Will Linden Lab come through after pressure from players?
The gauntlet has been thrown.
The last versioning upgrade for both server and client, along with the massive bugs that came along for the ride seemed to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. The players finally fed up and lead by Christiano Midnight, started Project Open Letter, a open letter to Linden Lab to stop feature development and fix the current bugs that have been overwhelming most of the sims on and off for the last couple of months (more on than off). As of this writing, there has been over 3000 signatures and counting with some huge names such as Anshe Chung and Aimee Weber.
Linden posted a response and that there will be some fixes to Group IM that supposedly is the cause of the myriad of issues plaguing the 1.15 release. Call me a naysayer but somehow I’m doubting this will fix everything, if anything. Maybe I’m the only one that hasn’t been listening closely, but we never really did figure out what exactly happened on that “emergency” grid down last Thursday. Did they attempt to try and fix the group IMs bug? Why is teleporting to and from certain sims fail at certain times, and other times they seem to work fine? Does Linden know that you can actually bypass the teleport bugs if your home is set to a sim that is pretty stable? Where are the answers to all of the questions? It seemed to me that the response that was posted was more of a non-response since it only highlighted a couple things: public office hours, JIRA (issue tracker), wiki, and Knowledge Base. In the corporate world, we call this a PR BS answer. None of the above answered the public in having the bugs fixed, or more communication between users and developers in a symbiotic relationship. From what I gathered, the users just want it to work. Period. Forget the voice-chat feature, forget all this PR mumbo jumbo. Just fix it so we can:
- Make transactions
- IM and chat
- teleport
- build
- be able to move around
I don’t think I’m missing anything there. That’s pretty much it. It’s the basics of SL. From my perspective, all the rest of the news sources are focused on the Town Hall with Cory Linden on Thursday to see what is said. I’m just as curious as the rest, but having been through my fair share of Town Halls in real life, I can tell you that I’m not expecting much resolution. It’s a way for management to seem like they’re responding, without doing so. So will Linden come through from the pressure of this latest move by the users? I sure hope so. It’s for the best… for Linden’s sake. The real question is: will we (the players) be given on a bunch of public relations speak or will real results come. Time will tell.
May 1st, 2007 • 
Darius Sartre • 
comment | May 2, 2007 at 09:35 | individual comment-link
Actions speak louder than words. It’s time for them to fix the code and stop yammering. Town Hall meetings? Screw that, just give me a platform that goes 24 hours without a single problem. It’s really getting that bad. Let’s hope today’s 2+ hour downtime brings some more stability instead of instabilities.
comment | May 2, 2007 at 10:18 | individual comment-link
That’s exactly my point. My day job Town Hall meetings are when the senior management decides to tell the rest of the company how the numbers are. What’s amusing is that no one cares about the numbers except for senior management. The rest of us want to know if our jobs are stable, if we’re going to get bonuses, and how much that is. Maybe a little on new directions and business. But it’s always a “pat yourself on the back” type speech. That doesn’t help anyone.
Linden needs to get off their high horse and fix the problems. Or else if a mass exodus happens, the only people to blame will be themselves.
Another thing to point out. It’s a wonder why these scaling issues aren’t solved already. Someone close to me pointed out that it’s not like they have “great graphics” or anything. This is from a non-gamer. What does that say about your product if it’s also unstable and not very beautiful?
pingback | May 3, 2007 at 13:43 | individual pingback-link
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pingback | June 17, 2007 at 11:17 | individual pingback-link
[...] seems like another open letter is in the works. This time it’s about the latest crackdown on governing policies. While [...]