A copule of issues continue to raise their heads, viewer 2 and camping being the ones on my mind right now, well getting to the pub for a lunchtime pint and watching a bit of footie are at the forefront of my mind but that will happen shortly.
There’s a thread on the blogrums asking if the camping ban should be lifted and there’s a deliberately provocative open letter to viewer 2 haters, from Aeonix Aeon in the form of a blog post over at The Andromeda Group blog.
Let’s start with the camping ban, we’ll never know if the camping ban has had an impact on the economy, people don’t analyse the statistics enough to prove whether there has been an impact one way or another. Camping was however one way for people to earn Linden dollars and I would imagine most of those Linden dollars were used to either buy items or pay rent, I definitely know people who used camping money for rent. The issues of camping were of course related to traffic wars and morphed into bot wars where people would have bots on their land 24/7 to artificially inflate their traffic score and get a leg up in the search stakes.
The arguments raged on about the merits of camping, but new users do want to find ways of earning Linden dollars rather than buying them, older users too, many business owners rely on sales of goods or services to pay their tier. The problem is that there aren’t enough opportunities for residents to pickup a few Linden dollars to get them hooked, once someone is hooked, they aren’t so averse to buying Linden dollars to fund their habit, but early doors people are often wary of spending money in a new environment, once they have a home and are enjoying themselves, then they look to enhance their experience.
On one of my sims we’re experimenting with roleplaying bar tenders, who are allowed to put out a tip jar during their voluntary shift, we’ll see how this goes, I’m hoping it works out.
The link between camping issues and Aeonix Aeon’s blog post is one of consumerism and the hook, consumers dictate direction more than business owners. Aeonix is ranting about fellow business owners not adopting viewer 2 or taking advantage of viewer 2 features to enhance the Second Life experience, indeed Aeonix sees this as hindering development, but misses the point that people need a reason to want to use viewer 2, Aeonix inadvertently makes the point when saying that people will start using it because of mesh, missing the point that mesh gives people a reason to want to use viewer 2, whereas shared media hasn’t so far provided such a hook.
There’s little point in putting your efforts into the viewer 2 basket if consumers aren’t using it and consumers so far haven’t taken up viewer 2 in enough numbers to make it worthwhile for people to take advantage of the features, viewer 2 also came out of beta way too early, people have more patience with a beta viewer because, well, it’s beta, but LL rushed from beta to full release and that in itself damaged the viewer 2 reputation and I say this as someone who has been pretty much exclusively using viewer 2 since open beta was available, if I were buying or selling land, I’d slip back to viewer 1.23 because land search in viewer 2 still remains a steaming pile of pants.
Business owners are more likely to build products for the lowest common denominator, rather than making a 1.23 version and a viewer 2 version of a product, confusion reigns when people have choices like that and of course, the bigger issue is that it’s time consuming for a business owner. This doesn’t mean that business owners shouldn’t develop items with viewer 2 in mind, it just means that I fully understand why they have been reluctant to do so.
Viewer 2 is much improved, it’s far better than it initially was, which is to be expected, but for some people those first impressions of viewer 2 last a long time and they don’t want to go through that pain again, I still get responses of “ugh” when I ask if people are using viewer 2.
People will use viewer 2 when they’re good and ready to use viewer 2 but more importantly they will use viewer 2 and viewer 2 based third party viewers when they have a good reason to do so, as it stands there aren’t enough good reasons for people to change their viewers, mesh may change that, although mesh won’t change the frustrating issues people have with viewer 2, it may be enough for people to put up with them, time will tell.
