Ciaran Laval

March 9, 2012March 9, 2012

Games Within Frontiers

I’m in pre St Patrick’s Parade in Birmingham mode, so I might need to get into some pre-parade drinking practice before Sunday, over 80,000 attended last year so you need to be in good form to appreciate the atmosphere! That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it! Fortunately they have decided to hold the parade this Sunday, rather than next Sunday, which would have clashed with a Villa game, which is very considerate, also this means I might have to go into pre-pre real St Patrick’s day drinking practice mode for real St Patrick’s day next Saturday! This has potential. Anyway back to all things Second Life.

Andre has a red flag, Chiang Ching’s is blue

They all have hills to fly them on except for Lin Tai Yu

Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games

Hiding out in tree-tops shouting out rude names

So there’s a blog post! There’s a video! There are interesting stats, yes Linden Lab are talking more about the forthcoming experience tools!

Inara Pey covers this well, as usual. Hamlet Au points out the impressive fact that 250,000 players have engaged with Linden Realms, which uses these new funky tools. I’ll simply point out that this has potential but there may be a gotcha.

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March 9, 2012March 9, 2012

Customers Can Be Difficult, Deal With It

There are certain aspects of human nature that at times we find unseemly, what passes as unseemly depends upon your viewpoint at the time but customers can have unreasonable demands and expectations, they can blame you for things that aren’t your fault, they can swear at you, be obnoxious and refuse to listen to you. Bad experiences make people more vocal, I read somewhere that people remember bad experiences for over twenty years, whereas good experiences have less shelf life, your mileage may vary but being annoyed makes us more vocal, that’s human nature.

Recently Botgirl Questi posted a blog on why Botgirl thinks Linden Lab are investing in new products rather than Second Life. Interesting post, which received a response in the form of a blog post from Metareality Podcast superstar and owner of Sand Castle Studios Gianna Borgnine, in a post entitled: The Virtual World False Dilemna. Healthy disagreement and that is to be welcomed. However it’s in the comments of Gianna’s post that we see the human nature aspect rear its head, in a comment from someone calling themself “Another Ex Linden“:

“Would you keep talking to the public if it didn’t help your job? What if it caused personal attacks against you or something you care about? Most individual Lindens gave up years ago.

Would you let your employees talk to the public when conversations incite defamation of your company? A year ago the company issued a policy that stops most remaining Lindens from talking. Only a couple senior engineers speak publicly without PR training and scripts.

By the time I left, many Lindens moved their meetings to Skype and only logged into development servers. They added a viewer setting that ignores IMs from strangers. Assholes were always the loudest and almost nobody called them on it, so the users lost their collective voice.

This blog is years too late. Take these lessons to the next company that tries openness.”

Whether the person posting is an ex Linden only the person posting knows, but this comment applies to far more areas than the person who posted seems to realise.

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March 7, 2012March 7, 2012

Land – The Financial Frontier

Linden Lab are no longer reporting economic stats,as reported by Tateru Nino here, but personally I’d long gone off Linden Lab’s stats and found myself far more interested in Tyche “Statto” Shepherd’s stats. Tyche regularly reports stats over at SL Universe, as well as running her own site from where you too can access the data, at GridSurvey.com. There are loads of stats to be found over there, including details of Tyche’s awesome census data:

43.0% of Mainland owned directly by Linden Accounts (Contiguous Mainland is 6723 regions including Linden Home regions).
6.7% to 7.8% of Mainland by area is abandoned parcels (details – 2nd Jan 2012).
56.5% of Private Estate regions are Full Regions, 42.9% Homesteads & 0.6% Openspaces (details including top 20 Estates – 29th January 2012).
Monthly Tier Estimates – Private Estates c.US$4.842 Million, Mainland c.US$1.008 Million.
As of December 2011 38829 Linden Homes are occupied (details – 2nd Jan 2012).

Stats galore and more fun to be had on that site but the survey that gets most attention from Tyche is her weekly grid size survey and this week’s doesn’t make happy reading:

“48 hours late in reporting but still based on Sundays figures – Anyway this week the grid shrunk by 196 regions, Private estates had a net decline of 183 whilst Linden Owned fell by 13

Total number of Main Grid regions is now 30188 ( 23058 private estates & 7130 Linden owned) 126 new regions were added and 40 returned to the grid, with 366 regions removed (30 were renamed and 6 came and went since last report)”

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March 6, 2012

Widget API Should Be Extended For Websites

There I was looking at Second Life API’s, when I stumbled upon the Viewer Web Widget API. I actually got these working under Firefox, they wouldn’t work under IE9, I had it working in my header and then after pondering why it wouldn’t work with IE9, I realised, it’s for third party viewers, not webpages!

This raises the question, why can’t websites have these API’s or widgets? I mean it would be cool to be able to have upcoming events advertised on Second Life blogs, of course it would be better if you could drill down and pick events for your own region or group, but these widgets for the destination guide and upcoming events are very nifty.

Having feature rich advertising like the events when you login stands out in many ways.

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March 2, 2012March 2, 2012

Kitely Now Offers Email And Twitter Signup Options

Kitely, the Amazon cloud based virtual world running on OpenSim have announced that you can now signup with a Twitter or Email account. This is a welcome development as some people, myself included, refused to signup with a Facebook account … well I don’t have a Facebook account! Not a personal profile anyway, I have a Facebook page.

The details of the changes can be found in this blog post. I have signed up via Twitter and it was an extremely smooth process, I also have two hours access a month and an Island to play with on the free account model, if I find Kitely engaging then I’ll look at the other pricing plans but in terms of trying it out, this is a good model.

Kitely has a pay as you go pricing plan, although you can opt to pay for visitors to your Island if you choose, I don’t think that will be the model most follow, however as I said, on the free account you get two hours a month anyway. Five bucks a month gets you twenty hours a month in Kitely plus a second region, whereas USD$20 gets you around 83 hours a month and 10 regions to play with, USD$50 a month gets you 200 hours a month and 30 regions whereas USD$100 a month gives you unlimited time in Kitely plus a whopping 100 regions to play with. However these are personal minutes, so you can see why for some, the Kitely model isn’t appealing.

Kitely owner Ilan Tochner has updated me in the comments about the pricing model to say that initial minutes are available due to people receiving Kitely Credits on the payment plans, so here’s a correction:

$5 / month = 25 hours / month (in Minutes+KC)

$20 / month = 100 hours / month (in Minutes+KC)

$50 / month = 250 hours / month (in Minutes+KC)

$100 / month = (unlimited Minutes + 5000 KC) / month

However if you want to see a decent use case for Kitely, there’s a post over at Hypergrid Business about an architecht selling his prefab sims.

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