A year ago today....

.... is when Linden Lab opened up "free registration" and removed all the previous identification requirements such as a credit card.

I personally think that's the point when Second Life "jumped the shark", and a lot of our current problems can be traced right back to that point onwards.

What do you think?

Broccoli

I agree, and now they're playing catch up which leads to the current problems you mentioned. Although I'm all for proper identification, everytime LL gets a bad article in the news they hurry to change things, leaving us confused again. They need a few international lawyers to set up some proper rules and imply those all together. Their current way of handeling things only leads to more forumposts complaining about rule no. 234 etc.

Mandy C

Here we go AGAIN !!!!!!


What do i think: STOP COMPLAINING !!!!!

Play the game as it is or LEAVE !!!

The date that lives in the minds off all!............6/6/2006 the being of the end.......Death for some.

You're secretly a Linden employee, huh?

When your car starts making a realllllly bad noise, do you just keep driving it til a rod blows thru your hood?

Personally I think most of the problems, including the decision to allow open registration, started the moment King Phillip popped the first corporate sponsor down his throat.

Agreed. Sad, SL suffered by the wish to get more people to SL.

Morwen.

I'm not so sure about 'jumping the shark' as SL still has no real competition as of yet and is going from strength to strength. But all the known problems arising from unverified sign-ups can be traced back to that date. Problems that have already come back to roost to haunt LL and will undoubtedly continue to do so until LL implements a more robust sign-up procedure.

All that talk about age-verification using that Aristotle outfit (whoever they are) is just the sound of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted and a bit of hand-waving to scare the kiddies back onto the Teen Grid. A better-designed signup procedure would eliminate the need for such dubious 'after-care' work.

I'm not blaming unverified for the problems - I'm blaming Linden Lab for opening the floodgates.

Question is though, how can we play 'as is' when LL keep moving the goalposts?

Broccoli

Although I wasn't around at that time, I heartily agree. LL should never have allowed the huge influx of unverified residents.

June 6th is the Anniversary of D-Day after all.

What exactly are the current problems? I, for one, have really liked the fact that there are many more non-Americans in SL than there were a year ago. LL stated their reason for allowing free unverified accounts was to remove barriers to non-US residents, so I'd say that in that regard the decision was a good one. The only prolem I'm having now has to do with how extremely laggy it gets when the number of residents online is over 30,000.

June 6th...D-Day (Death Day)

6/6/2006 - 666

Coincidence or not...you be the judge.

Umm, that, at face value looks like you're calling SL a game ... goalposts, goals, game.
Clearly it isn't.
I meet my friends in-world. Whether I want to ageplay with them, pixel hump them or merely talk .. I get on with it.
My only goal? ... have a smile across my face when I logout.

SL is many things to many people... let's not get too tied up in this thread at least over the terminology of how you define it eh?

Broccoli

I think if they hadn't opened it up, they'd be worried about making payroll...

Yeah. There are about 12 threads available for that.

Opening up SL was not a Disaster in theory, but the uncontrolled manner in which it was done and the real reason why it was done was the problem. It wasn't so much to bring the joy of Second Life to more people (which is becoming similar to our Ancestors bringing the joy of smallpx to the Indians ) but to give the big money suitors as many potential targets as possible.

BTW.....I call SL a game too. Sue me.

I'm not quite so sure actually. If there had been a steadier growth, with people actually paying to join and/or play monthly, there would have been much more income for Linden Lab.

Obviously it was a gamble for them, but did it pay off? Were signup number far more important than stability? It certainly seems that way to me.

Broccoli

Fair do's .. hobbit getting cranky

Well the real problem was HOW they opened it up.

Their current plan is to prevent those who are unverified from seeing adult Content.

That was sort of their original plan too - but it was badly communicated. You were sort of expected to limit your land to payment info only if you had adult content.

People made all sorts of arguements as to why you couldnt exclude those without payment details - such as the ability not to register, to the "I am 18" agreement.

There was no teeth in the unverified rollout, you couldnt AR someone for allowing unverifed Mature land for allowing No Payment on File.

I think it was their thought they wouldnt get blamed for allowing people to see users content, much like any webhoster generally isnt involved in whats on the websites of their customers. It was supposed to be up to the Users to control access.

Now the plan is basically the same, with the new wrinkle that people can AR you if you fail to self regulate.

Interesting to hypothesize, and hypothesize is all we can do I believe, but overall *if* LL hadn't thrown the flood gates open and considering the effects of those who 'tried and left' I wonder if the actual number of total paying account holders are more now than would have been.

Clearly only a small percentage of total members are paying so I am talking of true, contributing members.

Another factor is the publicity. Even with the removal of verified enrolment I didn't get pulled into the loop till September when Reuters decided to open their agency. This act I'm sure stemmed from the already increasing growth rate and LLs sojourns to the corporate biggies.

There's a lot of variables to consider, probably too many to get a reasonable answer. How many people would be so hooked by the (one week free intro wasn't it?) trial expiration to pay? How many were pulled in even by the negative press? Has the negative press had an effect to reduce interested parties other than the corporates?

I was hooked by day three btw. Payed my premium. A month later created an alt and spent the next 5 and a half months trying to get the alt premium too. Would this have been a problem with the old system? I can't say. Were LLs problem solving or in fact the appearance of problems so frequent pre-666?

Did i miss some thing?

Has LL actually started making money yet? And no, printing L$ doesn't count.

Investors will only keep funding things for so long before they want some return. I think the opening up of SL was needed to give growth the kick (though it probably kicked a lot harder than they thought it would) it needed to get some corporate cash coming in and start making investors happier. Maybe it could have gone better but I think it was something they had to do.

Depsite all the age verification & related stuff happening, I think the next big hurdle for LL will be what happens when people stop paying silly amounts of money for mainland sims. There's a plateau coming....

I agree. Growth is necessary to stay on top and I can totally understand LL's reasons for introducing free accounts. But the main problem is that LL didn't foresee the consequences enough and still don't. Introducing sculpties, speech and Windlight is great, but they should have focussed first on making the whole grid stable enough to manage the growth.

They are, or were before Philip went on a shopping spree and bought us sculpties, voice and a pretty new sky .

For a little perspective, unverifieds didn't come into existance with the open-door policy. Anyone who used phone verification was a "No payment info on file", there was just no way of telling, and it was rare in any case.

I barely got a month before LL swung the gates open, but it did change things for the worse. I bought L$ my very first day, after I spent the initial L$250 sign-up bonus, and never even knew about camping chairs for several weeks.
Then all of a sudden all the places I enjoyed going to got swamped by wave after wave of newbies making things intolerable with the endless desperation of "I'm a cheapskate, how do I get some L$ plz?????"

Opening sign-ups wasn't really the problem, but the sheer amount of people that flooded in was, and still is.

All basic accounts (verified or unverified) are free, and have been except for the very beginning.