Re: Greivances w/ All Recent Policy Changes

I've been quite vocal about disliking the change to the stipend policy, even offering several very sensible alternatives for a basic accounts stipends to be a very limited thing. But in light of the change with Open Registration conceed that even the most minimal of stipends for basic accounts would result in basic acct farming.

Turns out the stipend "mistake" was actually step 1 in careful planning.

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I've been quite vocal about disliking Open Registration in general. The revolving door aspect that can allow greifers to re-enter the grid to cause further herassment has been a major neck pain. But this was dealt with via a long awaited improvement to ban list effectiveness. Turns out it DID have a much higher increase in diversified signups than the community expected. They have added increased verification ability of Alt identities. They have compensated for the lack of a _required_ verified status by reinstating the signup bonus to people who do become verified.

Turns out the registration "mistake" was actually step 2 in careful planning.

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They are building tools so users are gonna have more direct control (via scripts and land settings) over how much confirmation any resident personally wants.

Turns out steps 3 and beyond are in the works.

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So I still believe that maybe a bit more preperation could have helped ease the transition. I still believe that these "in-the-works" choices may have been met less violently by the community (even if still vocally) if they had been announced ahead of time so that we understood BEFORE complaining that these aspects were planned as a series of things and were not blind choices.

There are still things needing dealt with. Still more loopholes to plug due to greifing still being easier than before. But I'll conceed that Linden Lab as a company has been reacting fairly quickly to address issues that have come up because of the plan-in-progress. You implimented the ban lines quickly to make an immediate benifit. Though it was an improvement you very quickly reacted to the need of the two ban features to be decoupled. You gave a bonus to people who now CHOOSE to give information to ensure they are accountable and means to discover who chooses NOT to be accountable.

With a safe assumption of more (still yet unknown) plans in the works I've regained much of my prior confidence in the direction SL is heading. I'm still vocal about my greivances but I have hope that the path being taken is one of improvement.

Thank you for having this community, environment and game available to the public to enjoy. Keep up your work.

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I recall the group tools being estimated no sooner than a .15 release somewhere. With these being brought out in .12 this restores very much of my faith in the system. Great Job LL.

Thanks for the vote of confidence Seronis!

We'll continue our efforts to be as transparent as we can about the changes we make to Second Life. As I mentioned elsewhere, sometimes we can spend a lot more time working with residents in advance of a change (group tools for example) so that there's less surprise about the change when it's implemented.

Sometimes we find ourselve making changes that might feel unilateral to the community, but are business decisions that we feel we have to make. In these cases getting feedback would be disingenuous because the business choice has been made. However, better communication in these instances, as with implementing Open Registration, would ease the transition, and I will try to make sure we do a better job with this.