Blaze Borgin, a teen grid resident, has posted a log of yesterday’s meeting between Terrence Linden and the teens (sounds like the title of a bad family comedy) here.
I must admit, it doesn’t fail to disappoint, it does however make it abundantly clear that the environment remains unsuitable for teens and Linden Lab are burying their heads in the sand on this merger. An example can be seen with regards to the sticky area of mature and PG sims bordering each other, which has long been an issue on mainland, Terrence completely dodges the issue:
Terrence Linden: to clarify on the G-rated regions question, about 80% of G-rated regions are not on the Mainland, and do not border M rated regions.
This is a complete dodge, the 20% that are mainland are not being taken into account, some of the 80% of private sims will border PG rated sims, this will be on larger estates, small estates don’t tend to have so many neighbouring sims.
Once more, this all boils down to Linden Lab not listening, or more to the point hearing something, thinking they have a solution and then ignoring all other feedback. They did this with the adult continent move, they heard people saying they were accidentally coming into contact with search results they hadn’t intended to see and from there they created the adult continent and promptly ignored input from those who had to move. Amongst that input was the suggestion to build a PG continent as a counter to the adult continent, a continent to give people a predictable PG experience, a continent that would have made the grid merger a whole lot easier, but Linden Lab would not listen and now we have this mess.
Once more people are suggesting the solution here is to build a PG continent, once more Linden Lab aren’t listening, they don’t even need to build the new continent, it’s already there, it’s the teen grid from where the iron curtain will be coming down in the new year, it already bloody well exists. They could auction off land on behalf of the 13-15 year olds who are being kicked into touch and let fellow teens or adults expand out there and grow the place naturally.
Personally I wanted LL to grow the adult continent naturally too, to let peer pressure take hold and make it known that the safe place for adult services was from the adult continent where people had to be verified to engage, that any adult business on mature land would be considered suspect, seedy and more likely to be employing the services of underage people, but Linden Lab cut reach on the adult continent by not letting anyone search for adult content. Anyone (other than the teens) should be able to search for adult content, only those who are verified can go to adult land, by allowing anyone to search you extend the reach of adult merchants and give people a simple choice, get verified or miss out, if someone wants to search for adult content, that means they have an interest in it, in sales terms it’s a lead.
The way Linden Lab are going about this is half assed solution territory, again, by ignoring the mainland mature sims, it’s a half assed solution, just make the teen grid the teen continent, let it grow naturally and work towards allowing the 13-15 year olds in, because long term that’s the way to do it, avoiding the issue of mature sims bordering PG sims completely, allows groundwork to be done to allow younger teens in, they could even invite private estates to move their sims to the new continent to expand its size, or mark sims as teen friendly, build these sims as a community rather than as a hotchpotch solution.
Long term solutions also involve dealing with profiles and picks, let people flag their profiles and picks as adult and make these profiles and picks invisible to teens, all picks on adult land should be invisible to teens.
Growing the grid is good, but when you invite teens in you change the rules and that’s where people need to tread carefully, anti teen sentiment is not at all helpful at the moment, it’s not the fault of the teens that this is happening and some of them are having their Second Life taken away from them, a better solution could be achieved, if only Linden Lab would listen.