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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The latest event quest was announced this week, Linden Lab teased us in gently, they made an announcement <\/a>about a new web based introduction version of Second Life. This created a bit of a buzz and although many people couldn’t test it, the whole concept and introduction page where you could try and use the viewer displayed a nifty sense of marketing, at last LL were showing videos along with some music to try and make it look appealing.<\/p>\n However the dark clouds over mainland were hovering and then with a double whammy the announcements of the latest leg of pre-events were unveiled. First up was Terence telling us more about the teens arrival<\/a>. Oh how the flog comments were filled with enthusiastic praise as Terence told us:<\/p>\n “With nearly 5,000 General-rated regions in Second Life, the area that will be accessible to our 16- and 17-year-old Residents will dwarf the 100 regions currently available on Teen Second Life, giving them far more space to create, explore, and experience their online environment and what they can do there.”<\/p>\n Oh how wonderful, those neighbouring mature\/moderate sims will be delighted, especially if the little darlings can cam in and purchase mature rated content.\u00a0 However this was just background info, the pre-event quest was announced by Jack<\/a>. This included important event information about search, particularly classifieds and land ratings:<\/p>\n “New Filters for Search with General or Moderate Ratings<\/p>\n Until now, we’ve had both land and language filtering in search results. However, there was no real difference between General and Moderate content filters. We’re tweaking the content filters, both by defining a “Moderate” set of keywords and by altering some of the teen-related language in the adult filters. If your parcel or profile does not appear at the maturity level you expect it to, then edit your text. You will usually see your edits reflected in Search within six hours.<\/p>\n Classified Ads Now Get Extra Level of Rating Validation<\/p>\n Classifieds have always allowed Residents listing a Classified to self-declare the maturity rating of their ad. With teens gaining access to the Main Grid, we’ve added content filtering to provide another level of rating validation. If you list an ad and don’t see the maturity level you’re optimizing for in search results, then just edit your text. You should see the edits reflected in Search in about an hour.”<\/p>\n