Second Life – Page 236

December 22, 2011December 22, 2011

Gaming Companies Should Embrace Second Life

I’ve made a couple of posts now about Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’ve also over the years made posts about World Of Warcraft, Eve-Online and City Of Heroes. The thing is, all of these games should have a Second Life presence, especially now that we have the advent of mesh.

Second Life is perfect for gaming companies to setup a sim or two displaying their wares, they can have video promotions on touch, they can show part of their world on a sim, they can’t do combat of course but with a little bit of careful scripting they could provide some very basic quests, but most 0f all they can show people how their worlds look, they can even sell outfits and own the IP and when it comes to intellectual property infringement, all of these companies have the power to slam a copybotters backside from here to kingdom come.

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December 19, 2011December 19, 2011

Paid Classifieds – Relevancy v Price

Inworld paid classifieds have generally been pretty straight forward, best price wins. However there’s a frustrating aspect of this, one which was at one time addressed by the paid classifieds bar only showing exact phrase matches. The problem is that if you search for say: Medieval Market, you’ll get the top paid results that use either of those words, rather than the phrase or both words:

The above search was done searching everything, so groups, places etc. will be in the left hand side, on the right hand side are paid classifieds which automatically sort by price. The results on the left hand side are relevant, the results on the right hand side, they aren’t really relevant.

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December 14, 2011December 14, 2011

Bioware And The Mysterious Case Of Customer Expectations

Bioware’s Star Wars The Old Republic is all set to launch on December 20th. The hotly anticipated game has been through beta testing and is now in the final stages before unofficial launch. The problem is that people who were tempted to pre-order were told they would get up to five days early access, this has created a bit of a furore, as exemplified on their forums. I should also add here that I’ve long maintained that even when things got heated on the Second Life forums, they were tame compared to other places, and the Star Wars The Old Republic Forums are a ghastly experience of forum interaction that demonstrates that Second Life forums always have been tame in comparison.

The issue is with the use of “up to five days“. Rather bizarrely people have got early access up to seven days in advance, which only seems to have confused matters further. However it’s the “up to” business, which like “From” in marketing terms seems to mislead many customers who omit the meaning of “up to” and “from” when reading marketing literature.

Matters aren’t helped at all by the excerpt on the main webpage:

“Fans who have pre-ordered STAR WARS: The Old Republic can now begin playing the game! ”

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December 14, 2011

Exit The Dragonfish?

In November 2009 it was announced that Linden Lab had struck a deal with Dragonfish, the payment processing arm of 888.com. This was discussed on the official forum back in the day. This was followed by a beta billing option entitled local payments, which you can read about here. Basically local payments allowed people to pay Linden Lab via a currency other than US Dollars, which will explain why US residents may have no idea what I’m talking about, US residents were never put in the local payments beta.

However over the last week or so, those of who were in the local payments beta, many of us not through choice, will have received an email informing us that local payments beta has ended:

Dear Ciaran

This email contains important information that affects your Second Life account and requires action in order to continue any payment transactions with Second Life.

Due to the conclusion of the Second Life local payments beta program, it is required that you add a new credit card or PayPal account by going to your billing information page on Secondlife.com.

Best Wishes,

Linden Lab and the Second Life Team

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December 14, 2011

Linden Lab Rediscover Community Spirit

Linden Lab seem to have decided to embrace communities and community spirit again, as well as embracing the concept of Second Life being a user created world, both moves are welcome.

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes reports that the tagline “Your World, Your Imagination” is back on Second Life marketing images. This is long overdue, this was a perfect tagline for Second Life and I’m really not sure why Linden Lab appeared to move away from it.

Meanwhile in the official General Discussion forum Linden Lab have unleashed three posts about community, friendship and interactions.

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