the final week

LL's loss.

Hopefully not SL's loss. Don't any of you think you're not appreciated by many, many residents.

Enjoy the free group slots.

For the few minutes they last.

I helped people learn to use SL before I was a mentor and I'll continue after the group closes.

It's a bit sad but things change.

I wish I had more of whatever little souvenir objects we've been given.

Time to get those last pictures with your tag showing.

I was mentoring on a help island recently. When one of the new residents said "we do not know what to do here" I almost lost it. I have seen what they intend to replace us with .... an on-click url redirect that I had overlooked as just another sign until I saw a picture of what to look for.

That is a not uncommon sight there. A group of new residents who do not have a clue what to do. Many do not even realize there is more to SL than the help island.

Yesterday I was ARing someone on something (unrelated to new users or mentoring) and even told him I was filing the report before I did so. When he eventually noticed that I was in the mentor groups he made the comment that he could not believe LL was doing away with us and we were appreciated by the residents. As I was ARing him when he knew I was doing it.

I can't deny the feeling anymore...
...
... the average linden labs decision maker does more damage to the grid in 5 minutes than 10000 griefer kids could do in a week!

Well...

I guess all we ex-Mentors can do is hang out in the Welcome Areas (yeck!) and catch the newbies that manage to find and click on an Exit sign on their isolated Help Islands.

Hopefully they will find the exit signs and click on them, I get asked how to leave the HI all the time. The green mentor signs are less than obvious and only work if you click on them (despite them showing someone with a headset on).

It's D Day. The day LL closes the best free resource they ever had.

All I can say is for all those I knew it has been a pleasure working with you.
For all those I never got to meet, it was a pleasure being in the same group as you.

I will always do everything in my power to assist those that are lost or can't figure things out.

May LL one day realise how much they have lost by letting this resource go.

I hope to see you around the grid sometime. It's a small world after all.

*Blows kisses and waves to all the fabulous Second LIfe Mentors who gave so much time, and knowledge to making SL a better place to be.*

Will a 'mentor' group remain at all? I mean, can't the 'mentors' operate in a more unofficial capacity on the grid, perhaps on a an elected member basis? It seems such a waste of talent and resource, I just wondered if there was a way the mentors could run their own system, much like the helper volunteers do?

Travelling counsellors comes to mind,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Oh there are lots of mentor groups... there just isn't one singlar place that people can pool resources and call on the help of other mentors without being members of other groups. And let's face it, we dont have enough groups. So the ability to call on ALL of the linquists goes out the window... It's a waste but that's just my opinion =0).

2 main reasons I can think of:

1) We will not have access to the help islands. True, we can always send an alt there by signing up new, but forget any use of no-transfer items your main has. We also lose the resources and access to other mentors, which I found invaluable when I was on a community gateway and a new resident was speaking a language I did not understand.

2) LL now has a choice between a really bad new user experience and selling those servers while foisting the load onto community gateways. True, community gateways will help any new resident, but they pay tier and are designed to help a specific population (which will then be served less do to more resource competition).

Essentially, while mentors are getting the pain over this now, it will be the new residents in the long run.

BTW, anyone else wondering if this forum area will get deleted today too?

Well put and thanks for the fun I have had for the last 3 and a half years as a mentor. But I will continue helping wherever I can as that was the why I became a mentor in the first place

It's the Final Countdown!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd42-uTLErM

In bitterness, I say that from tonight on I expect to see posts along the lines of "Why was I removed from Mentor's group!?!?" for at least a week or two. (>_<

My reply will be the same as it was when LL put out the survey that chopped the group by more than half: "Pay attention" (T_T)

After which they bragged about how many they had removed. Which caused the rest of us to not be rah-rah for LL anymore.

At around 1:30 SLT the groups still exist, but I was not able to start a group chat, teleport to a non-public Help Island, or teleport to SLVEC.

I took snapshots of the "Final Notice" for the Mentor and Instructor group, and of the messages reporting the failure of group chat, Help Island access, and SLVEC access.

Then I answered a question about deformed avatars from someone on Help Island Public.

They must have put up something to not let us back on the HIs rather than actually just remove us from the group. I was last on a HI this morning, so my home was set to there. When I just logged into my home location it somehow put me at my last non-HI home.

Then when I went to talk on the group chat (since the group was not disbanded yet) I couldn't. Maybe they will add an even further insult and not even force us to leave the group (which we can now not use to communicate anyway).

It appeared that the Scribes and Linguists were able to chat long after the rest of the Mentor group was not.

The Search Groups still lists the group, but when you click to see the group profile, you get a message that the group's privacy settings don't allow it to be displayed, not a message that the group is actually missing.

I wonder if the Scribes and Linguist are still in the group. LL could have a special plan for them. This is purely speculation.

Even stranger ...
From search I get the privacy notification on it, but it lists 1549 members. Last night it was 1480.

It is no longer in my groups list, so how did they boot us while increasing the group membership?

Unless it is just an artifact of my looking at group info yesterday and only being able to search for it this morning.

Well, Mentors are gone.

While business people learn, that there will be no success at all in virtual worlds like SL, if you do not bring some living avatars with human beings behind them to help and support the new customers to your world, LL kicks those loyal supporters ... who will now care about the green dots on OI and HI?

Dolly Buster just learns the same thing. She got some empty sims and does not bring people there to greet and support her customers (would those helpers be called Dollymentos?), so her sims stay empty. All the time I look on the map, I have only seen two green dots in the Dollyarea.

Those businesses that are successful in SL, have some employees there (or motivated customers) as greeters and helpers ... mentors.

Also: people learnt, there is a great new part of the internet that brings 3D, sound, voices, movement, avatars into the internet experience ... but if you need support for this, LL takes some steps back and uses 2D techniques to tell people how to live in that new world.

And while businesses learn that the best sales manager is a crowd of happy customers that do some extra to promote the product they like so much, LL kicks 3500 of such customers.

Yep, we can all help anywhere without the tag. But we had that from day 1, even before the first mentor started his work. We always had helpful groups and schools. The difference was, that the group of mentors somehow showed that LL themselves care for a good new user experience.

And Yep, it's whining to miss the Weeks of Learning, to miss mentor coaches that helped on a qualification system, or to miss the ability to ask for some support in any language spoken on this planet and get immediate response. Why not whine when something really good is kicked and we return to customer service like actually demonstrated on Dolly sims?

There might have been some misusers of the tag. But the new system will not remove them from the new groups set up. And I knew a lot of mentors that were simply great.

Mentors, you were an awful bunch of great people, thanks a lot for all the work you did.

Thanks Danziel.

I do wonder what LL's plans are for new users. It seems every time I went to a HI there were people who thought that was all there was to SL (or if they knew there was more, had no idea how to get to it).

I am worried that they will shove the load to community gateways. Which pay tier in order to train people in their community and the populations they serve will be lost in the new people who wound up shunted there. Then LL will close the HIs and sell them. A win-win for the lab.

Sad. I started out doing all the usual stuff in SL; dating, being a ranger in a medieval sim, hanging out in ballrooms and shopping. But when I was accepted as a mentor over 2 years ago everything changed. I could spend a whole day online just bouncing around the HI's answering questions and have a blast. Like most everyone else I am completely baffled why LL went this route. The worst thing I ever saw a mentor do on a HI would be categorized as "kinda goofy" behavior.. at the worst. Now we are going to have our new users first interaction with "knowledgable" players be at Welcome Areas *shudders* or at some "join our l33t clique" community center. The excuse that mentoring "doesn't scale" is only valid because LL quit recruiting mentors.

As of now... not a whole lot left to keep me interested in SL.

Now in addition to giving us the boot they take away our forum too.