Category: News

In my week #35/1 SL projects update, I referenced the upcoming re-launch of the Governance user group. Since then, the Lab has added a further group to the list that people might want to take note of.

The Concierge & Land has a fortnightly schedule (meeting every other Thursday), commencing on Thursday, September 13th, 2018, between 12:00 noon and 13:00 SLT; this puts it immediately before the Content Creation User Group. It will be led by Theresa Linden, and it will be held at the Linden Estate Services meeting area.

The focus for the meeting is described as being:

Discussion & education of SL topics such as current known issues and bugs, project viewers and new features, and general Mainland issues.

I assume the “known issues and bugs, project viewers and new features” relate directly to the land management tools within the viewer, rather than being for a more general discussion on all things viewer. However, the emphasis on “general Mainland issues”  is a little curious, as it almost appears to rule out private estates from discussion. So, it will be interesting to see how this is perceived / carried forward.

User Groups – General Information

There are now user groups held on a weekly / fortnightly / monthly basis, together with the Third-Party Viewer Developer meeting. All of them are open to general attendance by users – but those joining a meeting are asked to keep questions they have rooted to the topics covered by each of the meetings.

So, for example, the Simulator User Group is primarily for questions on the simulator / back-end services; questions relating to governance issues, cannot be answered at these meetings. Similarly, specific content creation questions cannot be addressed at the TPV or Web meetings, etc.

Full details of the user group meetings can be found in the SL wiki user groups page. The following is a brief summary of all eight (including the TPV Developer meeting). Click the group links for the individual information pages:

Day	Time (SLT)	User Group	Frequency	Focus	Location SLurl
Tuesday	Noon-13:00	Simulator	Weekly	Simulator issues and technology.	Denby
	13:00-14:00	Governance1	Fortnight	Governance-related issues such as in-world abuse, Abuse Reports, Forum Reports, Marketplace Reports, etc.	Havenhurst
Wednesday	07:00-08:00	Open Development	Weekly	Open discussion of SL development, including open source contributions.	Oz’s Raft
	14:00-15:00	Web2	Monthly	Discussion of issues around Web properties such as Marketplace, Profiles, Place Pages, Search, etc.	Denby
Thursday	Noon-13:00	Concierge & Land3	Monthly	Discussion & education of SL topics such as current known issues and bugs, project viewers and new features, and general Mainland issues.	Land Services 4
	13:00-14:00	Content Creation4	Weekly	Discussion of SL content creation including avatars, animations, and other meshes.	Hippotropolis Campfire Circle
	15:00-16:00	Server Beta	Weekly	Anything pertaining to server changes and public beta testing.	On Aditi: SLurl
Friday	12:00-13:00	TPV Developer5	Fortnight	Discussion of viewer & related development, updates, important changes. Primarily aimed at TPV developers	Hippotroplis Theatre

Notes:

1. Commencing: Tuesday, September 18th, 2018.
2. Date of next meeting (at the time of writing): Wednesday, September 26th, 2018.
3. Commencing: Thursday, September 13th, 2018.
4. Excludes the first Thursday of each month.
5. Date of next meeting (at the time of writing): Friday, September 7th, 2018.

Further:

• All meetings are subject to US holidays.
• Changes to the schedules are generally noted on the wiki pages.
• You will need to have Voice enabled for the Content Creation and TPV Developer meeting (text can still be used at both for comments / questions, as can Voice).

With thanks to Whirly Fizzle for the pointer to the Land Group meeting.

 

On Wednesday, August 29th, the Second Life bug tracking and feature request system will be undergoing an upgrade, starting at 20:30 SLT (so the early hours of the morning for those in Europe).

The scheduled window for the upgrade is some six hours in length, although as the official blog post states, it is hoped that the overall downtime will be far less than this.

The primary aim of the upgrade is to bring the Second Life bug tracking system up to a more recent release of the Jira software used the manage the bug tracker by Atlassian Corporation plc.

From a user’s perspective, most of the changes are of a cosmetic nature, again as the official blog post notes; the most obvious being the new log-in page that will be displayed for users following the upgrade, and whenever they are required to log-in to the system to use it.

An important aspect of this change is that every time you log-in to the new system, it updates the email address  that Jira uses for you from the one given with your Second Life account, instead of only updating it the very first time you use Jira, as is the case with the “old” system.

As well as this, there are various layout improvements and updates to the information displayed in things like a user’s dashboard, and some revised positioning of options and buttons.

Key among the latter is likely to be the positioning of the option to create a new bug report / feature request, etc. On the current Jira, this is located in the top right corner of a user’s dashboard. After the upgrade, it should be a lot more front-and-centre on a dashboard, appearing as a blue button.

I understand from the Lab there the upgrade also means some changes to how they handle bug reports, etc., internally, but these should not see any significant changes to actually filing bug reports and feature requests. However, there may be some additional cosmetic changes to some of the forms used with the system, and if so, these will take place once the new system has had time to settle.

I have been working on a guide to filing bug reports and feature requests (with the assistance of a number of people from Linden Lab) for those unfamiliar with using Jira, and hope to be able to publish this, as it reflects the new system, in the near future.

Update, February 26th, 2019: it is now possible for users to offer their own Mainland property for auction. See Mainland users can now auction their land and Creating Your Own Auctions.

As promised in the Second Life roadmap blog post of March 2018, the land auction system has been revamped, and is now live – although only for Linden Lab held Mainland at this point in time.

The announcement came via a blog post, A Face lift for Auctions, on Wednesday, July 11th. As per that announcement, the new auction system leverages Second Life Place Pages as the medium for presenting land up for auction and for placing bids, together with a new “cover page” listing available parcels up for auction. which can be found at https://places.secondlife.com/auctions.

As per the official blog post, there are a few things to note with the new system:

• Currently, it is for Linden-held land only – Mainland parcel owners will be able to add their own parcels for auction soon.
• Auctions of group-owned land are not supported at present.
• When bidding, you must have the funds available in your account – under the new system, your maximum bid amount is immediately taken out of your account and held in escrow until you are outbid, or win the auction.
• Winning bidders will generally be notified within one hour of an auction closing.

To help people get started with the new system, the Lab have produced an Auctions Walkthrough document, together with an Auctions FAQ – both of which should be read by those interested in place their parcels up for auction (when the system is open for people to do so) or who wish to bid on the parcels currently being auctioned.

Those wishing to offer their own land for auction (when possible) and who are not familiar with using Second Life Place pages, may want to read through my Place Pages tutorial. I will be updating this tutorial to additionally include information on how to create your own parcel auctions in due course.

 

Private region set-up fees and monthly tier rates will be reduced from July 2nd, 2018 – see below (region pictured: Isle of May – blog post

Updated to include a quote from Ebbe Altberg

On Wednesday, June 20th, while speaking at the Meet the Lindens event, Linden Lab, and a a part of the SL15B celebrations, CEO Ebbe Altberg made a major announcement concerning private region maintenance fees (aka tier).

I’ve been saying for quite a while now that I think the balance between what it cost to have land versus what it costs to transact or buy and sell in the economy is a little off-kilter. Land is quite expensive but selling things in the world is quite cheap, comparatively speaking. So I a basically fell we have fairly high real estate taes but very low consumption tax. so we’re trying to adjust this so that it’s better. That was part of the Mainland price reduction, and today I can also announce we’re going to lower the cost of private estates!

Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO speaking at SL15B during his Meet The Lindens session.

As from July 2nd, 2018, private region tier will be reduced by 15% for full and Homestead regions. In addition, the one-time set-up fee applicable to Full and Homestead regions is being reduced.

This means that after July 2nd, 2018, private region set-up fees and monthly tier rate will be as follows:

There are some caveats to this restructuring:

• Skill Gaming regions are not included in this restructuring.
• This reduction does not include grandfathered  / “bought down” regions as they are already priced well below these new rates.
• From July 2nd, the OpenSpace (“water”) class of region will no longer be offered as a product – however, existing OpenSpace regions already in use on the grid will continue to be supported, and will be subject to the tier discount.
• Education/Nonprofit (EDU/NP) discounted full islands will be re-priced to maintain their 50% discount off the regularly priced full islands, with the new  tier rate of US $124.50 applying at the start of that island’s next invoiced billing term.

Linden Dollar Purchase Fee Increase

As noted above, Ebbe has previously indicated (see here for example), Linden Lab is attempting to re-balance how the company generates revenue through the Second Life platform to help reduce region tier pricing. This is being done by increases in fees charged elsewhere within the service.

Thus to help offset the revenue loss resulting from this reduction in private region fees, Ebbe also announced that the cost to buy Linden Dollars will be increasing to US $1.49 per transaction (compared to the current rate of US $0.99 cents per transaction).

Feedback

Over the last few years we’ve seen genuine efforts on the Lab’s part to try to ease the burden of tier for region holders.

• In 2016, there was the region buy-down offer, which allowed private region holders to grandfather their regions for a one-time fee. This reduced the monthly cost of Full regions to US $195, and Homestead region to US $95.
  •   As noted above, these regions are excluded from the 15% tier-rate reduction.
• In March of 2018, the Lab  reduced monthly mainland fees by 10%, while also doubling the amount of tier-free land available to Premium members (from 512 sq metres to 1024 sq metres).
• (Note I’m excluding the 2011 Land Sale from this list, as it was a long time ago, and something of a different strategy compared to trying to lower tier costs.)

Both of these moves were very positively received by users, and given that requests to reduce tier have long been made, I’ve little doubt this announcement will be equally well-received.

One thing it should do is confirm the Lab is committed to trying to improve Second Life for users – not only in technical terms, but also in making the platform’s revenue generation something that is more evenly spread among all users.

Even so, this is a bold move, and one that can only be taken to mean that recent moves to pivot some of the revenue generation away from land (e.g. through the transaction fee increases (March 2016, June 2017 and November 2017), possibly coupled with more recent uptake of premium user subscriptions, has given the Lab confidence that they can reasonably offset revenue loss from the tier reduction through other channels.

Certainly, it shows how far things have come since 2013, when it was hard to see any tier reduction not hurting the Lab’s bottom unless alternative revenue sources could be reliably built-up.

With Tyche Shepherd of Grid Survey fame reporting that the rate of decline in private regions continues to ease, it will be interesting to see how this announcement affects the overall interest among those wishing to acquire land of their own, either directly through the Lab or through any of the major land realtor operations in Second Life.

In the meantime, you can read the full text of the Lab’s announcement here.

My thanks to Xiola and Brett Linden for their assistance with this article.

 

On Friday, June 8th, 2018, Linden Lab announced that estate / region holders can now restart their region directly from their Second Life dashboard at secondlife.com, via the My Estates page.

The option to be able to restart their regions remotely is a capability private estate and region owners have been requesting for some time, as the Lab acknowledge in their announcement:

We’ve been listening to the feedback from our Private Region owner community and we know that sometimes it’s impractical or even impossible to access your region in-world to perform the more traditional in-viewer region restart using the Region/Estate menu. With this new feature, Estate Owners can pro-actively select and restart their regions directly from the website without needing to log in-world and travel to each region individually.

When using the capability, estate / region owners should make note of the following, as stated in the Lab’s blog post:

Since we know that sometimes the reason a region cannot be accessed easily in-world is due to active griefing scenarios, we have also included the ability to restart the region in safe mode, in which the region will be brought back up with all the scripts, physics, and collisions disabled, making it possible to enter and remove any lingering item that may be causing issues. To see the new features available to you as a private Estate Owner, just log in to SecondLife.com and visit your Land Manager page.

Please refer to the Lab’s blog post for further information on this update.