Monday, October 15, 2007

In a funk

It’s Fashion Week in my home town of Los Angeles, and there are before-parties, after-parties, up-the-wazoo parties all over town. I can’t get up the energy or the excitement to attend a thing… not that I’m invited to the really good ones. I'm also over the little bit o'fun I had with our readers in my last post - guess nobody caught it - or maybe they all feel the same way I do.

Seems all I’m good for is to pop open a Red Stripe and just sit here glumly, contemplating the future of Second Life without huge prims. Granted, I keep checking back on the Second Life Community blog to see if anything new has been posted there; likewise the SL Forums, which as of this writing has 555 comments on it, the last one by Charlie Omega who pretty much summed up my feelings:

OK Michael, now that you have seen many opinions.....what is LL's take on this before it becomes too much of a flame fest based of differing opinions.

Will LL take the easy way out again and remove or limit something that already exists, thereby seriously damaging or destroying existing content?

OR

Will a harder headed stead fast approach be attempted against abusers?

I think after many of the comments here, the best choice is obvious from a 'customer' standpoint, so what is the best choice from the 'provider' standpoint?

Remember, we pay fees etc. for this, make enough people mad, and even bad publicity won’t be enough to pay the bills given enough time.

Linden Labs, please spare us this growing knot in our tummies. I’m all for dialogue (something we missed on the VAT introduction), but this is taking too long. If I were a builder – which I am not (I merely revere great builders) - I would be frozen into inaction, too worried and demoralized to continue.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have a hard time believing that they'll remove megaprims from the grid. The consequences would be catastrophic to many very important and visible sims.
How many megaprims do you think were used in the I Am Legend sim, for instance? Imagine the PR failure it would represent for LL to let WB and ESC lose out on the year of work and the money they invested in that sim... this is to say nothing of Greenies or other homegrown favorites.

The Lindens aren't dumb; the message was clear. They will have to compromise on the issue. I have no doubt that megaprims, in one way or another, will continue to exist on the grid.

Unknown said...

Actually the I Am Legend project does not use any mega prims.

Frankly, I don't quite understand all the wailing and gnashing of teeth here, even though I love some of the things being created with mega prims. Linden Lab always said they were not happy with mega prims, so anyone who used them knew that they could disappear (or else they were deluding themselves).

Personally, I hope some middle ground can be achieved. I'd like to see official support for large sized prims up to a certain level, but with controls built in so they can't be used to grief across land borders.

Things in SL changes. If mega prims disappear, there will still be beauty and innovation.

Again, I hope some middle ground can be reached, but all this fuss is silly, as is Charlie Omega's threat about "paying the bills". Do you know how many times over the last 3-4 years Linden Lab has heard the same threat? The answer is, at just about every *single* change to an existing feature they try to implement. The community gets overwrought, and then goes about its business.

But I do hope they find a happy middle ground.

Anonymous said...

Oops. I stand embarrassingly corrected. :) Thanks Forseti.

It just goes to show that I should probably *visit* a sim before I use it as an example... ;)