February 2013 – Page 6

February 12, 2013

A Visit To Wasabi Pills

It’s all Jezebel Bailey’s fault, there I was happily mining with my Dwarfins when she told me I needed to go dancing. Now this meant I would need to scrub up a bit and find a human form. Fortunately I’ve recently discovered the joys of outfits, I mean in the last couple of weeks …. yes I know! Anyway, I found a mostly human outfit, a rather spiffy old outfit with a rapier just to be safe, now I just needed some hair and I found something called Dragon Mesh hair in my inventory. Then I went to find the protest Gnomes to give Jezebel Bailey what for, dancing indeed!

Wait wait wait! Where did I get this hair? I don’t remember buying Mesh Hair. This is where paying attention comes in handy, someone at Wasabi Pills had sent me some dragon hair for review ….. me? Review hair? Seriously I’m usually bald. However now I was in a quandry because, I liked the hair, it fit first time without piddling around for a start. So I thought I best go and visit this Wasabi Pills store to see what’s what.

Anyway Wasabi Pills hair store seems to be a converted Church and from the outside it all looks sweetness and light:

This impression wouldn’t last!

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February 11, 2013

Roleplaying Sims And Rules

I sometimes see complaints about roleplaying sims and rules, the rules put visitors off. People aren’t familiar with terms such as OOC or IC or Get Out Of The Way. However there are often times when rules are there for a good reason, although sometimes they get TLDR.

So I found out the other day whilst taking some photographs on my own roleplaying sim when I was told off for dressing as a Dwarfin. I quickly headed back to find fellow protesters on another sim to march on the town hall about these rules.

At this point my chief Elf slapped me and told me to behave, pointing out that there was no way I was going to be able to build a story arc that explained how my Evil Drow Wizard had turned into a mining Dwarf with an army of Gnomes! I had to admit, she had a point.

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February 11, 2013

The Incomplete Pathfinding Cookbook

Hidden away on the Second Life Wiki, well not hidden very well, you’ll find the pathfinding cookbook. Described as a ready made solutions for some critters, it has some interesting concepts, it’s also incomplete or written with invisible ink.

In terms of interesting concepts we have such potential solutions as:

Sentient Treasure Chest

Treasure chest with legs. Sleeps, but runs and hides if anyone approaches.

Which makes me wonder if a wizard called Rincewind is having some input over at Linden Lab! There are sections for dogs, cats, rats, snakes, vultures which all sound like feasible critters people may want to engage with and then we get:

Hopping Scarecrow

Wanders about hopping and approaches random people, lingers and moves on.

Hmmmm!

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February 9, 2013February 9, 2013

My Alt Provides Awful Support – Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Offline IM’s Of “Hi”

As I mentioned in my last post, in my day job, I work in support. One of the tricks with support is to get people to tell you what the problem is. Many people will tell you “It’s not working” which leads to me asking “What’s not working?” to which I receive a reply of “It just doesn’t work” …. this can get tiresome but the longer you work in support, the more you realise that you need to be patient with people and encourage them to inform you of the problem.

I logged in with one of my alts today for the first time in about a fortnight. I do get offline IM’s, so if there were any support issues with any products from my alt, I’d have seen them, right? No wrong, there was a support issue, I didn’t respond to it, I did get it as an offline IM, the problem was that the person didn’t tell me what the problem was, the offline IM read “Yo”. The person who had sent the “Yo” message had tried to purchase an item, twice, but had not received the item. I didn’t know this at the time, because it wasn’t explained to me, but I should have replied to the message to see why they were contacting me.

Now I get a lot of offline IM’s and I’ve got into a bad habit, I’m in the habit of ignoring “hi” and “Yo” . What this incident has taught me is, that like my day job, I need to respond to vague reports and respond to them. On Ciaran I ask people to send me a notecard because in my experience, when someone fills in a notecard they tell you what the issue is, however I don’t have these messages on my alts, but even on Ciaran I receive IM’s of “Hi” and “Yo”.

The thing is if you’re a merchant or landlord, you are in the customer support game and you should be prepared for people to contact you who aren’t providing you with enough information to deal with their problem.

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February 9, 2013

Reed Linden Is Mister Fantastic

Second Life is a platform where it’s easy to complain about matters, I could write umpteen posts complaining about Second Life with my eyes closed, admittedly the posts may be incomprehensible because I can’t touch type well, so it might look like ghshsh ghgjh uays but it would still be a complaint.

However there are many situations where Second Life deserves praise and in particular, the support team. I am admittedly biased in favour of support teams because I work in support in my day job. However that also means I can often spot good and bad support situations from a country mile. I can also understand why support works in certain ways and that sometimes people may be helpful and another support person may appear unhelpful, in these situations if you dig deeper you find that the person you feel is unhelpful is following procedures and those procedures are designed for the benefit of all the support team.

For example in my day job we ask our team not to accept support requests directly and to refer a person to the helpdesk. Some of the team stick rigidly to this and others are more flexible, being more flexible gets good feedback from the person who received the support, but leads to us getting complaints from someone else who is awaiting attention for their fault, so hopefully you can see that support isn’t always cut and dried and that you can’t please all of the people all of the time, we also get feedback that techies who won’t help on the spot aren’t being helpful, but in terms of the bigger picture, they are being. However common sense is the real rule of thumb, if it’s a quick fix it’s better to do it there and then.

Over the last twenty four hours I have received fantastic support from the support team, I am a concierge level customer, so my support is at a higher level than a premium member but I’m not sure how big a difference that makes. I’m not going to go into the details of the support case, for a start it was not directly my issue, although it related to my sim. I submitted a ticket yesterday on behalf of another resident, something had happened on the sim and she wanted me to submit a ticket. However the situation was that my support request was initially turned down, for very valid reasons. I accepted these reasons and vowed to deal with my grumpy friend when I told her the news, and then I went to bed.

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