SL must move beyond the Techi Wiki culture

*sees 10 pages of this crap, starts reading a few posts, sees Blaze say that we need to "take the fun out of scripting and building", bangs his head against the desk, and stops reading the thread*

Please stop feeding the troll!

Yawn.

I'll follow up in Jeffrey's thread, its ideas are less controversial and besides, I've completed my contrarian duties for the day.

Yes, Chip, I KNOW there is the option of buying money.

That is one of the concepts the average player may rebel against. And for those who might not like the idea of buying their money from another player, it would be terrific if they had a way TO MAKE IT THEMSELVES.

coco

I love it when Prokofy's rage peeks out from behind the mask of its moderate alt.

~Ulrika~

There is. It's called content creation. Pick one or the other.

Three little letters:

TSO

That is what she is clamoring for-endless income from gnomes, pizza and mazing. No skill needed.

So techie wiki = someone who knows their arse from their elbow and sometimes makes stuff for free.... shit that doesn't sound so bad at all..

I think we've finally found our SL equivelent to calling someone a 'Liberal' - you know, when it's kinda spat out the side of the mouth - but when you took over what that means it isn't a bad thing after all...

It's all smoke and mirrors - pay no attention to the man behind the curtains...

Hell I didn't know Schwan was doin a big freebie shindig - maybe I should donate a few of my no modify houses there - he can set it up on one of those no-prim-tax sims they used to have back in the old days

Siggy.

As far as I know the concept of a "techi-wiki" category of SL residents has not been introduced in LL design meetings, formal or informal. I foresee no need to ever bring it up -- it appears overcomplicated and my instinct is to discard it based on some mutant variation of Occam's Razor. Therefore IMHO the question as to whether the "techi-wiki" is "holding SL back" is based on a false premise.

The LL model of the SL population and how it would grow was always much simpler. From the start the theory was that SL would become an increasingly interesting place as its population grew. In the beginning would be the "early adopters" who were excited about virtual reality in general. Eventually some artists and programmers would find the feature set complete enough to express their creativity and these "content creators" would build stuff. As the content became more interesting some casual explorers would find the content compelling and would buy some of it -- "consumers". A population of consumers would provide a market for those content creators that wanted to make real money -- ta-da, a market is born that only gets more interesting as it grows.

Every person on Earth has some threshold of features/content at which point they will find SL useful and/or interesting enough to login. As SL grows more and more people will fall into the subset whose threshold has been passed. The grand plan is to push the feature set of SL and allow the population to expand until nearly everyone's threshold has been passed.

It was always the intention to start SL small and let it grow. SL 1.0 was not launched ready for 1 million residents, and it is still not ready for that many. SL is growing at a very healthy rate. In fact, LL's main challenge is to develop the platform fast enough that SL's architecture can handle the next season's population. At the moment don't see many reasons to speed up the growth rate -- if SL were to "tip" and suddenly become the next big thing such that hoards of people were joining up, then LL would be forced to throttle new accounts until SL's fundamental system was more ready.

So, even if there were some minority of residents that were "holding SL back" then I might not be inclined at the moment to ask them to let go.

Edit -- fixed a typo

I do scripting and building. Mostly for fun. I do it because I want to, not because I want to create the next big thing for the masses. I did that once. Didn't like it (the consumers of SL are, imho, far too demanding and rude for me to want to deal with. They expect to pay next to nothing (or nothing!) for it and get a lifetime support at the drop of a hat, with me at their beck and call day and night on demand).

A lot of the people I get on best with in SL are those that are likeminded, obviously... other scripters and builders whom you can bounce ideas off and work with. So, they are the people I tend to hang around with, work with and play with!

If that makes me a techi wiki type, then good. Proud of it!

But I think you'll find that it's simply that people who have similar interests get on better than ones who have little in common, as opposed to some huge conspiracy or subset of SL holding the rest of you by the balls.

Sorry Kris, hate to tell you but our techie wiki applications were rejected due to us being members of the tacky-wacky.....

A harsh blow I know... still take heart, although my FIC local 741 union card was recalled, I hear the FAQ is accepting applications.

> Every person on Earth has some threshold of features/content at which point they will find SL useful and/or interesting enough to login. As SL grows more and more people will fall into the subset whose threshold has been passed. The grand plan is to push the feature set of SL and allow the population to expand until nearly everyone's threshold has been passed.

Hmmm, this sounds nice written on paper; but in reality what this would imply is major bloatware. In French they say "usine a gaz".

So, what you need to do is make SL do something very specialized, but do it very well.

As an extreme example, TCP/IP is not overly feature-laden, yet is used daily by millions (billions?) of people. OTOH, CrystalSpace is piling feature upon feature whilst still being a pain to build and link with on Windows, and it has relatively fewer users.

DOS similarly doesnt strive to be Office and Age of Empires and everything else altogether. Its just an operating system, and so began the rise of Bill Gates.

Azelda

Well, I definitely agree that the system is not yet ready for a huge onrush of users.

As for not enumerating the types of customers, where the techi wiki would be among them, I have to say I find that surprising.

The first thing many companies do is analyze their customer base, existing and potential. Given that SL is mainly a 3D mush, I would think that the techi wiki was at the top of that analysis.

I guess they do things a bit different at LindenLabs..

I don't see how comparing a virtual world with a communications protocol is relevant.

One could argue that Yahoo messenger is sucessful because of features, whereas people are leaving AOL Instant Messenger is being left in the dust.


... who then added a whole bunch of graphics and memory and other features and released Windows, bringing computers onto desks across the world?

I think the real secret it to have flexibility.

This is one of the few times I can't read the whole thread... connection is just too crappy, so pardon me if this has already been said.

It's ok for the social player to do what they enjoy, but not for the content creator players? HUH?????

I am so confused.

*applause* Thank you, Andrew. Well stated. I hope it doesn't fall on deaf ears.

If you walk into an artist's studio and demanded that she abandon her vision and start making art that resonates with a target demographic, you'd get at best an icy glare and probably something heavy thrown your direction.

You'd also get much the same reception in a pure research facility.

Maybe what we need is not for creators to become marketing drones, but tools for creators to license creations to people better suited to being marketing drones. A functioning royalty system that funnels micropayments back to a programmer or texture artist would be a step in the right direction. Then people who think they know better than the "techie wiki elitists" would have more material to develop their own applications.

The thing is, everyone else who has been following this thread with more than a tenuous grasp on their sanity isn't much more clear on it. You're already up to speed.

Whoa, right on the money. BRAVO!!!

But you better duck Andrew, someone is about to fling poo at you for this post.

Let go of your confusion and accept the reality as I have. I am ready to take the Oath of Non-Enjoyment and forever pay to produce content for the greater good of The People. I renounce the sin of Fuck-You Hedonism, and will never again log in with any expectation of enjoyment.

Let go of your hedonism Surreal and embrace the service of The People.

"Hey, hey, hey...
Give the people what they want

Well, it's been said before, the world is a stage
A different performance with every age.
Open the history book to any old page
Bring on the lions and open the cage.

Give the people what they want
You gotta give the people what they want
The more they get, the more they need
And every time they get harder and harder to please "

By Ray Davies, excerpt from "Give the people what they want".

*flies in her Cubey balloon, arm outstretched like the MU of Star Trek, while epic songs about battles fought and bathtubs lost (trance remix) play merrily in the background*

Thank you. Though without a doubt this will be handily ignored by some, it is music to the eyes.

"Temba, his arms open".

After Andrew Lindin's post i conclude ..

The people whose RL jobs depend on the Content Creation and the SL Economy are happy with how the SL content and user base is growing.

Think this is a major vote in the .. dont worry about the techiwikkis if there are any .. column

Temba, when the walls fell.