January 2014 – Page 2

January 29, 2014

Everquest Next Landmark Announces Alpha System Specs

First of all, you may be wondering what Everquest Next Landmark is. I’ll provide Sony’s words:

EverQuest Next Landmark is a Free to Play, next-generation online sandbox game. Build and explore a world unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Bold claims and not much to go on you may be thinking, so I’ll provide more information from Sony:

Build Anything — Create and build anything you can imagine. With Landmark’s state of the art tools, you have unprecedented control over your creations. A range of materials with realistic physics means how you build makes a difference.
Explore — Explore massive Landmark worlds and claim territory, building materials and much more. Delve deep into the earth and discover procedurally—generated adventures that will never be the same twice!
Make Your Mark — The best buildings players create will become part of Norrath — the EverQuest Next world — FOREVER! We’ll run exclusive contests to design parts of the world AND our designers will keep an eye out for the coolest fortresses, castles, caves, treehouses, fireplaces – anything awesome that fits within the world of Norrath.
Collect — The rarest resources, objects, gear, character customizations and secrets are scattered across the worlds of Landmark! Can you find everything?
Earn Money — Buy and sell items in Player Studio, SOE’s marketplace for player-created goods. Design, create and sell items and earn real world cash on every purchase! Click here for more details on Player Studio.

The last point may be the one that grabs the attention of Second Life content creators, although it should be pointed out that for now, Player Studio is only available for US players. The text I pasted doesn’t actually include a link for Player Studio, but one I made here does! Eligible creators can earn 40% of net sales, here’s a bit more info:

SOE’s Player Studio program invites players to download sample geometry files for actual in-game objects and through the use of standard third party art tools, learn how to develop, design and personalize items of their own – from re-coloring and re-texturing, to reshaping an item’s geometry. Once complete, players are encouraged to name and create a description for their item, describe how the item will fit into the game’s ongoing narrative storyline, and submit it to SOE for review and possible inclusion in the SOE Marketplace. If a player-created item is selected for inclusion in the SOE Marketplace, SOE will share 40% of the net amount it receives from the sale of the item with the player that created the item.

The link also has links to 3D modelling software, such as Maya and Blender as well as links to Adobe Photoshop, familiar tools for Second Life content creators, so there’s potential here.

Continue reading “Everquest Next Landmark Announces Alpha System Specs”

January 28, 2014

The Humble In The Jungle

Rod Humble’s departure has created a buzz, which is rather bizarrely being aided and abetted by Linden Lab’s lack of communication. This is one of the rare moments when their lack of communication may actually be useful.

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has a post about what Rod Humble achieved during his years at Linden Lab but teases his readers with:

I haven’t received any official word from Linden Lab about the departure of their CEO Rod Humble …. but my guess is we’re about to get such a word (along with even larger news, perhaps), very soon.

I don’t know what to make of that at all but it certainly piques the interest. The Opensim crowd have been quick to have their say on Rod Humble too, although many seem to want to pick up on issues that happened long before Rod Humble was at Linden Lab, such as interoperability and going back to the days when a proof of concept was made between Second Life and Opensim. Maria Korolov of Hypergrid Business has a post along these lines but which is presented in such a way that it’s well worth a read: An Open Letter To The Lindens.

The post discusses more than just teleports, it talks of business models, platforms and missed opportunities. Some will agree with large parts of the letter, others will disagree but there are some really well made points in there.

The Second Life Marketplace doesn’t need to be limited to Second Life. Right now, there is no viable multi-grid content marketplace for OpenSim, though Kitely Market is expected to open up to other grids in the next few weeks. But even if it does, the Second Life Marketplace would still overshadow it in terms of the amount of content available, even if only a fraction of merchants opt to enable the multi-grid delivery.

I can recall making a similar point to Pink regarding the potential for the Second Life marketplace selling to other grids, she didn’t shoot the suggestion down in flames. There could be potential there but with the recent tax and account issues I think Linden Lab are likely to shy away from selling content or trading virtual currencies anywhere but their own backyard.

Continue reading “The Humble In The Jungle”

January 27, 2014January 27, 2014

Rod Humble Years By Use Of Statistics And Tables

In this post I’m going to use tables to take a look at some statistics during the Rod Humble years. Allegations that this is just an excuse for me to remind myself how to do tables in HTML will be vehemently denied. I’ll be taking data largely from Tyche “Statto” Shepherd, which can be found at SLUniverse or from Tyche’s wonderfully useful site at http://gridsurvey.com/

I’m basing the following tables on Tyche’s reports on January 16th 2011 and January 19th 2014.

Region Numbers

Type	16th Jan 2011	19th Jan 2014	Change
Estate	24,756	19,205	-5,551
Linden Owned	6,673	6,986	+313
Overall	31,429	26,191	-5,238

This is quite a painful table. A loss of over 5,500 private estate regions during three years, which comes in somewhere close to 22.4% by my reckoning. My reckoning may be out of course but that looks about right.

The loss in private regions had started before Rod Humble came onboard and although they certainly seemed to accelerate under his reign, the losses were slowing down by the time he left. I posted on January 4th that net private region losses were slowing down. During 2012 the net loss was 2,865 (12.0% during the year), in 2013 the net loss was 1,719 (8.2% during the year). I’m not sure what anyone can do to stem the loss of private regions at this stage.

Regions By Maturity Rating

Type	16th Jan 2011	19th Jan 2014	Change
Adult – Estate	2,043	4,074	+2,031
Adult – Linden	346	346	0
Adult – All	2,389	4,420	+2,031
General – Estate	3,047	1,931	-1,116
General – Linden	1,492	1,622	+130
General – All	4,539	3,553	-986
Moderate – Estate	19,663	13,196	-6,467
Moderate – Linden	4,835	5,018	+183
Moderate – All	24,498	18,214	-6,284

As we can see, during the three years Mr Humble was in charge, Second Life appeared to get more adult. Over 2,000 more Adult rated sims now furnish the grid than when he arrived in 2011. Adult rated private regions have almost doubled.

This seems to have come at the expense of moderate and general rated regions. Moderate region net losses were well over 6,000 and not far off 33%. General fared worse in terms of a percentage loss, at around 36.6%.

The usual caveats apply here, I don’t know why Adult ratings have risen so much but I do know that many an adult sim is not dedicated to full on adult activities. Some people just prefer to have the highest available rating to give them the most flexibility. This is why Moderate rated sims score so well, in the old days there were only two ratings and moderate (then known as mature) was the higher rating and therefore gave the most flexibility.

I’m sure someone somewhere may be able to delve further into the reasons for Adult becoming so popular, but it would be a painful task.

As one would expect, there’s not that much change in the numbers of Linden owned sims but there clearly were some additions.

Continue reading “Rod Humble Years By Use Of Statistics And Tables”

January 26, 2014

The Rumour Mill Is Quiet On New CEO

I’m currently working on a blog post that includes tables and stats, but as it’s Sunday evening and my eyes are getting tired I’ve decided to leave that until tomorrow. Instead I’ll talk about the new CEO, whom I haven’t got a clue about.

We can start with ruling people out. Back in March 2008 I published a post entitled “Privacy And Robin Linden Will Not Be CEO“. This post was prompted by me suggesting at Robin Linden’s office hour that we were awaiting Robin to be crowned CEO, someone else congratulated Robin, prompting Robin to vehemently deny she was going to be CEO and to go even further by suggesting she would never be CEO.

However roughly six years on is quite a long time, so I can confirm that Robin Harper will not be in the running for the CEO position. I have this from a reliable source, trust me on this. I never reveal my sources … unless bribed heavily with gold and grog.

So anyway, the new CEO. What sort of person will fit the bill? The last two CEO’s have been surprise choices and I think the next one will be a surprise choice too. Linden Lab is still quite a large company and many an ambitious person in the right field will be tempted by the position.

Continue reading “The Rumour Mill Is Quiet On New CEO”

January 25, 2014January 25, 2014

The Rod Humble Years- Improved Technology Combined With Poor Communication

As revealed yesterday, Rod Humble has departed Linden Lab after three years at the helm as CEO. Who the new Linden Lab CEO will regenerate as is not yet known, but Rod was the third or fourth regeneration of the Linden Lab CEO. This depends upon whether you count Bob Komin’s temporary stint as CEO. Fans of the franchise are divided upon whether Bob Komin was a legitimate regeneration.

Linden Lab announced Rod’s arrival in December 2010, although it is my understanding that he officially started work in January 2011. There was also a blog post in January 2011 when he arrived in Second Life in a toga. Early in his tenure he gave an impressive interview with Rock,Paper,Shotgun in which he explained some of the positives of Second Life:

What makes Second Life so intriguing to me is its hard to define nature. I have heard people call it a virtual world, a game, the 3d internet, a social media platform.. the list goes on. I like that kind of unresolved ambiguity, I think it shows something that is not yet fully evolved and has exciting new roads to discover.

That interview also revealed that Rod had worked at Electronic Arts for six and a half years, which was the longest period he had worked anywhere, this is worth bearing in mind considering the recent news. Just shy of a couple of years into his tenure Rod gave another interview, this time to Giant Bomb, which shed light on this reasons for joining Second Life in the first place:

“When I was thinking about leaving EA,” said Humble during a recent meeting. “I was going to do my own company, and it was going to be around creative spaces–games that emphasize creativity tools more. When the opportunity came up and Linden Lab got in touch…first of all, Second Life? Is that still around? [laughs] I looked, and it was really, really healthy. Also, it was a company that was ready made to do a whole bunch of other products, which I wanted to do.”

This is also worth bearing in mind as Hamlet’s blog post on Rod’s departure includes his Facebook announcement about his departure in which he says:

I am starting up a company to make Art, Entertainment and unusual things! More on that in a few weeks!

Which sounds like he’s doing the sort of thing that he wanted to do before joining Linden Lab, the sort of thing he thought he could do with Linden Lab. Rod’s time at Linden Lab looks, on the face of it, to have been very good. He expanded the Linden Lab empire and put the Lab back into the Linden. However there were downsides during his reign.

Continue reading “The Rod Humble Years- Improved Technology Combined With Poor Communication”