Letter to 'M' Linden

Foreword:
On Tuesday M(ark) Linden posted about his first week in SL and I was tempted to answer it, but reading through the comments, I came across one which so expressed what I felt about it that I contacted the writer and asked him if he would like to put it here. This is his letter unedited:
Dear M,
On May 27, I wrote a response to your "My First Week" piece in the blog. Since then, I've heard about the piece from several residents, but not from any Lindens. I'll take this opportunity to offer you the opportunity to respond directly to the concerns a lot of us seem to share.
As I review what I wrote, it seems dripping with vitriol, which I guess is some measure of both the passion of your core users and the immense frustration we feel at the issues that have plagued Second Life for so long, and what many of us feel is the inattention to what really matters to us.
In the blog you mentioned you've been in-world for a year. Good for you.
What have you built? Ever found yourself hunched over your laptop in an airport trying to finish up that last little piece of whatever your build was only to have the sim crash and eat the whole thing? Your citizens have.
Have you scripted? Ever stared at a screen trying different combinations of commands only to have that contrary witch you call a script editor stare you down with "ERROR : Syntax error"? And how did you learn scripting? Did you join some scripters groups? Find some freebie scripts and tear them apart to try to figure out how they worked? Go to some classes?
Ask yourself this: Why do we need those classes, anyway? Why does the LL documentation and implementation of your own scripting product continue to be so user-hostile that there is a continuing hubbub of events, offline editors (LSLEditor and more) and at least one separate website (lslwiki.net) to teach what should be easily available from the company that put the system together? Despite your best efforts, as the error screen says, the citizens of Second Life continue to create amazing scripted objects and teach other the craft.
Have you ever tried to learn something from that strange combination of Rube Goldberg contraption and Fibber McGee's closet that is the Knowledge Base? The citizens have, and we managed to learn despite it.
Have you ever spent hours learning Photoshop/PaintShopPro just so you could create that one texture that you needed, or learning GoldWave/Audition/ProTools to tweak the bird sounds for your inworld garden? The citizens have.
How's your group life? Have you honestly had the experience of having your group chat requests for (or offers of) help show up 45 minutes after you send them into the dark hole that is group chat lag? This persistent problem rips the spontaneity and creativity out of community after community --- yet, the groups soldier on, mostly good humoredly. Those are the citizens of Second Life.
Have you tried to build something in a public sandbox and experienced this boob Nightmare Dench’s griefing as an average citizen without any hope of getting a timely response from the LL support desk? The citizens have.
Have you ever despaired for your (usually empty) in-world boutique because of the weekly random reminders from your company to stop all transactions while your techs fix some other part of your network and viewer? The citizens have.
Have you sunk some money -- some sum that is significant to you -- into some land and actually paid the tier out of what you make from your business as you watch the land value plummet? What are we up now? 20,000 sims? And about 55,000 concurrency? That's less than three real citizens, camper alts, griefers and bots per sim. Take out the camper alts, the griefers and the bots, because let's face it, they're not the greatest customers, and is it any surprise that land value and retail businesses are depressed? "Robust economy"? Are you kidding? Have you concatenated the SL economy with the LL economy?
The user-friendliness of this infrastructure is not a side issue, not even the most important issue for the future of this world. It is the only issue. I include the following:
- Reliability of the asset servers for all functions 100% of the time.
- Reliability of the viewer.
- Ease of use of each component of the system, including the website, the knowledge base, support, the building editor, etc.
- Ease of moving from "How do I download this Second Life thing?" to being a contributing, participating citizen.
I ask myself, how on earth can it be that I have been here since 2006 and the same issues continue to plague this system, despite endless assurances that it has all been [RESOLVED]. (Want to get a hearty round of LOL's in any group chat? Just answer any complex question with, [RESOLVED].) Clearly there is something astonishingly inept about the Linden Lab system of handling these things. I state this categorically not only because company after company handles far more complex data handling tasks, but because it seems so apparent that LL loses focus more easily than a squirrel with ADD.
I said in my blog entry and I'll say it again here: The best imaginable news for the core residents (the ones who have actually created this world despite your company’s platform) at this point would be if your real job is mergers and acquisitions and your bonus rides on how big a sales price you get. It seems the Linden “management system” is all about vision, not execution. Maybe if the next guys pay enough, they’ll pay attention to what really matters here; and it isn’t Windlight or Dazzle. And it sure as hell isn’t the “feature” of displaying Avatar Rendering Costs, LL’s astonishing, cheap, and blithering ill-timed attempt to blame the most creative residents for the miserable performance of your network.
Make no mistake. I am a huge fan of Second Life, and I have probably spent more time, emotion and money here than I really should have. I’ve spent weeks learning so I could pass along some useful knowledge to new people, and maybe create something of value. Most of all, I’ve met amazing people from all over the world. I think I’m a pretty good citizen, and most people I meet are, too. They persist in their commitment to this world despite LL’s best efforts to discourage them. Those are the citizens of Second Life. While I have my cynical moments, I don't spend hours and hours composing my complaints about things here. Mostly I shrug it off and move on. But the grinding mediocrity of LL's performance, the consistent failure to solve the fundamental issues .... well, it does get frustrating.
Your company has treated the citizens poorly. I think you have treated them like fools, but they are not fools and the evidence is everywhere every time you log on. You would do well to engage in an adult to adult relationship with the citizens, and I've seen little evidence of that.
So here we are. A new moment in Second Life. Your grand entrance. Competition looms on the horizon. It is only a matter of time before we will have the option to port our inventory and skills to some other world. How about some answers? Enough of the "we have a lot to do" -- hell, we knew that long before you did. What are you going to do? What is going to be different? What concrete steps will Linden Labs take to repair this creaking wreck of a platform and by when? Is there a future in Second Life, and if so, why? I know it is none of my damn business, but given what I've invested in this world, I'm impertinent enough to think that it IS my business, and I'd like some answers before I fritter away too much more time or money investing in a virtual future that seems more and more to be the "proof of concept", not the real deal.

And by the way, welcome. :-)
llListen(0, "M", NULL_KEY, "");
Best regards,
Mishka Butuzova

Have your say: Add comments below or click the banner at the top to find out more