Linden Lab – Page 219

November 19, 2010January 12, 2014

The Second Life Cataclysm

World of Warcraft is largely expected to experience The Shattering next week, a time when Deathwing wreaks havoc and brings chaos to Azeroth by changing the landscape, another step in the direction of their Cataclysm expansion pack. There have already been a number of pre Cataclysm events in World of Warcraft, including this week’s chaos when Elementals tried to invade the major cities.

Linden Lab are also unleashing events to mark their Cataclysm, when the teens are welcomed with open arms to the grid, this has a scheduled release date of the end of this year, but that may change, although it’s highly unlikely to happen on December 7th. We’ve already experienced a number of pre events too, the search game when you had to figure out why your parcel didn’t show in search when multiple maturity ratings were selected was one event quest, another was when those humourous Lindens decided that a parcel that had PG content but sat on mature/moderate land should be filtered out of PG search, because hey it’s mature land you silly people and even though the content may be completely PG, we don’t want the teens knowing it exists. Continue reading “The Second Life Cataclysm”

November 12, 2010January 12, 2014

Worlds Can Collide Sometimes

Battle.Net the Blizzard partner site that caused a kerfuffle over the way they wanted to engage with Facebook and display real names on the forums has evolved into quite a useful tool. I can now talk to friends who are playing on different realms or even in different games in the Blizzard family and now that they’ve removed the threat of Facebook, real names on the forum and displaying your friends of friends when they shouldn’t be being displayed, it’s now something worthwhile.

However, at some point this sort of tool will be more beneficial if it extends across other worlds, such as Second Life, and allows you to talk to non Blizzard game users. There’s also something else they’ve introduced that’s handy, an authenticator. Basically, with this little USB device, you can only login to your account or the game, whilst it’s plugged in, and whereas such a device is far from perfect, it’s an improvement in security. Continue reading “Worlds Can Collide Sometimes”

December 29, 2009January 12, 2014

2009 Reviewed

As 2009 draws to a close and people debate whether the forthcoming year is twenty ten or Two thousand and ten, it’s time to look back at the year, warts and all.

January

January was a strange month, we were still feeling the fallout of the Openspace fiasco when Linden Lab pulled a distraction trick by purchasing Onrez and XstreetSL! The rumours started to surface a few days before the official news was announced and covered here by Nobody Fugazi. We were treated to an official press release, FAQ, a forum thread and an official blog post. Interestingly back in January they were talking about new features such as shareable wishlists, they were also talking about merging accounts and balances, they partially got there but Xstreet would become a major bone of contention later in the year. Continue reading “2009 Reviewed”

September 12, 2009January 12, 2014

Listening To Communities

With a hat tip to Desmond Shang for his forum post, and another to Kamilah Hauptmann who brought this to Desmond’s attention in the first place, there’s a very interesting blog post from Eric Ries, who has been involved with IMVU regarding listening to your community. I’ve touched upon this before with the example of how Champions Online rectified a situation over limited discounted subscriptions, but Eric’s post is probably a better example because it took IMVU a bit longer to figure out the harsh realities of not listening.

The crux of the issue is that IMVU didn’t listen to their community, made changes that as far as they could see would only have an impact for 0.1% of their community and that everything would be fine. However things weren’t fine, people whom IMVU hadn’t even considered would be interested in some of these policy changes were concerned to such a degree that IMVU was losing both revenue and customers on a scale they hadn’t imagined was remotely likely. Continue reading “Listening To Communities”

August 3, 2009July 26, 2014

Gene Roddenberry Junior talks in Second Life

A noob was in town at the weekend, Gene Roddenberry junior (AKA Rod Roddenberry), son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry…umm senior…spoke to an audience in Second Life as part of a Science Fiction convention that I didn’t even know was going on. I’ve talked before about how I expected more Science Fiction to be apparent in Second Life and there’s a convention going on and I know nothing about it! Heh, Second Life is too big for its own good at times 🙂

The podcast will be up on LCCC Radio (The Duck) sometime this week, I’ll post a link when it is ready. Rod talked of many things, his enthusiasm for Star Trek the next generation shone through (he’s a bit young for Star Trek the original). He spoke of how he had a teenager/Father relationship with his Father and how Wesley Crusher is not based upon him!

There was talk of copyright issues, talk of his own projects, what he saw on the set of the next generation and much more, the podcast should be worth listening to.

However he spoke extremely enthusiastically as a noob to Second Life, only an hour after being registered. Why did he have the surname he did? He had no idea, we do of course, as you choose one of the generated names.

He was prompted to move his mouse so his avatar didn’t slump in the away mode look and he was enthusiastic about the fact there were furries present in Second Life as well as the look and design of other avatars.

Continue reading “Gene Roddenberry Junior talks in Second Life”