Secondlife and Plans for Development

I was reading the blog Second Tense (Second Life Developer Round-table Highlights Dec. 19,2006) by Hiro Pendragon and it was about Second Life Developer Round-table Highlights. This was a meeting attended by Second Life Developers and Philip Rosedale’s, Robin Linden attended by phone conference. This post was dated December 19, 2006 featuring note of the meeting of the day before.

According to Philip the biggest problem challenging SL is the growth factor. Seems as though the simulators themselves are scalable, the asset servers aren’t. Thus the recent rash of downtime being due to asset server problems. Seems Philip also stated LL is having trouble finding competent staff.

Apparently also discussed in the meeting were Feature priorities with LL’s most immediate being…

integration of voice

HTML
(One note was that llLoadURL will be changed to load the user’s
internal SL browser that’s coming, rather than the external browser.)

Flash support

“Journaling” transactions in sims to prevent content loss. Philip noted that this was “difficult”.

The poor service of customer support was was also addressed by Robin. So it seems to me that the lindens know the support system is falling apart and some of Robins comments really caught my attention. She spoke on attempting a tiered system of increasing levels of support…. the more money spent monthly on SL will get you more support. This ruffled my feathers at first, but upon giving it a little more thought I guess it would actually be more fair than the piss poor or lack of helpful support many now receive. Another thing Linden Lab is doing is negotiating with a company to integrate a support/ticketing system into Second Life which will supposedly enable better problem tracking.

Here are the tiers Robin mentioned… at least as many as hiro remembered and reported.

Base tier, available to all users, including free accounts…. access to submitting tickets for customer service and the abuse report tool and access to the knowledge base
2nd tier available to premium accounts would have basic + Live Help
3rd tier is 3 levels of Concierge support.

Owning between 1/2 of a sim to 3 sims
Owning between 3 sims to 10 sims
Owning 10+ sims

the higest tier would be “Global Providers”

These are the issues which most caught my attention, but Hiro went on to report on considerably more which took place in the meeting. Such as…

Self Policing
Ban list Sharing
Identity Authentication and Mixed Grid
Ideas bounce around by the developers on a variety of topics

I found this article very interesting and well worth taking the time to check out the full article. I believe it gives a little insite to how the heads of LL are thinking…whether we like it or now.