Reading Radar

Read the part under “Current Performance Issue” carefully. Maybe they should fix this and then reevaluate the openspace performance before making any changes?

At the very least, no doubt this will open the door for claims that their was some LL induced bug component to the poor performance on Openspaces, regardless of whether or not those sims are overloaded and whether or not LL is telling the truth about it being rare, and minor.

They really need to publish the technical details on this one to cover their tail, IMO, if it really doesn’t have anything to do with the performance issues on Openspaces that led to this whole policy change

I think I might have said in the Podmafia Christmas Special that the grid has been more stable than ever, and the client stability has been the best for me personally that it’s maybe ever been.

So, thanks to me, you can all enjoy the lottery, SL style:

And the subsequent Fail Whale, SL style.

Sorry about that. Yes, it’s been happening a lot. No, I don’t know why. Yes, I hate it too. No, I can’t fix it by retracting my statement.

By the way, I did go to the status page, and it said zippo about any logins being disabled today.

Back when it was announced that Big Spaceship would be working with LL to “transform the Second Life Experience,” a lot of people made comments regarding Big Spaceship, or rather comments about who they weren’t. Namely, someone that anyone had ever heard of. At least not anyone who is a resident in SL. Well, ok, no one that I could find. Still, I figured I’d give them the benefit of the doubt, and see what came of it. It seemed to me good enough that LL was willing to get help where they needed it, and clearly UI and non-confusing user experience is one area where they need it.

So when Kat Linden posted that they are testing the new Second Life homepage this week, I thought “yay, let’s see it” and trundled off for a look. Here’s the screenshot she posted:

Crap Mariner eloquently shared his thoughts. I don’t know if I was as overtly hostile, but I guess I wasn’t too kind in my comments I posted in the SL forum thread on the topic. I said:

Please take the “flirt” thing and the woman with boobs that could each fill a sim off … SL has a reputation as it is.

I hope it didn’t cost too much.

Looking at it again, I still think I’m right… this is like a photo album slideshow, not a product or company homepage that’s designed to convey what the product is, and help the world know what to do next or why they’d even want to. It’s confusing. It’s black, as cm/ls pointed out, and it’s wide. And it uses Flash. Crap didn’t point out that using flash on a homepage is another sin, so I will. It’s stupid and unnecessary, especially if this is the result.

There is no focal point. Your eye zooms off to each side of the page looking for boundaries, and there aren’t any. It hurts to look at and try to make sense of.

Based on this one look at their product, Big Spaceship should work for facebook. Jumble and clutter are mandatory there.

I put out a note to Jack Linden asking if he’d be willing to appear on SL Under the Radar so I could get his side of the openspaces. After all, well known companies like Rezzable are publicly questioning LL over the Openspace policy changes. Jack promptly responded to me and directed me to Catherine. I just now sent her a request so she hasn’t really had time to respond yet. I’m hoping to find out some of the technical issues involved and why supporting loaded OS sims at the current price levels wasn’t making sense, and maybe some reasoning behind the original prim count increase on the OSes that people use as their excuse for believing that LL wanted them to use them as normal sims.

I also invited Rightasrain Rimbaud of said Rezzables to find out why they insinuate on their post that the reason they’re getting rid of 6 full sims by the end of Nov has anything to do with Openspaces - if in fact I’m correct and that’s what they are insinuating. After all, the price of full sims hasn’t changed, and if they aren’t making money on them, that’s hardly LL’s fault. I honestly suspect something else, which is that making money in anyone’s metaverse right now is just damn difficult. Oh, well… Rightasrain got my notecard, but no response. I’ll do the episode either way, with or without official response. I can speculate on them the same way they speculate on the Lindens “evil” motives.

I guess what it boils down to is that after watching Rezzables at work since they first appeared in-world, it doesn’t seem to me they’ve ever had a solid way of generating consistent, bill-paying type revenue, and now it also appears that they’re kind of thanking LL for that fact. Which, if I’m correct on both those points, seems both disingenuous and a little silly, frankly.

EDIT:

Ok, I apologize for picking on Dusan, who pointed out the low openspace article ratio contained in Dusan Writer’s Metaverse. And waste of time was a little overstated (ok, I didn’t mean it). You like that? Does anyone believe anything I blog anyway? I sure don’t. But I’m still tired of anyone who IS whining. That part’s true. Ok.. back to the blog..

Ever since the openspace debacle and semi (but not really) reversal by LL, some of the best blogs have turned into a waste of time. Dusan Writer’s is no exception, today’s hilarious post being a bait and switch post with the remark “This post has been a bait & switch post and has nothing to do with SL. What, you think I can’t do that too?”

I’ll stress again, not real impressed with the drunk sailor style of policy making LL are employing these days, but when everyone cried, shouted, and whined that LL misled people into thinking that openspaces were not only for light use by upping the prim count, essentially LL gave everyone what they asked for by lowering the price AND the prim allowance of the openspace back to the original price, and then created the Homestead, the Little Sim on the Prairie, and the “Remember the Alamo!” sim offerings for those who wanted more. With increased price of course. The Homestead essentially equals the Openspace with the increased prim use, but with new limits imposed to ensure adequate performance.

I find it ironic that NONE OF THE WHINERS sees what they did here - first they all purposely ignored the “for light use” instruction for the openspaces, and then they berated LL for tricking them by giving them more. So LL said, “Ok, we’ll make it clear, punks,” and did what they did. Granted, LL has no excuse for not realizing sooner how many people were abusing openspaces and for what purposes, but again, sometimes they forget the people that inhabit SL.

You know what I wonder? I wonder how many crowded venues I went to in the past that were lagged out like a mofo and it was less about LL’s grid performance and more about the fact it was an openspace packed to the gills with bling and scripts and 1000 avatars all stuck in molasses along with me. I’ll never know. But for all those times that was the case, thanks, jerks. I blamed LL when instead I should have been helping you learn how to read.

Still waiting for you people to all leave for OpenLife.

Oh, in answer to Yxes comment in the last Podmafia that if it had really been about performance, LL would have just returned the openspace to the original specs and price, that’s exactly what they did, plus they added some performance limits/checks they were criticized for not having.

In case anyone wonders why I seem to not be as upset with LL over this as much as they, the wonderer, are… well, frankly, LL whine a lot less than you do. I do want to add, though, that apparently LL need some reading glasses as well, because they’re declaring healthy healthy when island additions are in reverse. They’re probably lucky OpenLife isn’t actually up to par as SL competition, if that metric means anything by itself.

Edit: re-reading this post, I have to think that they aren’t saying they had 30,000 signups and 1,000 land orders this week, they mean that’s what they have in total. But 20,774,912 sq m is only 317 sims, right? Not nearly 1000. I’m confused about what’s being claimed here. But I’ll assume they meant they hit over 30,000 sign ups, not that they had 30,000 last week. End of Edit.

Bettina Tizzy is reporting that Openlife claims 30,000 new signups in a week, and over 1,000 new land orders.

Here’s last week’s numbers published on their web site.

Here’s this week’s.

You be the judge. That’s a delta of less than 3,000, and the size of their metaverse hasn’t changed at all, meaning they haven’t filled any of those orders for land yet. Unless I’m misinterpreting what they mean by land orders, and they just mean people buying plots. But from their web site, the only land sales I see mentioned are sims.

I can’t wait until they really do start going through their growing pains and all the people who are supposedly leaving SL starting noticing “hey, this isn’t as smooth as we thought!”

Openlife is taking on a precarious role if they’re truly accepting the mantle of second Second Life by trying to attract the most dissatisfied SL’ers, because when they have a few “what the fuck just happened” moments, and they will if they really grow anywhere near as fast as they think they will, they’ll find out that how fickle people can be and how little most people want to go through the birthing process all over again.

Someday OpenSim solutions might be really appealing when they’re run like web servers and thousands of companies can offer stable sims with big bandwidth, but right now Openlife has to go through all the same stuff that LL went through to get scaled up. The difference is that their code is behind, and they have fewer people and less money.

Look, I’m not bashing them out of any kind of ill will, in fact I wish them all the best luck because choice is GOOD, but to think they’ll be able to sail sublimely through the troubled waters that LL’s already crossed is naive at best, amazingly stupid at most. They have huge challenges ahead. There are going to be problems, a lot of them which SL’s already been through. If people really understand that, that’s one thing.

I just keep remembering the whining about the system skirt. If people are upset about that kind of hardship, imagine what’ll happen when they routinely can’t keep prim attachments on or scripts go wonky, they can’t stay logged in for more than 10 minutes, and their inventory has to reload every time they cross a sim border (which kept happening to me, btw). I hope the crew at Openlife actually understands for real the high expectations of SL’ers if they’re actually trying to pull the disgruntled ones over. You know… the ones with higher expectations and less tolerance than anyone else?

I posted about my tests with SLim a couple posts ago. Testing again today, I’m seeing that if I IM my alt from SLim, the alt’s name disappears and I get a message that he’s temporarily unavailable. Then his name reappears on the list.

If I IM from in-world to the account logged into SLim, however, it works fine.

Anyone else seeing this with SLim right now?

Best last line regarding the openspace sim controversy:

From Wagner James Au on Gigaom:

“Still, one thing remains clear: “I’m moving to OpenSim!” has already become the metaverse version of the “I’m moving to Canada!” threat we hear every U.S. Presidential election.”

Does this make the protesters the Alec Baldwins and Susan Sarandons of SL?

A funny story on the protest from Itazura Radio coming up in the next podcast.

Reading the comments on Jack’s most recent post about openspace sims makes me think Stuart is right. After LL shifts policy, which we know they will do, the furor will eventually die down and people will move on. It happens OVER and OVER and OVER in SL.

Unfortunately that fact also points out the LL does do things haphazardly and then has to change positions. That’s a pattern too. They really need to clearly think about their policies and how they impact people, and how people are going to interpret and use (sometimes misuse) them before they make a policy or policy change.

I see both sides on this. I am tired of the whining and the comments that “you WANTED us to load them down,” but at the same time LL did increase the prim count, etc. I find it odd that people are so naive as to think that if there were issues, LL was not going to point back to the fact that they are intended for use as open waterways and mostly empty land, etc, but there you go. A lot of these same people keep touting their business credentials, but I know in my company, if something bad happens, and you’ve been told something might not work, it doesn’t matter how much it seemed to work before it went bad, the end result was because of your decision. A lot of these self-proclaimed professionals aren’t very professional based on their comments is what I’m saying. They don’t acknowledge that LL stated the purpose the sims were for. Both sides erred, IMO.

People can’t really afford higher tier on any sims right now, I don’t think. I have no figures to back it up, but I think people are having a harder time making consistent sales in SL right now except for big names and really popular content creators. Maybe I’m wrong on that, and it’s something I need to study, but that’s my initial impression. I don’t think a lot of people have money to spend on tier on sims right now. Raising the prices on Openspace sims will never help that.

It’s sad that we have to keep having this cycle of ill designed policy, reaction and threats of leaving for a younger, more attractive VW that doesn’t even have an economy, voice chat, or reliable prim behavior yet, and then everyone calms down and moves on to the next tragedy. LL should learn how in the name of all that’s virtual to make and enforce good policies, and the residents should learn to use their heads a little and quit stamping their feet like little babies every time something happens.

Hopefully I’ve insulted everyone, LL will resolve this soon, and everyone will quit whining into their blogs about how unfair the universe is and how they’re all going to quit, because they aren’t.

Ok, the SLim IM client thingy is out in first look form, as announced in the SL blog, but I can’t really comment on how well it works for a simple reason. In order for you to voice or text IM others using it, they also have to be using either SLim or else the new SLim compatible SL client for you to reach them. And in order for them to use the SLim client they have to already be using the SLim compatible SL client… confused yet?

It’s actually pretty simple, just not so great for getting initial impressions. To use the SLim client, you need a new version of the SL viewer. That allows interaction between the two. You need an account through Vivox to make the SLim client work. And then you need the SLim client itself.

Even though it’s really not a difficult process, it’s just difficult and annoying enough that all the people already fed up with LL (rightly or wrongly) aren’t going to be bothered to try it out. And that means no one to test it with, and that means no first impressions. At least until Saturday, which will be the first day I’ll be home and online at the same time as some people who maybe ARE trying it out.

It’s too bad the process isn’t a little more streamlined. Once it’s built into a mainstream viewer, if LL and Vivox can get the account thing ironed out so you do not have to create a separate one on Vivox, then maybe more people will use it. Right now I’m not sure how many people will.

I like the concept. I wish I knew if I liked the actual function.

BTW, can LL write even ONE blog post without people whining about “ok, that’s nice, now get back to stability” or “does vivox know that everyone is leaving SL anyway?” etc, etc? I get that you’re disgruntled. Posting OT on the blog isn’t going to fix it. Stick to the fucking topic. There’s plenty of ON topic places to post your anger that openspaces weren’t actually meant for your blinged out hair stores. I mean, I agree the price hike was bad, but I’m starting to feel a lot less sorry for the openspace abusers the more they open their mouths.