Ciaran Laval

May 10, 2011May 10, 2011

Don’t Just Stand There, Let’s Get To It, Strike A Pose, There’s Nothing To It

At a time when BK Linden is telling us that new user registrations are up, thanks partially due to the new user experience and that Q1 2011 was the most successful in Linden Lab’s history, Vogue Italia are running a story sounding the death knell for Second Life. This story is all the more bizarre because stories about Second Life being empty and people having nothing to do went out of fashion in 2009.

However, we are treading somewhat into there being no such thing as bad publicity, and brands like Ava Choo get a mention, albeit with a complaint that there was nobody in the store to sell them anything, although I do have sympathy with them over the Kenny G music.

The thing with stories like this is that I’ve heard them all before and Second Life has always had empty places since I signed up in 2007, as someone told the person writing the article, you need to know where to look. I used to go to a place called Club Crobar when I was a lad in Second Life, it no longer exists, but other places do. Places come and go all the time.

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May 9, 2011May 9, 2011

Fire Damage For Tavern, Account Damage For Roleplayer

So as I was assessing the fire damage on my Tavern on my roleplaying sim, I noticed a note in my mailbox next to the tavern explaining how Linden Lab’s billing system had created so many problems for one of the roleplayers that they’d been suspended and wouldn’t be able to continue that character, a paying character I should add.

The damage to my tavern is virtual, so far we’ve placed boards across the doors and doused the fire, we don’t want people entering the tavern and getting hurt by falling debris:

However the damage to the account, that appears far more serious.

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May 7, 2011May 7, 2011

Dynamic Login Screens and Basic Mode Needs Inventory

I haven’t spent much time Second Life this weekend, nor in Second Life related sites, since Thursday I’ve been busily trolling Liberal Democrat websites to laugh as they wallow in their own misery, this isn’t strictly true, they just make it too easy not to laugh at them but I have been offering them supportive advice, much as I dislike Toxic Nick Clegg, I do like three party politics in the UK, the Lib Dems need to move away from being Tory Lite and more to being a left of centre social democratic party, which worked a treat for the SNP in Scotland.

However there’s only so much fun one person can have with politics, it gets boring really quickly, so let’s get back to Second Life and the rather delightful sight of blog updates and promotions on the new dynamic login screen:

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May 7, 2011May 7, 2011

Elf Clan Say Yes!

Elves! Bloody Elves, they’re not quite as bad as Hobbits, Hobbits are devious little buggers but Elves refuse to come over to the darkside of Elfdom and embrace Drowism. However, in my last post I discussed the issues surrounding Elf Clan in Second Life and suggested that if I were them, I’d accept the offer being made by Linden Lab.

Then I surveyed the sky, decided it might rain and put my coat on for the journey to Villa Park. Whilst there I witnessed an absolutely awful game of football and returned home for find out that Elf Clan have indeed said yes to Linden Lab’s offer! Oh and as an aside, one word of advice to Elf Clan, the name of CEO is Rod Humble!

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May 7, 2011May 7, 2011

Tier and Loathing

Elf Clan, a popular Second Life group with over 2,000 members announced that they would be ceasing operations in Second Life on May 18th and that a sim called Elvenmyst would be closing on this date due to billing difficulties. I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of these sort of announcements as the billing issues with Linden Lab are becoming absurd, one of my tenants hasn’t been able to buy Linden Dollars for a while now and these issues have been acknowledged by Linden Lab in this blog post.

However there are deeper issues behind the Elf Clan unhappiness, the openspace fiasco, of which I was an extremely vocal critic and still believe that you don’t treat customers the way Linden Lab did back then. LL employed great spin to try and deflect the decision back on customers who had been abusing resources, but first of all the abuse was pointed out to LL during the explosion, secondly people reported that they had asked LL for permission to use those sims in that fashion and LL had apparently agreed, the only warning against Openspace misuse had been that you would not get support for performance issues on your sim if it was found that you weren’t using them as suggested, nowhere did they state you could not use them for purposes other than open waterways and forests, who on earth was going to put an open waterway or forest in the middle of nowhere?

However that’s all ancient history, the puzzling thing about the Elf Clan issue now is their response to Linden Lab’s response. Rod Humble got wind of the billing issues via Twitter, billing contacted the person responsible for paying tier and it turns out they’ve been offered two months worth of free tier, as posted here, and Elf Clan are still stamping their feet.

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