Ratings soon to be nonexistent in Second Life

All I can say is, “boooooooo.”

In my opinion, this post by Linden Lab is a terrible disservice to the Second Life community. While Jesika Linden claims:

As Second Life has grown, the ratings system has become less and less useful. During our investigation into ways to help reduce database load, we found that the database resources required to maintain the ratings system were far greater than its utility and popularity.

This is interesting considering the fact that they’ve been having scalability issues. But greater concern is the fact that all users (even those that have been around for ages and have gained tremendous reputation) will now have to start fresh for ratings again. Linden points to a couple of alternatives such as RatePoint so I decided to take a look at it.

RatePoint is very easy to sign up and use. Just follow these simple instructions:

• You give them your SL name, an e-mail, year you were born (this probably limits you to the right Grid), and a password for the RatePoint service and wham, bam, alikazam! You have a rating pack waiting for you in world.
• Then you teleport in world to pick up your RatePack at the kiosk.
• Remember to open the the pack and wear the viewers. The public one is like a hat. It shows off your current rating. The private viewer in the HUD will display RatePoint users in the vicinity. If you click on them, you will be able to rate them in all their glory.

*** NOTE ***
You must be in an area that allows outside scripts to run to have the ratings update and work in the HUD.  While at the RatePoint Island, I met one of the people in charge, Ron Kiernan. Ron was kind enough to walk me through a couple steps and answer some questions about RatePoint itself. Ron also pointed out that updates will be around fifteen minutes. So don’t worry if your rating didn’t show up yet.
*** END NOTE ***

While my alternative look at ratings took me to RatePoint and it seemed rather simple to use, within the bigger picture is a problem of non-consistent ratings throughout the entire community. You have no way of knowing if a person is as trustworthy by others and that you’re able to do business with them, or if you’re taking a chance with a stranger. Much like shopping on eBay from a seller that as zero star rankings. Furthermore, since none of the third-party rating systems work with each other, there is no way of finding out which rating system one person is using or if they’re using one at all.