Rodvik Speaks – Part 1

RodVilla has at long last spoken on the blog, a rare treat these days, a blog post that talks about Second Life and Linden Lab. I could go off on a tangent about how the blog isn’t being used efficiently but for now I’ll just look at the content. I’ll split this into two parts, because I like doing that! First of all we’ll look at tier, Linden Lab branching out and the new creators program.

Tier won’t be going up in 2012, Rodvik tells us, but in reality tier needs to come down, however, as I’ve said before, Linden Lab need to find alternative revenue streams for this to happen, it’s totally unrealistic to expect Linden Lab to drop tier prices before they have other revenue streams in place but these alternative revenue streams are needed for the long term future of Linden Lab. Some may suggest that Linden Lab are addressing this by talking of branching out in completely different areas to Second Life, I’m not convinced about that, Second Life needs to be self sustaining, relying on other products probably won’t fly, but for Linden Lab, branching out makes perfect sense.

The problem Linden Lab have is with turning Linden dollars into US dollars, their previous attempts to incorporate advertising on the website failed in part due to the GlamAdapt advertising program being US dollars only, however it surely wouldn’t be that hard to have a service whereby you had to sell your Linden dollars to pay for advertising in US dollars, that’s how many land owners pay tier, the problem really was a third party being involved. I know some people don’t like advertising but really, it’s not always intrusive and I really think Linden Lab are missing a trick by not having advertising on their website, but this is all old territory for me, I still can’t fathom out why they aren’t trying to get the likes of Adobe to advertise on their websites, maybe they have and Adobe aren’t interested.

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Gaming Companies Should Embrace Second Life

I’ve made a couple of posts now about Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’ve also over the years made posts about World Of Warcraft, Eve-Online and City Of Heroes. The thing is, all of these games should have a Second Life presence, especially now that we have the advent of mesh.

Second Life is perfect for gaming companies to setup a sim or two displaying their wares, they can have video promotions on touch, they can show part of their world on a sim, they can’t do combat of course but with a little bit of careful scripting they could provide some very basic quests, but most 0f all they can show people how their worlds look, they can even sell outfits and own the IP and when it comes to intellectual property infringement, all of these companies have the power to slam a copybotters backside from here to kingdom come.

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Star Wars The Old Republic Experiences Smooth Launch

Star Wars The Old Republic has experienced a pretty smooth launch, sure there have been issues, the argument about early game access over people who had pre-ordered not getting up to five days access when lots of people didn’t seem to understand what up to meant and lots of other people didn’t seem to understand what five days meant. Seriously, if at any point Bioware knew they couldn’t deliver up to five days early access, they should have stopped advertising it. However as things went the vast majority of those who pre-ordered did get up to five days early access, some got seven, so that worked well.

Then there’s the issue of queues, Bioware seem to like the concept of queues, not only do some have to queue to get logged in, you can also end up in a queue just to access the forums!

Star Wars The Old Republic Waiting Room

However the bigger issue is queues to actually login to play, this is a big issue for some.

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Paid Classifieds – Relevancy v Price

Inworld paid classifieds have generally been pretty straight forward, best price wins. However there’s a frustrating aspect of this, one which was at one time addressed by the paid classifieds bar only showing exact phrase matches. The problem is that if you search for say: Medieval Market, you’ll get the top paid results that use either of those words, rather than the phrase or both words:

Everything Search For Medieval Market

The above search was done searching everything, so groups, places etc. will be in the left hand side, on the right hand side are paid classifieds which automatically sort by price. The results on the left hand side are relevant, the results on the right hand side, they aren’t really relevant.

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Bioware And The Mysterious Case Of Customer Expectations

Bioware’s Star Wars The Old Republic is all set to launch on December 20th. The hotly anticipated game has been through beta testing and is now in the final stages before unofficial launch. The problem is that people who were tempted to pre-order were told they would get up to five days early access, this has created a bit of a furore, as exemplified on their forums. I should also add here that I’ve long maintained that even when things got heated on the Second Life forums, they were tame compared to other places, and the Star Wars The Old Republic Forums are a ghastly experience of forum interaction that demonstrates that Second Life forums always have been tame in comparison.

The issue is with the use of “up to five days“. Rather bizarrely people have got early access up to seven days in advance, which only seems to have confused matters further. However it’s the “up to” business, which like “From” in marketing terms seems to mislead many customers who omit the meaning of “up to” and “from” when reading marketing literature.

Matters aren’t helped at all by the excerpt on the main webpage:

Fans who have pre-ordered STAR WARS: The Old Republic can now begin playing the game!

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