blog.secondlife.com — Linden Labs, creators of the online community Second Life, have generated an outcry with the recent notice they are closing their online forums, stating that they are unmanageable. Many claim that the closure is an attempt to silence criticism. Once known for its strong community, is Linden Labs recent push for growth coming at its expense?
Aug 13, 2006 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountAug 13, 2006
Damn you Linden Lab. NOOOoooooooooo......
khanneasuntzuAug 13, 2006
Linden Labs will be *hard* pressed to repair or overhaul SL in the current format. They built themselves wedged in a room full of porcelain vases and only a major overhaul of the game will save them. I think they are geeks who had an imperfect understanding of game/VR design when they started in 2003. Now they are stuck in the format (like a tank with so many guns it can hardly move) and no one on the outside will invest in the game with a massive porn industry (onethird of a multi-million dollar economy) ...PLUS a vibrant BDSM/perv/child porn underground. Some aspects of SL are NASTY.I bet Google would love to invest in the formula, people would love to buy in-world add banners but with that dark cloud hanging overhead in the game RW investors won't touch it. I love SL dearly but I fear the thing is hemorrhaging to death. SL has only one brief chance before the other major MMO's come online next year. They need to go to a million subscribers. To do that they obviously deal with the game as a souped up chat platform. With a million subscribers (even though most of those are offliners and alts) they have a better argument under their belt for investors. I think it is obvious the forums were a losing proposition ... however closing them will create one or several non-linden lab forums. Or worse - a consumer lobby... unions... protest groups.. Imagine a few tenthousand people signing petitions and complaining. They might die from the Bad Karma on top of all their other headaches.IF LL had money to burn they could improve on the awful interface. I don't play SL because of the playability - I play it because it an exercise in raw freedom. If Lindens can create an interface about as good as WoW or GTA then they have a chance. But I am a bit concerned the game will slide into the margins.... and there will be something like a Google Earth VR in the same or similar niche that'll sweep em away in 2-4 years. I will miss the rush of playing SL dearly if that happens. I will miss my character and my friends, and cry bittersweet tears. Like I said, I treat SL as a social experiment, a place to be free and a place to play with human minds. It is a souped up chat platform, not a game. Highly recommended to people who want to play with a part of themselves they ordinarily hide. Like a said, a great place for pervs. <a class="user" href="http://www.lastampa.it/cmstp/rubriche/girata.asp?ID_blog=35&ID_sezione=50&sezione=Over+Game">http://www.lastampa.it/cmstp/rubriche/girata.asp?ID_blog=35&ID_sezione=50&sezione=Over+Game</a><a class="user" href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1962441,00.asp">http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1962441,00.asp</a>
Closed AccountAug 14, 2006
This isn't IRC... so end this. Shut it both of you.
termalAug 14, 2006
Astroturfing?I love SL *despite* the ~30% of it that's devoted to "adult" stuff. I tried RLC just to see what the UI and graphics were like and I was anything but impressed. It was like a cheap knockoff of SL with a really dumbed down interface (ok, arguably SL's is a little daunting to new people, so for some people that's a plus). On the plus side, it was pretty resource light instead of chewing up CPU cycles the way SL does, but it was also buggy and crashed on me several times in the couple of hours I ran it. Oh, and the camera controls make you feel crippled, and you can't even copy/paste from chat.Avatars are a little better looking than a SL newbie one is, but you're incredibly limited in customizing them and you can't go for a look that's not completely slutty looking for women. The guys there are similar to those typical of SL's sex areas, which is to say very friendly to females, but with a palpable undercurrent of sleeze and horniness in every social exchange. But that's 99% of the focus, instead of a just a small fraction of SL's content. Fine for the people into that, but whatever...just don't think the free RLC membership is going to let you experience it either--you can't even do more than look around without a paid VIP membership.
tiagotiagoAug 14, 2006
wow, with all this bashing on the decision, either people are exaggerating based on miss information or it is me that is miss informed...from what I understood from the whole situation, LL is removing some of the more "miscellaneous" forum sections that were starting to get hard to manage (either content wise or due to the number of threads in there requesting responses from LL members), but they still kept the more direct sections (like for building and dealing with technical problems).they expect many of the more specific chat to be hosted either somewhere else (like on forum freely created by someone else) and futurelly in world in some cases. many of the forums being disabled are obsolete and/or being replaced by other services, like the official blog for exampleI guess I could go on and on about the details of the transition, but I think (at least for me) an analogy can sum it up:they are not chopping down the tree, just trimming some branches were in the way the forest growing around it
yashuAug 15, 2006
If you are not the less then 1% of users that have invested more then ~$USD5000 into the game, then linden lab will never care about your opinion regardless of how many forums they run. The feted inner core owns secondlife.It was a great idea, SL, but the parent comapny let their right wing politics basically ruin the place. It always seemed odd to me that such an extreme right wing company picked san francisco as it's home.
taotakashiAug 15, 2006
See, the good thing for having now a official Linden blog instead if the forums is that you can link to it, e.g. from a digg post :-) The same can happen to your posts when they are not in some closed forum anymore.Regarding the "outcry" it happened to me that most people I meet are actually quite glad that they will shut down those forums..