Questions for Philip and Robin part 2

Hi Robin, Torley et al.

Robin, thanks for your reply in this post on this forum over the weekend. The semi-planned down time gave me a while to think.

Just in case I can't get to the meeting(s), and maybe to influence the agenda a bit at your end if it's not set yet, I have the following thoughts that you might like to comment on.

Whilst it would be nice if every decision LL makes could be discussed in world or in the fora, it's not reasonable. Some are clearly outside of our (the resident's) purview - the actual decisions about hiring and firing for example. Decisions about buying new servers and installing them almost certainly LL decisions, although we might like to have some influence over their supply rate, decisions about upgrades yours, although hopefully listening to residents if performance starts to go pear shaped as their are upgrades.

There are a host of in-world "social" decisions - p2p for example that are discussed (usually anyway).

Then there are the in-between ones. The change in signs-up being the most obvious example. I would like to think that LL doesn't operate entirely in crisis management mode. The decision process for something like "OMG, we nerfed texture animated torii, quick patch it now!" should be a crisis management, but the decision for something like removing verified accounts should be planned and considered, at least usually.

So... what I'd like to propose for the discussions is that for changes which will have a significant in world social impact, unless they are taken as crisis management (stopping new basic stipends for example), you take a decision and then announce it in the fora, on the mailing lists etc. and in-world whenever possible for discussion with time to consider the responses before going ahead. There will be noise, sure, but hopefully some signal.

The response of "we need better griefing protection when people can make alts so easily" would have come up I'm sure. Higher ban lines get considered and suddenly it's obvious that white and black list lines need to be separated. That can be implemented so the tools are in place BEFORE we have the flood of alts and griefers.

People will still moan and grumble of course. I for one don't think cc verification of age is ideal, but it makes it a step harder for people to get onto the wrong grid by mistake, and makes it much easier to say "It was deliberate, you're banned" as well. Better access is good, but open access is quite possibly worse, for griefing, for trying to cruise the TG, and (less worrying for me, but not great) teens on the MG too.

You've still kept and made your business decision, for whatever reasons you deem it's the right one. But you give us a chance to respond to the proposed changes so the tools are in place before hand, even if that means the change is delayed by a fortnight or so, rather than a string of post-hoc alterations that produce the need for more and more crisis management patches as one change has a string of unexpected consequences, just like raising ban line heights has done... including the introduction of a caste system in SL!

You make a lot of key points we've been discussing internally, Eloise. A term I've been using lately, not literally, is "chess players". As in, I'm looking for chess players. Some Residents, despite all the noise, have an uncanny ability to cut through and focus and see adverse "domino effect" results of changes that LL makes to SL. Unfortunately, they often get drowned out early on in the awful muck of the mediums involved. To be blunt, it's really like working a spam filter sometimes where we really struggle to get to the core and communicate with our community.

A thing we often wrestle with is how to get the word out--even posting on the forums (awful search too), mailing lists (confusing to some), etc. only reaches a certain cross-section of Residents. Message of the Day is nice because everyone sees (or has the potential to see) it upon login, but it must be brief, and the hyperlinks aren't clickable. What then? The obvious suggestion which comes up many time, is focusing more on broad inworld communication tools, since Second Life can be used as a communication tool itself.

I'm all for doing things PROACTIVELY instead of going, "Oh shit, we really screwed this one up!" later on. Granted, no truer words were ever spoken:



But if at least a fraction of those can also propose solutions to help us help you make things better--everyone wins! This is what we want. ^_^

Also to be specific about our actions, we've been moving towards more means of "conversations with Residents", like blogging. The forums is a closed system that doesn't reach a wider audience outside of SL which could also help to inform us of other important opinions--including of those who aren't Residents yet but will be soon. Those reading this who don't yet know, should visit and bookmark and subscribe to Robin Linden's blog, Be The Change:
What's happening for me personally, is I often read the forums but don't have time--nor energy because of my hands's Repetitive Stress Injury--to reply to it all. I have to condense, distill, and summarize effectively, "What is important here?" and anything that needs to be communicated to my fellow Lindens, it gets done.

Now, some of it is very easy, judging by the number of complaints, things like "PvP Abuse". True enough--but others are way more subtle... User Interface problems that trip up new Resis without the experience (yet) of knowing how to describe their problems, yet they feel frustrated. It's those things we also keep a close eye on, because they are "submarine issues". And metaphorically, we hope to drop mines and blow them to surface and expose the problems so we can fix 'em.

(Example: who else notices that Region Land Usage in the Mini-Map is useless?)

Such are the daily challenges and rewards of being a part of Second Life. But like one of my fave quotes goes, semi-humorously:
Thank you graciously for sharing with us.