Category: Opinion

What is Linden Lab’s role?

Posted on by Inara Pey

On May 4th, there was a lively Twitter discussion about many things SL, during which, Tateru Nino asked the following question:

@InaraPey @isfullofcrap Question. Should Linden Lab Rule, or should it Protect and Serve? Where do you see it on that continuum now?

This lead to a further discussion on just what people felt LL’s role should be. Given that the company itself has seemingly been trying to move itself more into the realm of service provider more than anything else, I suggested that Provide and Inform might be a better means of describing LL’s role.

I’m uncomfortable with the idea of “ruling” – although that is at times how LL appears to be operating (and outside of questions of ToS and arbitration*) – as that implies an autocratic approach completely devoid of any form of interaction with the user community, and if we’re honest, that’s actually far from the case. Yes, LL frequently suck in the manner in which they go about things, and they may not do things quite as we would like; but they are not entirely autocratic in nature. Were this otherwise, it’s doubtful we’d have the likes of third-party Viewers, nor would we have the likes of sim “donations” to the likes of the Linden Endowment of the Arts.

Similarly, I don’t think Protect and Serve entirely fits the bill because “protection” is something Linden Lab should be doing (and is, for the most part) as part and parcel of providing the Second Life platform, while “serve”, while warranted in terms of customer service potentially puts the shoe a little too much on the other foot when compared to Rule. Again, I’m not saying that Linden Lab has got either “protection” or “service” right, rather that both should be intrinsic to how they go about running Second Life.

Which brings me to Provide and Inform. I settled on these because to me, they are pretty much the two foundations upon which and service-oriented company should establish itself. “Provide” in this regards is pretty much self-explanatory; “Inform” brings us back to the issue of communications, which as we’ve again see this week is an area where Linden Lab pretty much sinks itself once again.

Much has been said in the intervening time between Tateru posed her question and I gave my initial response; some of it – such as today’s Metareality podcast for example, covers much of what I’ve been slowly cogitating over the last week and slowly forming into words for this post (so much so that I’ve actually thrown a large part of this post into the bin).

However, I’m not intending to turn this into another post on LL’s failure in communications (that may well come later, depending on what happens through today). What I am aware of is that even provide and inform is not entirely sufficient in defining what the Lab should be about, as both tend to perhaps point to an outward flow, rather than something more bi-directional in nature.

So, at the risk of appearing to be jumping on Tateru’s bandwagon with her recent, and excellent post / question relating to Linden’s Lab’s message, I’m going to throw this question out to the wind and see what comes back:

How do you – as succinctly as possible – see the Lab’s role, and how would you sum it up into a suitable expression?

*ETA as I totally forgot to ensure that remained after editing this piece. Mea culpa.

Something is rotten in the state of Battery Street

Posted on by Inara Pey

Alex Hayden carries an interesting blog post today. It appears that, for a limited time period, Linden Lab are offering “Starter Homes” to SL users.

No, not “Linden Homes”, available to Premium Members only, but “Starter Homes”, available to anyone who wants them.

The LL email on Starter Homes

For anyone who has chosen a Linden home, the e-mail will appear very familiar: an introductory graphic leading to a web page where you can select your home from a range of options or, if you prefer, an empty lot of land.

Options

The promotion actually started on April 19th, and runs for the month through until May 18th. So what are LL doing? Going into competition with themselves? Are these some kind of “next generation” Linden Home being offered on the basis that after 15 days you must up to Premium to keep yours?

No and no.

The truth is revealed in the offer small print:

Linden Lab is sponsoring the Start Home Program, which will be operated and supported by Anshe Chung Sims. You acknowledge that if you agree to participate in the Starter Home Program, in addition to the Linden Lab Terms of Service you also agree to be subject to the terms of service required by Anshe Chung sims. After 15 days you decide whether you want to keep your home or not. If you do want to keep it you will need to pay for it pursuant to the applicable terms of service. If you don’t want to keep it you won’t be billed for it.

Yup, Linden Lab are “sponsoring” ACS; which, when you look at it, is mind-boggling in itself – but I’ll refrain from digressing… I’ll also avoid re-treading ground Alex covers so well.

One cannot actually blame ACS for this per se – unless some form of unequal leverage was brought to bear on Linden Lab in order for the “sponsorship” to be initiated, as least.

The problem here is, as Alex points out, LL’s willingness to start playing favourites, and in the process, tilt the board in favour of one reseller.

Over the last couple of years, Linden Lab has been trying to repaint itself as a service provider. Well, this is all fair and good, but as Crap Mariner pointed out via Twitter, in the service provisioning business, one does not advantage one reseller over another. Yet that is precisely what LL are going here. Whether or not they opt to repeat the “offer” down the road, it still results in a very unpleasant taste in one’s mouth at the thought of the market being so blatantly manipulated.

Of course, LL may feel justified in doing so inasmuch as there is little their other resellers can do. Their power is limited, and their finances are almost completely locked-in to SL. Again, as Crap observes:

This has been pretty much an ace-in-the-hole for Linden Lab in many respects, and doubtless a comfort blanket for them when they do opt to start tinkering around with more than the technical aspects of their service. Which is not to say that at some point it won’t come back to bite them on their collective arse.

In his piece, Alex asks, “How can you justify sponsoring the Starter Home Program and yet not sponsor a collection of Sims so that the Annual SL Birthday Celebrations can take place?”

Well, the answer is simple. This sponsorship programme carries the promise / potential of financial gain to Linden Lab; providing sims for SLB doesn’t, period. If this scheme is successful, ACS may well end-up ordering additional regions to handle the demand. And if they do, who is to say other estates, their feathers ruffled, won’t be offered a piece of the action as well. As such, the Lab may again feel perfectly justified in poking their collective mitt into things. It doesn’t, however do much for the growing number of SL users who, like Alex, are feeling as if they are being treated as little more than a commodity ripe for the financial picking.

The offer also raises some wider questions as well, such as what prompted the deal in the first place?

  • Is it that estate owners are growing increasingly jittery over region losses, and have been demanding LL “do something” (and, however much we’d like it to be, simply “lowering tier” isn’t going to be seen as a “safe” option within the Lab). If so, this approach is still decidedly one-sided, unless offered month-on-month to other estates, which is hardly likely to happen
  • Is it that LL themselves are worried about the continuing decline in regions and, having seen that the “Land Sale” from last year failed to achieve long term benefits (although the immediate benefits cannot be denied), they are desperate to try something else in the hope of hitting upon a magic formula to recover “lost” revenue?
  • Or is it, again as Crap wryly observes, “merely” the case that “ACS may be squeezing Rod’s nuts”?

You decide.

There’s another aspect to this as well. A month ago, Rod Humble made a big play about talking community and getting back to the family / frontier “feel” of Second Life. In it, he said, “I will be kicking off another monthly roundtable (probably Monday) to chat about getting that family/frontier feel back with an eye to some area-like project,” [my emphasis]. Shortly thereafter, this promised “round table” morphed into “closed door” discussions. Now I may be doing Rod Humble a great disservice here in linking the two – and if I am, I’ll say here and now, I’ll have no hesitation in apologising openly – but, if this arrangement has anything whatsoever to do with developing “some area-like project”, then I’m fast losing faith in what is going on at Battery Street.

With thanks to Alex Hayden for his kind permission to re-use screen captures from his blog.

Dear Rod Humble…

Posted on by Inara Pey

Dear Rod Humble,

It is now some ten months since I last wrote to your company regarding its apparent inability to keep customers informed as to issues and problems impacting the service it provides. And while it may appear presumptuous of me to do so, I feel compelled to now write to you directly.

In that missive, I made mention of the fact that once upon a time, whenever there were problems, or when maintenance – planned or otherwise – was about to commence, Linden Lab would push out an in-world notice. As I said at the time:

It was informative; it was helpful; it was reassuring to know you guys were out there, keeping an eye on things and letting us know what was going on. It gave us a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside. In short, it was communicative.

And then one day it stopped, leaving us with no option but to find out about Things Going Wrong or that planned maintenance had started by experiencing it the hard way: through teleports failing or transactions going astray or No Copy items poofing into the ether, never to be seen again.

I’m not alone in feeling the in-world notifications need to be re-instated, and I drew your attention to this fact at the time of my initial letter:

At the same time we have seen what amounts to something of an erosion in the use of the Grid Status page. Once, matters pertaining to the grid were displayed directly on the Viewer splash screen, up in the top right corner with other useful information. For some reason never really clarified, they were removed. I commented on this to you directly about this on a couple of occasions, specifically with regards to the “new” log-in splash screen introduced around the time of SLCC2011. While your initial response was non-committal…

…You did seem to respond more positively when I raised the issue later in 2011:

Yet here we sit, almost a year on from my original letter and our exchanges, and nothing has changed. This fact was brought sharply into focus by the outage which occurred on the 26th April 2012, and the terse explanation that was eventually given for it happening.

The matter appears to have been the result of “unscheduled maintenance” – although the subsequent explanation released on the 27th suggests that the risk of it causing problems may have been anticipated. To me, the use of the term “Triggered a bug” – rather than say, “Resulted in a bug” – suggests there was a known issue / risk here, even before the maintenance commenced. Was this perhaps the cause for the maintenance in the first place? But I digress into speculation. Whether or not the potential for issues arising from the work was anticipated ahead of time, the fact remains that even as unscheduled maintenance, there was an opportunity to inform users of what was about to happen ahead of time.

Indeed, can you not see how much better it would have been if there had been an in-world broadcast that the work was about to commence? While such a broadcast would not have prevented the subsequent outage, it would have given fair warning to those already in-world and encouraged them to proceed with care, rather than people suddenly and unceremoniously booted out of SL and bewildered as to why. Of course, you did provide the log-in warning for people attempting to log back in to SL – but really, that was pretty much akin to saying to someone, “This may hurt,” after you’ve suddenly kicked them in the shin.

It is hard to fathom why Linden Lab appears determined not to re-implement such warnings – and I can only take it as a determination on your part, given that a) it’s almost a year since the idea was mooted both personally with you and with the likes of Viale Linden and despite the positive feedback, nothing further has happened; and – more particularly and relevantly – b) it appears that the JIRA (VWR-20081) from Marianne McCann remains unassigned. Further, given the lack of feedback following Oz’s comment from May 2011, it would appear that “support and ops” simply weren’t interested enough in the idea to warrant any such feedback; which in itself could be seen to speak volumes.

There can’t be any technical issues as to why in-world notices cannot be re-implemented; after all, they are used to give warning during the weekly server roll-outs. This being the case, one can only assume that in-world notices are not used is down to a complete lack of interest / concern on the Lab’s part, and the same holds true for providing links to the Grid Status page on the Viewer’s splash screen.

I know that from our direct exchanges that you feel you have, as CEO, been far more communicative than your predecessors at Linden Lab – and I’m not about to deny the fact that you have. But reaching out on Twitter or Plurk  – as welcome as it is – is no substitute for ensuring your company is fully and properly engaged in the process of communicating with its users through the channels that are most likely to reach the majority of said users.

To be more succinct: when it comes to keeping people informed of matters of import that may impact the Second Life platform, the most appropriate place for Linden Lab to communicate with its users is through the platform – Viewer and website. Everything else should be seen as a secondary or back-up means of getting the word out.

So again, why oh why do you, as a company, refuse to accept this?

No-one expects Linden Lab to handle everything perfectly; there will always been times when the unpredictable and/or the unexpected happens. There will be times with the best will in the world, the sky falls in or SL simply blows a raspberry at everyone and disappears up its own left nostril. We don’t expect you to be superhuman in your efforts to communicate.

But we do ask that the company communicates, and does so through the channels most likely to reach the majority of your users. When it comes to notifying us of the need for grid maintenance – whether it is scheduled or not – or in informing us of issues that may impact our use of the platform, then the channel most likely to reach the majority of your users is in-world notifications. As such, it’s hard not to interpret the ongoing refusal to make any attempt to do so as anything less than a cavalier disregard as to how users might be affected by either the need for immediate maintenance or by known issues.

And frankly, we deserve better than that.

Yours sincerely,

Inara Pey.

SL9B and mixed messages

Posted on by Inara Pey

It’s now a week since Linden Lab gave, somewhat abruptly, the news that they’ll (for this year at least) not be involved in organising SLB celebrations, and reactions continue to rumble on. I say “this year at least”, because the negative response to the announcement on the official forums was enough to draw official comment from the Lab, which began:

Having seen the feedback in this thread and elsewhere about the plan for SL9B celebrations, we wanted to elaborate a bit about why we’ve decided to focus on promoting numerous events hosted by the community this year, rather than hosting a centralized celebration as we have in the past. [My emphasis.]

While it is likely that LL won’t reverse the decision with the passage of time, that they have qualified it is reason enough for me to extend the same courtesy.

Opinions are fairly split on the approach. Tateru and Hamlet Au appear broadly supportive of the issue – although Tateru does admit to having something of a centralised clearing-house of four sims to provide an anchor for celebrations across the grid when organising SL3B. Others remain convinced that in not having a central point for builds and at least some events rather does take the shine off of things. Crap Mariner has analysed the state of play on the Grid as a whole, and come up with an approach that, while not without one or two issues, has much merit.

For my part, I still remain of the opinion that the lack of some in-world focal-point, supported by Linden Lab in terms of region provisioning, is to be lamented. Again, it doesn’t have to be a bucketful of sims lagged-out from here to kingdom-come (although I didn’t find lag at SL8B to be anywhere near the nightmare of SL7B).

More to the point, there is the way in which the announcement has been handled – something that Gianna Borgnine raised during last week’s Metareality podcast. However the announcement is enthusiastically dressed-up by Linden Lab, it still comes down to it being a further step in their withdrawal from active participation within Second Life more than it is about “giving back” or “returning” anything to the community as a whole.

If I’m completely honest, in this regard, the blog post shouldn’t really have been a surprise at all; over the last twelve months we’ve seen Linden Lab gradually withdrawing from active involvement in Second Life as they seek to shift their operating paradigm away from being the provider of a virtual world to the supplier of a platform and a richly diverse box of tools. Truth be told even further, there’s actually nothing wrong with the approach, providing it is done consistently and openly. There is nothing wrong with the company stepping back in this way, cries of the “gamification” of SL notwithstanding (anyway, since when has the provisioning of tools many in the community have been demanding for years become a matter of “gamification”?).

The problem is, as Gianna laments in the Metareality podcast, in the matter of mixed messages that LL seem to be sending out at every turn. Let’s face it; back at the beginning of March, Rod Humble was blogging:

I will be kicking off another monthly roundtable (probably Monday) to chat about getting that family/frontier feel back with an eye to some area-like project, although some of the early ideas (like you get to pick a prefixed last name after you are a resident for say six months) can also be chatted about. [My emphasis]

OK – so granted there is something of a caveat there (“with an eye to some area-like project”), but the fact remains that a huge part and parcel of the “family/frontier” feel to Second Life was the sense that Lab or user, we were all sharing in the adventure.

Yet here we are, barely a month on, and the Lab is pretty much saying, “OK, guys. You’re on your own.” However you look at it, the two messages simply don’t chime together very well; particularly given the SLB announcement comes at the 11th hour in terms of the community mobilising itself and organising anything of any decently scaled event suitable to mark the event before June hits us (and sorry, I don’t count “birthday parties” held in clubs across the grid as being “decent scaled” events).

Again, I have no problem with LL pulling out of direct involvement in the organisation of SLB – it would just be nice if they a) were open about their aims for managing the platform and the kind of relationship they wish to have with the community, and b) actually took steps to make announcements like this in sufficient time for the community as a whole to respond and fill the void.

Here, as a slight aside, is where Crap’s observations on LEA have merit to a degree. The LEA is arguably here for the benefit of the community as a whole, and it has a large cache of regions; so if any single organisation is in a position to step forward and provide at least the space for some form of in-world focal point for celebrations, they are something of a logical choice. Of course, that they have the land doesn’t automatically mean that it is there for the taking – many LEA activities are planned months in advance and regions are heavily booked. But – had LL given sufficient lead-time as to their decision to say “not this year, folks”, then something most likely could have been done.

And is it yet too late, as Crap asks, for the LEA not to step in and say that for some of their regions (again four or six should do), they will be pushing back the calendar in order to make an emergency provision for SL9B?

But, to come back to the focus: in the Metareality podcast mention is made of the LL / user relationship being somewhat spousal in nature, and while the notion is a little pooh-poohed in the broadcast, the fact is that this is pretty much – rightly or wrongly – how the relationship has been perceived by many in the user community (I’ve made mention of it myself in the past). While it may in some ways seem a conceit on our (the users’) part to consider it so (LL is, and always has been in the business of making money first and foremost, rather than being a “partner”) – the fact of the matter is that the company itself promoted this “partnership” idea for years; so we can actually be hardly blamed for toeing (or is that Tao-ing?) the corporate line. As such, if the honeymoon is over (if you’ll pardon the pun), it would be nice for the Lab to come out and say so cleanly and clearly.

As to SL9B itself, it’s fair to say that as noted, the announcement has stirred up commentary on SL and LL covering both sides of the coin. How things turn out in a little under two months’ time remains to be seen. But given the lateness of the hour at which the renouncement of LL’s involvement in any capacity other than advertising was made, I still can’t help but feel that this year the theme may well turn out to be more one of “if only” than anything else.

My thanks to Tateru for pointing out my little faux-pas in missing a couple of words at the start :). 

AO, AO, it’s off to walk we go…

Posted on by Inara Pey

AOs – Animation Overriders – have been part and parcel of Second Life since not long after the dawn of time (or at least not long after someone figured out how to lose the duckwalk by one means or another).

Today, AOs are a fact of life in SL and come in many forms: some just handle the “basics” – walks, sits, stands; others combine functions, providing a one-stop solution for walks, sits, stands, dances, poofers and other little toys. Most run through scripted HUDs, some run via the client itself. Some handle just one set of animations, some can be configured with multiple sets of animations, driven by notecards; some even allow drag-and-drop. Beyond this there is a whole range of scripted attachments which may also contain a wide variety of animations, often for specialised use, but which also might contain walks, sits, and the like. Finally, and most recently, we have the rise of client-side AO systems, some of which have differing capabilities to one another.

It’s a bewildering plethora of approaches – although in the case of HUD systems and client-side AOs, most use the same core system of animation interpretation, the famous ZHAO (2) format.

As to advantages and disadvantages, all systems suffer from them to one degree or another. Client-side AOs for example, can override scripted animations, resulting in an avatar appearing to jerk around or behave strangely as the two animation clash.  Some AOs can be script-heavy – at least in terms of the number of scripts they contain; this can lead to finger-pointing by those with an eye on public or client-side script counters, regardless of how  efficient the scripts may actually be in terms of resource use.  Recent developments in Client-side AOs mean that drag-and-drop is fully supported – no need to send time and effort configuring notecards; the downside is, each TPV supporting the system tends to require a dedicated set of links within your inventory – so if you do swap between Viewers (using one for RP, another for photography, for example), then this can become a source of annoyance.

Now it appears that Linden Lab are considering the question of AOs, and whether to develop an approach of their own. This has been hinted at in the number of user group meetings, and is now the subject of debate over on the SLU forums.

Some have taken LL’s interest – expressed through Oz, as a sign that the Lab are looking towards a client-side implementation of some form of AO (perhaps animation controller  might be a better description) with the Viewer. However, as Adeon Writer notes in opening the discussion, LL have both the client and the server at their disposal, so are relatively free to approach the issue from any number of angles without being exclusively tied to a client-side solution.

A variety of ideas have been suggested in the SLU thread – some of which run very close to capabilities found in the latest client-side AO system; whether this is because people are happy with that system and wish to see it replicated, or whether it is because some are unaware of the client AO capabilities, is unclear. One idea that has gained support is for having a “wearable” attachment that allows animations to be associated with specific avatars have also been put forward (so you have one associated with your “normal” avatar, another if you have a “pixie” avatar, another for your “tiger” avatar, and so on), with an edit capability similar to any other wearable editor.

The problem here, of course, is that not only are there many potential routes towards a solutions – there is also the veritable minefield LL must tread simply due to the widespread use of scripted AOs and HUDS.  If they are seen to be doing anything that is  perceived to be about to “break” or “compete” with existing content, regardless of how wrong such perceptions might be, they are liable to find themselves being chased up a tree faster than a cat with an oversized dog on its tail…

Those at the Lab are obviously aware of this and it’s liable to be a reason why the matter hasn’t been dealt with before; despite claims to the contrary, the Lab is actually loathe to knowingly break content. It’s also most likely why Oz is taking time to understand the flavours of client-side AO used by TPVs in order to find out what works, what doesn’t, and how LL can work alongside existing HUD systems.

However you look at it, it is fair to say that something needs to be done to improve the current means by which AOs – client-based or HUD-based work. Neither is, from the perspective of the new user, a particularly elegant solution and requires something of a learning-curve in order to understand. Developing an alternative that is both easy to grasp, and which offers a high level of functionality for the sophisticated user, however, isn’t going to be a simple matter – if only because we all have differing needs from an AO, and the needs of the novice user don’t always sit well with the needs of the seasoned user.

For my part, I long ago gave up the use of an AO HUD in favour of a client-side solution, as the latest AO found in most v3.2-based TPVs offers me the greatest flexibility, occasional clashes with scripted animations notwithstanding. However, I do have the advantage in having several pre-prepared ZHAO-2 notecards, so switching over to (and switching between) client-side AOs is relatively simple. Given that the AO also supports multiple configuration cards, switching between sets is also easy. Which is not to say this approach is perfect; two of my irritations with it remain:

  • There’s the aforementioned inventory bloat when dozens of duplicate links are added to my inventory each time I opt to use an AO notecard with a Viewer equipped with a client-side AO
  • There is no persistence between relogs when running multiple AOs – the client will default to the first AO notecard / set in the list, regardless as to whether I’ve set a default or not.

Personally, I’d like to see a well-implemented animation control system from LL; they have the resources at their disposal to develop something that works fast and well and can meet the widest range of requirements from ease-of-use through to minimal resource demands. Perhaps even one that is extensible and takes into account purpose-based uses such as within combat environments (although that might well tread on a lot of toes). It’s not going to be an overnight thing – again, full kudos to Oz for feeling matters out on the technical side. It’ll be interesting to discover what – if anything – does develop down the road, and whether we will see anything emerge from LL in terms of AO system development / implementation.

SL9B: end of an era?

Posted on by Inara Pey

Linden Lab have issued a call to help with SL9B celebrations, which reads in part:

Second Life’s 9th Birthday is coming up in June! This year it’s all about you — the denizens of the grid, the sultans of Second Life  and connoisseurs of creativity— and we want to highlight the many unique and innovative ways the community has made Second Life their own.

This year we will focus the spotlight on community events.  No one throws a better event or party than the Second Life community! If you’re having an event to celebrate Second Life turning nine, we want to know about it!

On the surface, this sounds great – until one realises that what is in fact being announced here is effectively the end of an era.

In previous years, Second life’s birthday has been marked through a coming-together of the community as a whole on a set of regions supplied by Linden Lab, to create a glorious theme park of builds and ideas created around a central theme, and in and around which parties and celebrations can be held. While not always free from controversy and acrimony, this approach provided a focal point for events and activities marking SL’s birthday, and helped to bring together residents from across the grid.

SL8B sims – not this year

Well, not any more.

Hidden within this announcement is the fact that this year there will be no large-scale provisioning of regions by LL; no central place to explore (lag and all) and see builds great and small and enjoy the thrill of celebration and discovery.

And this is a shame.

The SL8B events have traditionally been a marvellous way for the many talents and groups across SL to showcase their work, their talent and their vision. It’s hard to see how such an infinite diversity of ideas and vision can be replicated through a process of complete de-centralisation; one cannot imagine sim / estate owners  / groups developing large-scale builds specifically for SL9B, especially with so broad a theme as has been offered.

NY HealthScape roller coaster, SL8B – just one of the amazing and informative builds

I’ll personally miss the great gatherings like SL8B and its predecessors. I’ll miss the ability to wander through sim after sim of incredible builds, meeting talented content creators and designers and learning about the unique work of groups such as NY HealthScape.

Why LL have chosen to go this route is hard to fathom. Certainly, as mentioned above, previous SLB events haven’t been entirely free from controversy or headaches – but such upsets have rarely intruded into people’s overall enjoyment of the events themselves, and it is fair to say that where drama has occurred, it’s been somewhat confined to those involved, going largely unnoticed among those from across the grid who have attended events within the SLB sims and spent time exploring the exhibits.

As it stands, this announcement in some way reads less like a call for celebration and more like a renouncement of involvement in a key event in SL’s annual calendar.

And at the risk of repeating myself, that’s a shame.