The new viewer is now mandatory, as announced on the official blog.
This comes just two days after the viewer was officially released and one day after Pastrami Linden blogged regarding a flurry of emails about the viewer, half delighted and half enraged.
In terms of customer service skills, this is yet another glaring example of Linden Lab’s shortfall in that department. 24 hours after a blog entry with people arguing, complaining, praising and generally rambling, they decide to make this controversial viewer mandatory.
I’ve actually upgraded my video card, partially due to the new viewer. I needed to upgrade anyway as I wanted to play Neverwinter Nights 2 and my card was slightly under spec, however I’d held off on that. The new viewer finally pushed me over the edge.
Nicely timed for a Friday release, I predict a weekend of whining ahead.
So what’s the problem with the new viewer? My old graphics card defaulted to low settings, this made the grass blotchy. I tweaked around but couldn’t find a good balance between graphics and performance. I didn’t bother fiddling too much because this happened to me when it was a release candidate viewer at the time. Maybe if I’d fiddled enough I’d have had my grass back, but a lot of people won’t bother doing this.
I’d mainly been using the release candidate to transfer land to myself, I was getting a buffer overrun error with the then main viewer and couldn’t transfer land to myself all too often. In terms of technical performance therefore I’ll admit this viewer is an improvement.
Aha I hear you cry, there you go then, if you want to move onwards and upwards you need to upgrade, take a hit on your graphics or leave (in which case, can I have your stuff).
However let’s just consider the customer service aspect of this. In my spare spare time (as Second Life takes up a lot of my main spare time) I play the Daddy of them all, I’m a mighty warlock sending the fear of God into Warriors or a Mage turning people into Sheep in World of Warcraft. Technically different I’ll grant you, but Blizzard take into account that a certain number of their users operate on older kit. Not so old that you’d be playing Manic Miner on it in your spare time, but they realise that not everyone is using state of the art gaming machines. When they released The Burning Crusade expansion pack a lot of people were making comments like “WTF, why isn’t this on DVD” and Blizzard answered “Because plenty of people still use CD’s”.
World of Warcraft has recently released a new patch, all singing, all dancing and all working fine on my old graphics card. Aha you cry, it’s a completely different experience, it’s client side rendering, it’s not user created content. However, close but no cigar. The customer service service side of Blizzard means they don’t go racing away with fancy graphics, indeed plenty of people complain that the graphics on World of Warcraft aren’t good enough and yet, their user figures tell a different story (of course there are allegations that these are skewed by Gold farmers but it’s one account they count, not each character).
Linden Lab will piss a lot of people off with this new viewer. Whereas some people will say “tough titty” to those who now struggle, business people may soon be singing a different tune. For example if enough of my renters struggle with this viewer, there goes my income, there goes the income of the creators of the buildings they buy, the clothes they buy, the animations they buy, the pose balls, the scripts, the huds yadda yadda yadda.
So yes, things progress, life goes on, the bar gets raised, but does it have to be done so quickly with so many people complaining they are having difficulties? Do any of the technical people at LL ever stop to wonder about the customer support implications of their decisions?
I seriously hope the new CEO is interested in customer service, the geeks won’t inherit the earth.
Second Life isn’t a game to many people, it’s more of a business platform and business people often lag behind gaming rigs.