The Lindens are doing a good job

Basically I think the Lindens are doing a good job. Mainly at screwing up the whole game and taking the fun out of the game. This is what they seem to be good at so far. Each update to fix a problem that needs to be fixed they alweys seem to decide to add in extra crap that dosent need to be added. Which in turn causes more problems that need to be fixed, often more of an issue then the problem the update was first created to fix in the first place. So then what happens? Easy, they add yet another update to fix those problems and add a few more extra things,and then, SUPPRISE! it makes even more problems for everyone...Then you have what is going on now...the whole game is screwed up so much, its not fun to play anymore, and in alot of cases you cant even play it due to the problems!

Now I dont want to say the Lindens alweys screw up the game. They really have done a good job at creating a game that is generally fun to play. But this recent update has changed that all around, and things just seem to spiral out of hand.

SL is not a game.

Then What Is It?

Actually I love their graphical improvement in 1.13 and the new features were mostly highly requested for a long time. I can wait for fix of a few more bugs for now

Crack cocaine. Why do you think people get so tetchy when supply problems occur?

If the figures displayed on the secondlife.com hompeage are correct, which are well over $500,000USD per day, we are talking about a $182 million economy. That is a lot of ƒ@^&*! money. Huge companies like Sony, IBM, and Apple have invested tens of millions of dollars in it. Rock stars like U2 and Janis Joplin and other celebrities are not only walking around in-world ( no paparazzi in SL), but they are giving free concerts. Stories about SL have appeared in Fortune, the New York Times, and Playboy, it was featured on the cover of Business Week, and Reuters now has a full-time reporter dedicated to SL. If it is a game, it's far from a child's game.

Personally I believe SL represents a new paradigm for Internet-based communication. Just as Usenet and BBSs were, at one time, a leap forward in technology and human interaction even while being the realm of a small subset of the greater population, so too will the Web eventually become a depreciated technology. Whether it will be SL or a competing product what we are looking at here is essentially the future of the Net. And this trend will continue until we achieve efficient, effective, and safe total immersion.

What upsets me most about this 1.13 snafu is that if SL falls on its face that progress towards a completely immersive virtuality will be delayed for who knows how long. LL made an incredibly intelligent decision when it enabled users to create and manipulate scripts. This was a brave move, and my hat is off to the leadership team for their refusal to succumb to the lure of the quick and easy buck. These guys have the vision. Imagine if you could create and/or modify weapons, characters, objects, and fortresses/villages, etc. in WoW - it would be the most powerful gaming system ever created. If it comes across as a bad decision we will end up stuck with "Microsoft 3D Browser©" or some such diluted, half-hearted nonsense designed purposely to slow down progress so they can maintain their investment in Web-based technologies.

That being said, I hope they learn their lesson about being casual with their testing procedures. You have to manage the expectations of the investors and the users so that you give yourself enough time to make it closer to perfect than the users will expect.

This is what Apple has done since the advent of OS X and anyone who knows anything about Macs knows it's not worth the effort to hack or write viruses for them. Something that will probably shock you PC users out there is that I don't even have a virus scanner on any of my Macs. There's no need - there aren't any viruses. Every time I get a frenzied e-mail from a friend about how I should be shaking in my boots because of the latest doomsday worm eating data and crashing computers I simply reply 'thanks for the warning but this does not pertain to me - I'm on a Mac'. More importantly: they just work. The hardware and the software never conflict. Compared to PCs it is extremely rare for software to be buggy on the Mac. And yes, they cost more, and yes Apple almost never meets it's release deadlines, but what you get is a computer that is 10x more usable and user friendly than are Windows machines. (And BTW if you're worried about some griefer writing a program that crashes your PC using SL vulnerabilities you might want to think about what I just said).

IMHO what is at stake here is not just the future of LL or SL, but whether or not the average consumer is going to accept a revolutionary way of remote interaction - a new paradigm for the Internet. If it survives the current crisis, AND they increase their load capacity (significantly) to handle the demand, SL may very well become the gold standard of immersive technology for the foreseeable future - and possibly revolutionize the Internet itself.

It is a multi-user 3D platform over the internet where users create their own content--some of which is games.
Closer to a scocial experiment or Matrix than a game. Games have goals, "quests," and a decided "end game" scenario.