Hamlet Au over at New World Notes recently posted a very provocative post , suggesting that Second Life users fear of change could lead to the downfall of Second Life. The problem I have with Hamlet’s post is that it’s simply not true that Second Life users have this great fear of change, but like any userbase, they question the motives and fear the changes will not improve the Second Life experience.
If you go to the Jira, and type the following query in the new query window:
issuetype = “New Feature”
You’ll find 6,591 results, that’s 6,591 suggestions from Second Life Users that will involve in many cases, change. The problems really aren’t a fear of change, they are a fear that changes will lessen, rather than improve, one’s enjoyment of Second Life.
Hamlet cites Amanda’s comment about Facebook being the best place to find out about cool things happening in Second Life, but this is a complete red herring, first of all, Amanda’s comment was incorrect, secondly we should be finding out about cool things happening in Second Life via the Second Life website or inworld, improve inworld chat and group notices (which I believe is on the agenda) and stop encouraging people to spend time outside the Second Life environment and you can have change that is beneficial.
People have seen change in Second Life, the adult continent moves are one example and really, had LL listened to their users at the time and worked on building the PG continent, then the teen merger which we recently had, could have worked better, indeed it may well have allowed the 13-15 year olds to arrive too, however Linden Lab were reluctant to allow that change. The Teen merger itself is of course another change and whereas many people haven’t noticed much change, those who use classifieds, search, events and the marketplace have noticed changes, keywords that are perfectly PG are filtered out because they can have a bad meaning and it really does get silly when you can’t tell someone on the Jira that their Master and Slave references on a product that isn’t adult, is the cause of their listing being incorrectly flagged as adult and it does get silly when you can’t type Dick Van Dyke on the official forum without having Dick and Dyke censored out. These issues should have been ironed out before the merger happened and we still have the situation of mature parcels right next to PG parcels on mainland, who is it who has been reluctant to change that situation, the users of Second Life, or Linden Lab themselves?
Viewer 2 is cited by some as an example of residents being reluctant to change, but again, it’s viewer 2 that is the problem, not residents fear of change and whereas some see it as nerd rage to rant about viewer 2, as someone who has used it since it was first made open beta, I have to say that some of that nerd rage has helped fix issues and improve viewer 2. Initially there was no right click build option when you were building on top of an existing prim, the camera controls were awful and on different tabs, the sidebar was more intrusive and couldn’t be minimised, people’s complaints and suggestions led to an improved viewer 2.
Yet still we have the situation of the teleport window closing down your search results, as explained in Jira-WEB-1819, LL seem to think this is fine and dandy, it’s not and it becomes frustrating when you want to do any in depth searching, the same as land sales search being poor, viewer 1 is better on both of these issues, people would be happier with viewer 2 if these features were put right, but it’s not the residents opposing change for change’s sake here which is the problem, because the usability issues of the search window closing and land sales search being poor are prime examples of why change isn’t always for the better, these are not improvements.
Another non improvement is the reduction of classifieds to 256 characters, as explained in STORM-577, opposing this change isn’t a case of me wanting to prevent Second Life improving or growing, it’s simply that I don’t see how this improves the classified system.
However changing the Jive forums to Lithium, has largely received a positive reaction from users, how they’re moderated is a different matter, but the platform itself has had positive feedback. Mesh will get a largely positive reaction, people have been asking for the ability to set their sim to a certain timezone for quite some time and if that were implemented, people would largely be happy, people asked for more groups, and got them eventually, people want improved inventory management, improved physics, better security, people are asking for change within Second Life all the time.
However Second Life is in a situation whereby drastic changes can very much upset the applecart, unlike World of Warcraft where nerfing a Warlock will generate a lot of nerd rage, nerfing existing scripts in Second Life would cause problems for merchants and customers, it’s not so easy for Linden Lab to implement earth shattering changes because we have an inworld economy and big changes would undermine it.
The problem really isn’t change, the problem is how change is implemented and whether there are compelling benefits to that change and really, when the benefits are compelling the changes speak for themselves and people accept them gladly.
There was a time when I looked at Hamlet as a source of good info and perspective. But that changed .. and I don’t mind that change in the least. ;^)
Hamlet’s relevance decreases almost with each post he makes. His attempt may have been to spark debate; but I find that hard to believe.
His bias undermines any objective content he may inject into his posts, and his tone is frequently caught somewhere between outmoded superiority and self-righteous resentment.