Ciaran Laval

December 27, 2011December 27, 2011

Creators Program Divides Opinion

There seems to be a fair degree of divided opinion over the forthcoming tools for content creators, based largely around Rodvik’s statement on the official blog:

“One of the key goals of Linden Realms was to learn more about what tools Residents could use to develop richer experiences in Second Life — and boy, did we learn a lot! In Q1 2012 , we will be releasing new tools used to develop Linden Realms, which will allow Residents to create even richer original experiences in Second Life. To prevent abuse of these tools, we will introduce a “creators” program in which verified members will be given access to these very powerful capabilities.”

There are arguments for and against such a program, there have long been arguments for and against such ideas. I’m currently very firmly on the fence about this as I believe the devil will be in the detail and some of Rodvik’s tweets have suggested it won’t be too painful, first this one:

“@AmaliaIllios Whats the dejavu? Curious I want to avoid anything bad. We are thinking some kind of minimal sign up program….”

Followed by this one:

“@AmaliaIllios ..basically so we can ban greifers who might abuse the tools (needed because they are really powerful). Hope that makes sense.”

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December 23, 2011December 23, 2011

Rodvik Speaks – Part 2

Are you waiting for the family to arrive?

Are you sure you’ve got the room to spare room inside?

Does your granny always yell ya, that the old songs are the best?

Then she’s up and rock ‘n rollin’ with the rest!

Oh wait .. wrong post, that’s for the Karaoke Christmas special. There’s only so much Slade one can take, forty years old next year so I’m sure Noddy Holder and co. will be getting a windfall next year. However after spending half an hour driving around Morrissons car park at 9am this morning looking for a parking space, I’m not sure how much Christmas spirit I’ve got left, I only wanted to get some beers! The shops are only closed for one fecking day, good grief people what is it with this bunker mentality at Christmas … wait wait wait Ciaran, this has nothing to do with Rodvik, Second Life or Linden Lab! ok agreed, so where was I? Oh yes, Rodvik’s blog post. In my previous blog post I talked about the policy and direction, now I want to talk about NPC’s!

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December 23, 2011December 23, 2011

Rodvik Speaks – Part 1

RodVilla has at long last spoken on the blog, a rare treat these days, a blog post that talks about Second Life and Linden Lab. I could go off on a tangent about how the blog isn’t being used efficiently but for now I’ll just look at the content. I’ll split this into two parts, because I like doing that! First of all we’ll look at tier, Linden Lab branching out and the new creators program.

Tier won’t be going up in 2012, Rodvik tells us, but in reality tier needs to come down, however, as I’ve said before, Linden Lab need to find alternative revenue streams for this to happen, it’s totally unrealistic to expect Linden Lab to drop tier prices before they have other revenue streams in place but these alternative revenue streams are needed for the long term future of Linden Lab. Some may suggest that Linden Lab are addressing this by talking of branching out in completely different areas to Second Life, I’m not convinced about that, Second Life needs to be self sustaining, relying on other products probably won’t fly, but for Linden Lab, branching out makes perfect sense.

The problem Linden Lab have is with turning Linden dollars into US dollars, their previous attempts to incorporate advertising on the website failed in part due to the GlamAdapt advertising program being US dollars only, however it surely wouldn’t be that hard to have a service whereby you had to sell your Linden dollars to pay for advertising in US dollars, that’s how many land owners pay tier, the problem really was a third party being involved. I know some people don’t like advertising but really, it’s not always intrusive and I really think Linden Lab are missing a trick by not having advertising on their website, but this is all old territory for me, I still can’t fathom out why they aren’t trying to get the likes of Adobe to advertise on their websites, maybe they have and Adobe aren’t interested.

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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 22, 2011December 22, 2011

Star Wars The Old Republic Experiences Smooth Launch

Star Wars The Old Republic has experienced a pretty smooth launch, sure there have been issues, the argument about early game access over people who had pre-ordered not getting up to five days access when lots of people didn’t seem to understand what up to meant and lots of other people didn’t seem to understand what five days meant. Seriously, if at any point Bioware knew they couldn’t deliver up to five days early access, they should have stopped advertising it. However as things went the vast majority of those who pre-ordered did get up to five days early access, some got seven, so that worked well.

Then there’s the issue of queues, Bioware seem to like the concept of queues, not only do some have to queue to get logged in, you can also end up in a queue just to access the forums!

However the bigger issue is queues to actually login to play, this is a big issue for some.

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