NPC’s Likely Next Year

Rodvik has blogged with too much bold and spelling realise with a Z. This from a man who likes curries and football is not good, he needs a visit home! The blog post is a chirpy upbeat post reporting the best number of new signups for four years in August and that Linden homes are now at record levels too.

Other news includes trying to improve service response times with expanded staffing, which is good news and viewer changes to merge advanaced and basic modes, which is a hmmm we’ll wait and see. The biggest positive about this post is that it didn’t include and price rises or majorly bad news, although traditionally they come at the end of October, full sim price rises were announced near the end of October 2006 and The Openspace fiassco kicked off near the end of October 2008, not until we’re well into November will we be able to breathe a sight of relief!

The big news for me though was the talk of artificial life and NPC’s, although testing won’t start until December on this, it’s something I’m keen to see.

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Beware Of Geeks Bearing Gifts

Controversy continues to surround Stroker Serpentine’s full perm release of his Sexgen V5. There are certainly grey areas when it comes to intellecutal property rights, with three other creators involved, Corsi Mousehold, Briggi Bard and Craig Altman.

Craig Altman has commented over at SLUniverse that he has not granted permission for his animations to be released full perms:

The animations in this item of mine are being used against license, I have no agreement with Stroker for them to be given out in copy and transfer perms.

Corsi Mousehold talked to The Alphaville Herald the other day and suggested his animations shouldn’t be part of the package:

I could DMCA but in SL things can spread like wildfire. I would have to DMCA every single person I find that is giving it away. That’s a nightmare.

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Online Gaming Needs Channels

I like blogging on a Friday, not sure why, anyway one for the road here which isn’t really Second Life related but more online gaming related. However, having said at that, one area where Second Life has been ahead of the bell curve is in offering a free to play option, I don’t want to get into an “It’s not a game” argument here, the free to play option has been available in Second Life for a number of years now.

During this time I’ve watch Lord Of The Rings Online go free to play, Champions Online go free to play, Star Trek Online is rumoured to be heading free to play. The Daddy of them all, World of Warcraft, isn’t going free to play anytime soon, nor should it. However, if I could pay a reasonable amount a month to play Lord Of The Rings Online, Champions Online and Star Trek Online, I would do so, give me a channel I can subscribe to and a choice of games and I’ll pay.

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New Profile Options Coming And Media Pondering

This is a bit of a rambling post on a varitety of subjects, the lack of official music channels in Second Life, a new messaging feature via web profiles and some strange claims by Linden Lab over premium features, I’m blaming the hottest end of September since 1895 for this rambling!

As some of you may have noticed, I’m a bit miffed about the whole Spotify now requiring new users to have a Facebook account, largely because I think this is absolutely ridiculous. However where I do think Spotify have made a sensible choice is in making their offerings available to Facebook users. This may sound contrary, but it really isn’t, my criticisms of Linden Lab pushing Facebook have been due to Linden Lab seeming to push Facebook our side, pushing Second Life Facebook side makes perfect sense.

However the deal does raise the concept of media, Second Life is a place that is ripe for media, music, videos, live performances, they are all popular within Second Life and for bands looking to make a cheap promotion, Second Life seems a reasonable cost solution and yet, we don’t see much of it. However this brings me to another gripe, which is the lack of a decent API for advertising events, I love the showcase widgets we can create, I’d love to do the same for Events or get a  feed of some sort of events strream with a nice level of richness, but it’s not available.

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The Wonder Of You

TechRadar has a fairly balanced article regarding what happened to Second Life and where it’s heading, which you can read here. What I like about this article is that it doesn’t end by saying Second Life is going nowhere, it also has quotes from people like Tateru Nino and current Linden Lab CEO RodVilla Humble.

The article is realistic, there was too much hype, big brands thought they could come in, build something and people would come. I have long maintained that the big brands should have intergrated more, I understand that this is tricky in a user generated content world, they lose some control and maybe didn’t want their brand side by side with a store with a huge phallus on the top of the building (I saw stores like this when I first arrived and they made me cringe). However brands should have been looking to sponsor more gigs, sponsor art galleries, plant adverts in sims, generally engage with the Second Life public.

Then there’s the issue of the learning curve and whereas more experienced Second Life users find it hard to understand that the learning curve is steep, it simply is for many people. I joined Eve-Online earlier in the year for a while, they have superb tutorials, they email you with more tips when you’re new, Eve-Online has a steep learning curve too but they do try harder to keep new users engaged with those tutorials but in a user generated world where Linden Lab have less control than the creators of a world like Eve-Online, it’s harder to guide people.

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