absolutely sure' might be a lil over the top.

At one stage it was a huge PITA to buy land - you had to jump through hoops and weblinks to increase tier and buy it - seems funny that on the flipside it's easy to throw it away.

And that's less moral than running an automated script - how?

If it's published as text on the web, there's a way to automate it.

*rubs eyes*

*looks again*

*still there*

I would just like to concur with Travis's statement.

At one point or another, the things many of us relied on for economic relief have been changed, or it's mechanics altered- of course, that when we were primarily dealing with only Linden $... I can't imagine how affecting this must be now for people like Weedy, when you're dealing with real life money in a virtual game where the developers refuse to take any responsibility for the structure in which it's exchanged. Linden Lab has never made an explicit promises, so dealing in a real life financial business in SL is the ultimate gamble if you can't afford the loss... but it really presents an ethical dilemma specifically in an incident like this where the individual impacted by such a change is impacted negatively. Is Linden Lab libel? No, absolutely not; they've never extended guarantees. Should they just shrug at Weedy and say "Too bad?".. that seem heartless... but this is business. SL has become primarily about business. Like Travis, I miss the event support, I miss the common exchanges and being made to feel like my feedback mattered as a supporter of the service.

Alas, it's a changed world, and it's only logical for Linden Lab to evolve with it. Imagine how much they'd be shelling out for the 500 events posted a day. As teh world has grown, the old Linden style has become etched in the SL tome of history. It's simply not practical for them to do it anymore...

*hugs weedy*

Keep you chin up.

I think the word you are wanting is "liable". Libel is something completely different.

Thank you Dyne

Hooked on phonics didn't work for me

I am sorry for you Weedy, but one day it happens to you, next day to another person. Just like in real life, there are risks doing business in SL, too. In fact, the whole system is very much unstable and changing, thus there's a very high risk doing business in SL.

I make scripted stuff, and I always worry if the next SL upgrade will break them. If it would, that would be very bad, however, there's nothing to do about it, sadly. I take and accept that risk, not that I could do anything else. (Well, I could NOT create anything, but that wouldn't really be a solution.)

Your post was so long I could only skim it a few times.

Section '1':
About your current situation in RL. I don't think this matters much for the subject. Yes, I am sorry about you, but do you think your concerns should be handled differently if you had a well-earning RL job? Would Linden Labs's changes be 'not bad' if that was the case?

Section '2':
Describing your business and ethics. Yes, it seems good.. but... I still ask, if you have witnessed businesses being co-opted or put out of business by changes from Linden Labs, didn't that raise a warning sign to you? Didn't it say 'hey, warning, this place has risks, beware'?

NOOOO!! No more bush signs, please!

Yes, it's like when someone takes all their smelly trash in RL with your car and just dumping it onto another neighbourhood, in the middle. Who cares if it smells and annoys those people -- you'll never EVER see them anyway, so they can just ... ********** eh

Of course, the same people would possibly be upset if someone came to THEIR neighbourhood and dumped THEIR smelly trash.

We've got a small chunk of random Governor Linden land next to our group plot in Noonkkot (how do you pronounce that, anyway, anyone speak Korean here?) that seems to be the result of the layout of the road. Is that going to go public at some point?

You can cover a lot of cases like this heuristically. Make up a list of people who have an "automatic interest"...

1. If the land was abandoned because a group or individual ran out of tier, notify them and give them a week to tier up and buy it back (right of first refusal).

2. If the land was deliberately abandoned, notify the previous owner(s).

3. If there's only one adjacent landholder in the same sim, notify them (or the group).

4. If there's multiple adjacent landholders, pick the largest.

5. Then the next largest.

6. Then the largest landholder in the sim.

7. And so on.

After a week (three days, whatever), go to the next priority, until you're out of options and it goes to public.

For group land, if you can't set it for purchase by a group, then use the group founder.

While this is a popular strategy for all kinds of things, in practice "are you sure" dialogs provide almost no protection. Why?

Because you get "are you sure" dialogs ALL THE TIME.

People get into a "yes, yes, REALLY, I'm sure" habit.

If these things only come up when you're about to do something irrevocable, they work much better. And... as a matter of course... if someone is about to do something irrevocable it's a better idea to find a way to make it something they can back out of.

Hence my suggestion (above) to give the previous owner the priority right of first refusal on the land.

DamnifIknow.

Andrew,

Perhaps if you want a good answer to "what LL should do with XYZ feature" a better place would be a non-flamefest thread?

Argent, I like your idea. I was thinking along a similar line: immediately put the land up for sale back to the resident/group that released it, and then later open it up to neighbors. The system could send someone a notice that land had just been made available to them for a limited time.

I was also thinking that perhaps released land could automatically pay the releasee a sum based on something like 1/2 of the world wide average L$/sq.m price then go back up for sale at the same rate= + L$1/sq.m.

I must concur with Argent - usability studies show time and time again that users often ignore confirmation dialogs and click Yes/OK without even reading the text. So it doesn't surprise me that LL had a big customer support problem with that.

That would be great, it would really cut down on land fragmentation, as well as that nagging worry about whether the little derelict chunks next to your lot are suddenly going to sprout Bush signs.

you have been gom'd.

(but i still hate land scanning)

That is complete bullshit. LL didn't co-opt their "business". They closed a loophole and are making land sales consistent. The land scanners should have to deal with buying land on the open market like anyone else.

That would really be ideal. It seems to me that adjacent parcel owners should always get the first opportunity to purchase released land. If it's opened up for public bid immediately it really makes mainland expansion a lot more difficult. Most of us with large land holdings on the mainland got them by slowly acquiring adjacent parcels as neighbors moved and land went public, and as our ability to cover the tier through sales slowly increased. I think it's really important to not upset that system too much. Not everyone has the RL purchasing power to buy a huge chunk of real estate all at once.

either it's a free market or it's not. make up your mind.

i don't like land scanning. and at a social level, i think it's unfair.

but i think the notion of a free market doesn't always include social fairness.

so...

- no violation of the tos occurred.
- a business in sl that was run by sl users is now monopolized by ll

GOM

in case you didn't notice... this is a technological world and either you choose to use technology or you don't.

the field is level... the players aren't of equal skill.

This is a social world too. If folks can't play nice there is bound to be a backlash and if enough feel so inclined they can vote via the feature proposal or with their tier.

Added:

Andrew's original post in this thread seemed to indicate that the phasing out of public land was more of an internally directed thing, with Customer Support voting on the issue of having to sink so much time into dealing with release situations. I couldn't find any proposals on the public voting feature that seemed to address the issue of public land or releasing land. I have to admit, I don't study the Feature Proposal Voting page too much, so maybe I missed them if they are/were there.

In any case, if the issue was of enough importance to warrant action on our part, there would have been proposals submitted for it? Did any residents ever do that to anyone's knowledge?