Ciaran Laval

October 18, 2012October 18, 2012

Rod Humble Moves Linden Lab Forward, But He Shouldn’t Leave Second Life Behind

I’m seriously having to drag my mouse away from add to cart on Steam where Football Manager 2013 is seductively glancing at me… well it’s more than a seductive glance, it’s winking, fluttering its eyelashes and licking its lips … I must resist, I mean it destroys your social life, it’s too time consuming these days … wait they’ve introduced a new classic mode which makes gameplay quicker, like in the old days, beta will be available any day now if I pre-order and resistance may be futile …

Now when I was a lad I knew more about the people behind games, people such as Paul and Oliver Collyer, whom brought us Championship Manager and are still part of the team now that it’s called Football Manager. Going back further into my childhood I knew who Kevin Toms was, he wrote a game called Football Manager for the Sinclair Spectrum, which I loved, the speccy game is not related to football manager 2013 in any way, shape or form.

Then there were people such as Ron Gilbert, Peter Molyneux, Jeff Minter yadda yadda yadda. However I had never heard of Rod Humble when he came to Linden Lab, by the time Mr Humble arrived my days of reading magazines such as Computer & Video Games, Crash for the ZX Spectrum, Amiga Power for umm, The Amiga or PC Gamer were long behind me. However those in the gaming world do know Mr Humble, when an article appears in gaming related sites, you see comments from people asking why is Rod Humble is at Linden Lab.

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October 17, 2012October 17, 2012

Tier, Not Land Barons, Will Undo Second Life

There are a few posts over at New World Notes during the last month or so regarding Land Barons, the damage (or not) of the SL Marketplace, tier prices, entertainment and roleplaying. I’m not a Land Baron, I do have an interest in roleplaying, entertainment, tier pricing and the damage or not of the SL Marketplace. There are links between these subjects.

Desmond Shang kicked things off back on September 27th with a post about whether land barons matter anymore or not. They do, love them or loathe them land barons do work that would otherwise fall upon Linden Lab to do. Linden Lab are not Blizzard Entertainment, they don’t have the resources to deal with lots of individual customers day in, day out, they have a product that is chaotic in nature, Land Barons fill a gap.

Masami Kuramoto then inspired a post from Hamlet Au regarding themed mainland, and Masami makes some reasonable points but misses the point that the chaotic nature of Second Life is also one of its biggest draws. Masami is quoted as saying:

“SL has the largest map of all games, but the content is messed up. Imagine entire continents of adjacent regions featuring the same theme. Sort of like the Linden Home areas, but without the prefab buildings. Imagine Nexus Prime, Suffugium, S.I.C., The Next Day, Insilico and Hangar Liquides side by side and The Wastelands somewhere nearby.”

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October 16, 2012

Kitely Offer Unmetered Regions

This much needed rest from Second Life blogging is going to bugger up my end of the year review, I think I’ll just have to raid Inara Pey’s blog and take it from there! So a lot has happened, which I’m not going to cover, much … it’s time to look forward not back but something has been happening over at Kitely.

One of the big criticisms of Kitely was their pricing structure,which was pretty much based upon how long you, or your visitors spent in Kitely. This meant folk with popular venues would baulk at the costs, whereas those who wanted to spend a small amount of time there could get a whole region, or multiple regions at low costs. Swings and roundabouts and all that. However, during my absence Kitely have not only changed their pricing structure, they’ve also introduced a new unmetered option too.

Kitely developer Oren Hurvitz explained the new unmetered option on October 3rd in this blog post. This is in my view a big plus for Kitely and they now offer options for users to work out what deal suits them best, the pricing for unmetered monthly access is as follows:

1 Region $40 per month.
4 Regions $60 per month ($15 per region per month).
9 Regions $80 per month ($8.89 per region per month).
16 Regions $100 per month ($6.25 per region per month).

As you can see, the more regions you pay for, the lower the cost of each region.

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October 16, 2012October 16, 2012

Linden Lab End Affiliate Program

So I go to Majorca for a holiday and whilst I’m away topping up my tan and enjoying Pina Colada’s on the beach followed by seeing way too many replays of Nicki Minaj singing about starships in bars, all hell breaks loose and Linden Lab decide to end their affiliate program!

I don’t know why they’ve done this, it may be to do with the Steam connection, or it may be that it wasn’t very successful, either way you have until the end of business today to remove those links, LL sent out a nice email about this:

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July 12, 2012July 12, 2012

SLCC 2012 Looks Like It Will Be Just Like Blizzcon 2012

The Second Life Community Convention has been fraught with controversy in years gone by, although it has also been a roaring success, take a look at last year’s event here. Alas this year it looks like the drama, criticism and lack of support from Linden Lab and the wider Second Life Community has finally took its toll.

Fleep Tuque has a long and informative post about the hazaards of organising the Second Life Community Convention, this comes in light of the news that Avacon won’t be organising the event this year.

Fleep points out that the organisers were chewed out for not making the convention more like Blizzcon, well it looks like this SLCC 2012 will be exactly like Blizzcon 2012, because Blizzcon is cancelled this year, but will be back in 2013, will SLCC? I think something may have been lost in humour there, I doubt that anyone at Linden Lab seriously expected an event like Blizzcon, but maybe they hoped for an event that would involve musicians, meetings and fun? Blizzcon has a massive budget so I don’t really think that criticism was intended to come across as bluntly as it sounds.

Fleep also points out that organisers were left feeling jaded due to criticism, this will have been in many forms, there has been criticism over prices, venues, dates, choice of hotel etc. in the past. However this is part and parcel of organising an event, people will always be critical, the way to answer them is to organise a successful event and from what I’ve read of SLCC in the past, they were largely successful but there seems to have been a competiton in values too regarding whether it should be a convention or a conference.

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