Kami Harbinger

There's lies, damn lies, and numbers of accounts reported for virtual worlds.

Richard Bartle's list of "The five most important people in the virtual world" has this "gem" of statistics:

"To give some sense of what he's achieved, some eight million people (as I write this) have tried Second Life at least once; for Lineage, the figure is over sixty million (and the population of South Korea is only about 49m). Now THAT'S impact."

The 8.2 million "Total Residents" is not even remotely "people who have tried Second Life at least once" (it may reasonably be in the 4-6 million range), but that's not the worst of it.

But Richard's next statistic is even more wrong. First, according to Wikipedia's article on Lineage, "NCsoft has reported that Lineage had at one point more than three million subscribers". For Lineage II, it says "reporting 610,918 unique users during the month of March 2007"... The Second Life economy page says "Residents Logged-In During Last 30 Days: 889,914". SL is 45% larger than L2.

Second, the number of accounts ever created in Lineage are totally meaningless, because Koreans often play on temporary accounts at netcafes. An "account" may only be used for one session. A single player can easily use dozens or hundreds of accounts. That's why there's more accounts than Koreans.

User-hours are the only metric that can be reasonably compared between VWs, and most of them won't report them, because they know how bad it makes them look. I had 4 accounts on FFXI (one main, three mules in different cities so I could use their auction houses). But I never spent more than a few minutes a day as the mules, I spent several hours a day for 9 months as my main. I have accounts on Runescape and several others, but I only played them for an hour or so each. Those accounts should only count as a single user-hour, while my FFXI usage was close to 1000 hours. I have a main account and an alt that I use for permissions testing in SL. I log into my alt maybe once a month for a few minutes, check something, and log out.

Roy Trubshaw Because if Roy hadn't figured out how to create a shareable, writeable high segment on a DECsystem-10 mainframe in 1978, we wouldn't be having this discussion."

Well, in the sense that they wouldn't be talking to Richard Bartle, I suppose that's true, though he might have ended up another Julian Dibbell or the like. If Rob Trubshaw hadn't built his timesharing system, and Bartle hadn't managed to make MUD commercial, VWs would still have come from PLATO and Habitat, and reporters would be talking to someone else. I played Avatar in the latter years of PLATO, and it's indistinguishable in genre from any modern MMORPG. I never got to play the original Habitat, but I've played Club Caribe, and it's very Second Life-like.

Gygax and Arneson introduced the idea of the role-playing game; taking the part of a single hero piece in a game instead of just controlling it from above. They're the originators of the idea. Colossal Cave, Rogue, and PLATO's dnd followed from that, and MMORPGs were inevitably going to follow from those.

For earliest appearance, it's Oubliette, not MUD. Richard Bartle repeatedly claims in his blog and on other blogs that Oubliette and Avatar had no persistence, despite the ability to play it and assurances by the original developers that it does, and despite the fact that MUD1 was regularly reset, and therefore wasn't persistent!

For most innovative, that's clearly either Avatar or Habitat. MUD was just Colossal Cave for multiple players, but Habitat was weird and yet recognizably comfortable.

And for greatest direct influence, DikuMUD is the source of all modern MMORPGs. While it was certainly based on MUD, it threw out much of what MUD or any other derivative had done (which infuriates many of the old-time MUD developers), made the gameplay simple and mechanistic, and it succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. You can't play EverQuest, DaoC, FFXI, WoW, or almost any other MMORPG without playing DikuMUD.

William Gibson visited Second Life recently:

"It was quite a thrill to give William Gibson himself a short tour of Second Life at the end of last year. And while I am not sure what he expected, I don’t think he expected that his avatar would be publicly mocked for its lack of aesthetic qualities.

"We visited one of the hardcore dystopian cyberpunk sims and had a wander around. A group of cosplayers were sitting chatting on benches and when they saw William Gibson (obviously not appearing under his own name) a few catcalls rang out. He was, I think, both surprised and disturbed by this – I think surprised by the mocking and disturbed that in a virtual world where anonymity is prized and the usual laws of physics do not apply, appearance still seemed to be an issue for residents."

Ha ha! There is nothing funnier than the self-proclaimed "coiner of the word cyberspace" getting mocked by real cyberpunk virtual world inhabitants for not being cool enough.

But he should expect that. He's the archetype of one of his own stock characters: the washed-up old has-been who's out of style, out of touch, and clinging onto the spotlight only through inertia and money... Totally last year, maybe just last season.

Admittedly, I'm not Gibson's biggest fan anymore. I was for a few years; reading "Johnny Mnemonic" in OMNI Magazine was one of the most formative influences of my life, and I read Neuromancer over and over and over. But as I read more of his works, and found out why they had their flaws, the shine came off.

Back in the '80s, he was a poseur who didn't use the Internet or BBS's or computers, didn't have a computer, wrote on a typewriter, and based his "Matrix" on arcade games. I liked his gritty urban settings and the cybernetics, but the second he started talking about computers, my eyes rolled out of my head. The Matrix never made any sense, but that's because it was written by someone with no idea what he was writing.

Most of his '80s short stories were awesome. Neuromancer was still really good as long as you ignored Case's work, and Count Zero was okay, but Mona Lisa Overdrive was weak. Then he started his new, unrelated stories. His artsy things like Agrippa and his movie are not good. Virtual Light was a bad ripoff of Snow Crash (similar characters, similar writing style), and the rest of his books have been worse. I stopped reading halfway through Idoru because it had been done better in REAL LIFE a year or two before, and stopped reading Gibson. So that's, what, 20 years since he wrote anything good?

He's sort of tried to catch up to at least the late 20th century in the last few years, but his blog is hideous and unusable and rarely contains anything but him linking to stuff days, months, or years behind the rest of the Internet, and I sure don't expect anything good from his new book.

...

So, wait, I'm Cyberpunk Boy #1, and I don't like Gibson? What cyberpunk do I read, you ask?

I've always been much more partial to the books of Pat Cadigan; Mindplayers, Fools, and Synners ("Change for the machines! We must all change for the machines!" "If you can't dance with it, fuck it, or eat it, throw it out!") were fantastic, and she continues to write good cyberpunk books; Tea From an Empty Cup and Dervish is Digital use the mechanics of MMO VWs in good murder mysteries, stories that actually make sense and aren't just travelogues. Or

Bruce Sterling writes weird stories about uncomfortable people in unpleasant futures (or near-presents, in some cases), and I recommend them all. Schismatrix, Crystal Express, Islands in the Net (if you didn't like it the first time, try re-reading it now, and you'll see why it's brilliant), Globalhead, A Good Old-Fashioned Future, The Difference Engine (half Gibson, still good), even more recently Zeitgeist. Well, okay, Heavy Weather was pretty bad. No excuse for that.

Lance Olsen's Tonguing the Zeitgeist is very amusing.

Greg Egan is mind-damagingly good. Seriously, read Axiomatic, and you will be broken/fixed for life. All of his books are just as good, but few are that concentrated a dose of life-changing weirdness.

John Barnes ranges from heroic Heinlein homage to nightmarish, often in the course of a series. The Century Next Door series and Mother of Storms especially.

Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is pretty nifty, and you can get a free download and avoid cutting down trees; but toss him some whuffie, okay?

Right now I'm halfway through Charles Stross's Glasshouse, enjoying it immensely, but apparently in the future, everyone will be a sociopath (or Charlie just hates people, which is more likely, as he's a recovering bastard sysadmin from hell).

Raph Koster just posted a reprint of Whither Online (circa 2005), where he said:

Anyone remember what cyberspace looked like a decade ago? There we were, all fresh arrivals in the Metaverse, dreaming of Snow Crash’s virtual bars and William Gibson’s skies like televisions on dead channels. We wondered if the Holodeck would require one of those newfangled 3d hardware video cards or not. If we were really old-school sci-fi fans, maybe we thought about Bradbury’s Veldt or Vernor Vinge’s "True Names."

Back then, we dreamed about dynamic worlds that we could morph on the fly with a thought (or at least a twitch of a mouse). We had a lot of grand visions about really realistic NPCs that would move about the world like the ones in Ultima VII did. We thought maybe the orcs would be invading virtual towns because they wanted to, not because there were spawn points set up by the city gates.

Then he goes on to talk a lot about the failed dream of AI and artificial life generating quests that people would like. This is the wrong answer. Putting AI in an MMO is like sitting in a restaurant surrounded by free gourmet food, but wishing you had a McDonald's shitburger.

As always, I point at Second Life in answer. Even in 2005, this should have been the obvious answer, but 2 years later, it's not really in question.

We already have a metaverse where there are hundreds of thousands of ongoing melodramatic plots created by mostly-intelligent agents. The good kind of agents, real people, not stupid AI NPCs. AI will never work and people don't like NPCs. Programmers tend to like NPCs because they're easy to set up and control, but actual players, even those programmers when they're in the game, despise them, because they're just machines. There is only one NPC I've ever felt any empathy for in 30+ years of playing computer games: Floyd from Planetfall. And I was maybe 12 when I played Planetfall. The use of NPCs is a delusional sickness brought on by spending too much time alone with your computer.

I'm not talking here about "monsters", which are merely a mechanical obstacle like a puzzle or a locked door. It's revealing that when MMORPG players talk about killing monsters over and over to get experience and material rewards, they call it "farming", not "hunting". Monsters are psychologically equivalent to plants, not animals or people. An NPC is an artificial person you're expected to interact with and give enough of a shit about (if only for the reward or reputation boost) to carry out a quest. But in MMORPGs, there are no bad consequences for failing to carry out an NPC quest. If I ignore a "sick" NPC and don't bring her medicine, she'll still be there tomorrow. If I do heal her, she'll still be there tomorrow, coughing away for someone else. What do I care? There can be no world-altering alternative, because it doesn't scale past one player.

True AI was a boondoggle. When I was younger, I believed it was possible, but as years passed and no progress was made, and I studied the issue more, it became obvious that it will never work, and that any attempt to make it work is doomed to failure. Worse, it's stupidly wasteful, because we already have 6 billion mostly-intelligent humans on this planet. We don't need non-human intelligences to put characters in games.

Artificial life looked like a promising field for gaming, initially. But it's too unpredictable, and too fragile. You can set up a field of creatures or plants, and hope that they'll expand fast enough to counter demand, but very quickly the players will plow into them in such numbers that the tipping point is reached, and they go extinct. If you do set them up to reproduce fast enough to counter the number of players, then the slightest lag in harvesting will have them swarm over and destroy everything. It's massively unstable. I'm appalled that Raph still believes in this nonsense; he experienced first-hand the total failure of his first artificial life design for Ultima Online, and apparently learned nothing from it. It wasn't just an economic and ecological catastrophe, it rapidly became boring except for the Player vs. Player element. Real human players provided the only challenge in that world.

You cannot have designer-prepared plots or AI-prepared plots for more than one player in a mutable world. It's a logical impossibility. Suppose you get things set up just right so that just one player can try to carry out a specific planned quest; someone else will be disrupting parts of it elsewhere, and the player will fail. The more quests you try to set up and juggle at once, the more chaotic the interactions get, and the more disastrous the failure.

There is a way out, though, by accepting that people exist, not fighting it. The plot in Second Life is pretty compelling if you like people at all. It's people going out and having fun (and sometimes having conflicting ideas of what "fun" is), and running businesses and succeeding or failing, and falling in love, and falling out of love. Because it's just real life with fewer consequences, and accelerated to Benny Hill speeds, it has all of the bizarre plot twists of a daytime soap opera, but you get to be the star of your own show. Everyone does.

Any RPG quest type has an equivalent, you just have to be more creative. Consider the standard RPG "supply and demand" quest, where someone needs a resource and someone else supplies it. I make good pocket money as a skilled craftsman, the SL equivalent of a small electronics shopkeeper, making gadgets that people ask for. It's not just farming crystals and materials and then clicking a button, either; I have to build prims and write scripts and test my software. It takes actual skill and interest on my part, it's not a repetitive activity. That's been a fun and both personally and financially rewarding quest. If you can't script, you can make clothes or buildings. If you don't want to build (though I think that almost everyone will want to build things eventually), you can run a tour group, or host a fan-club, or strip, or whatever.

The artistic urge that everyone has, the drive to have something to do besides just talk, has created, from a blank canvas, a nigh-unlimited range of games and quests and social activities. If you like swordfighting, go to Samurai Island. If you like casual and gambling games, go to a casino/arcade. If you like porn, there's strip clubs. If you want to talk Star Trek fandom, there are Star Trek fan-clubs. If you like live music concerts, there are always multiple performers in SL at any time. If you want to pretend to be a furry, or a vampire, or whatever makes you happy, there are 24/7 roleplay sims for that. If you like exploring, Second Life is crammed full of interesting things people have built. Just pick a direction and start flying, and BlogHUD anything neat you find.

Everyone on the planet can't participate in SL quite yet. It needs more servers, and it needs more efficient use of those servers. While the peak concurrency has more than doubled in the last year, it has years to go before even a million people can be in SL at once (circa 2011, at this rate). LL needs to learn how to load-balance and transfer regions across servers; server-bound regions are not a scalable solution. Probably it'll have to wait a couple years until the server can be open-sourced before SL truly becomes the Stephensonian Metaverse. Linden Lab is going to have to transition from sole proprietor to protocol definer, region and user registrar, and banking authority. There's more to do on the user side, as well: more activities, more interesting sims. Wasting time on ideas we know will fail is folly. Working on activities and tools that enable real people to communicate and have fun together, that's what we need now.

The Metaverse is here, but that's just the start.

Computer games and virtual worlds do something strange to our perception of reality. They bleed over, they tantalize us with more powerful interfaces and additional information we can't acquire in the real world. We're left with the nagging feeling that the "real world" is not real, that this is the imitation sub-reality we don't belong in.

• eXistenZ
• Videodrome
• The Thirteenth Floor
• Philip K. Dick
• Alternate Reality: The City
• Terra Nova: Altered States
• Wired: This is Your Brain on Tetris
• Terra Nova: I thought we could pick up that mailbox
• Wired: Real World Doesn't Use a Joystick

I've been experiencing this effect all my life. I can do near-total immersion into a game, which gives me far better overwatch of the screen (rather than just focusing on a point), faster in-game reaction, etc... But surprises in-game will startle me physically, and it takes a while to wear off. Some traits never left.

Driving games like Pole Position and Burnout permanently damaged the way I drive. At least kids these days have Gran Turismo, which isn't so deranged, but my hyper-aggressive "accelerate into, through, and out of curves" type-A driving owes a lot to videogames. Don't worry, I no longer drive in cities, I can't stand to be stuck in traffic. I've never hit anyone, never had a crash, but as a friend put it, "The way you drive, you'll only ever have one crash".

Missile Command was the first one I noticed it in. I would see a skyline and look for missiles. If I saw contrails, I'd have a moment of total "which world am I in?".

The Atari 800 game Rescue From Fractalus (more screenshots) ate my brain for months. I would dream about sweeping the planet for survivors, getting ambushed by Jaggies. I would always jump when the Jaggies pounded on my screen, even when I knew it was them. Even now, certain mountain ranges look like the mountains of Fractalus, and I get confused for a second.

Alternate Reality: The City didn't change my behavior, I think, but I'm still there: I often dream in AR, and hear the music. The life simulation of AR influenced all of my later game design; I've spent my entire life building things similar to Alternate Reality or Ultima.

Doom had a profound effect on me. I instinctively check corners when I walk into a room; there could be a demon or another player there. You laugh now, but I'll be the one laughing when a demon's eating your face. Key-cards in secure facilities give me deja vu and trepidation, as I know the game's going to get much harder on the other side.

Descent was just plain dangerous. I could barely walk after playing a few hours of it. I had to wait half an hour before I could drive again, or I'd try sideslipping and maneuvering in 3D. The worst Descent experience was walking into a bathroom which was tiled floor to ceiling with tiles exactly like the walls in a Descent level. I could barely stand up for perspective confusion.

One afternoon after playing too much Final Fantasy XI, I took a nap. Waking up, I was hungry, and my first thought was that I needed to get my sword, go to the park, hunt cockatrices, then use a fire crystal on them to cook meat mithkabobs... I was halfway across the room to my swords before I realized that was insane... There are no cockatrices in the park, just squirrels!

Animal Crossing: Wild World looks cute and harmless, right? Unless you live near a garden full of apple trees, in which case the urge to go steal all their apples every third day is nearly irresistible. Sadly, this doesn't seem to pay the rent as well in RL as it does in AC. I've had many dreams in Yama, my Animal Crossing town. It's such an idyllic world, so easy to live in as long as you do a quick bit of maintenance on the town and your animal friends, that it's hard not to dream there.

Second Life is all of those and more. I get annoyed that I can't fly or teleport, or change my avatar quickly, or dance for 4 hours straight. Flight, in particular. The notion that I'm stuck on the ground and have to find stairs or an elevator is confusing and weird, and I'll spend some seconds trying to see the balcony or window I need to get to, before realizing I have to go inside a building to go up. My first thought about how to get somewhere is to grab the map and teleport (Google Maps on my Treo is a partial substitute...). I obsessively observe the construction details of architecture, furniture, and gadgets, because I need to figure out how to build it in the least number of prims. Cell phones are a reasonable substitute for IM, but I pine for my tabbed group chats. I often wish I could turn on name bubbles and mouse over objects for a description.

There are positive effects. I've found that I dress better after using SL for a while. My avatar still dresses better than I do, but we're getting close now.

I use my avatar's name in a number of non-SL contexts now. Am I really sure which is the avatar and which the "real" person? "Are we still in the game?"

It's my typist's birthday today, and having lunch with friends for the real-life wake (I don't really "celebrate" getting old), I went out to drink and find music in SL.

Fireheart Braver did a great show at Cusack Coliseum; apparently she'll be back next week, check the Events/Live Music listings. Country/rock, lots of sad songs. She has a really good voice.

The Sanctuary Rock's always fun, and amid all the metal, played "The Internet is for Porn", which is never more true than at the SR. Still, there's only so much metal I can take, even after my reconversion to metalhead (through watching Metalocalypse) last year.

And then the news I'd been hoping for! After two weeks, the Elbow Room (Mare 104,44,56) is back!

Low-prim as ever, and rockin' with the best '80s pop:

(click to zoom)

Apparently the spammers have my email address, which was bound to happen sooner or later; I don't do anything to guard it, because I'd rather that real people be able to reach me, too. But I don't just get any kind of spammers, I get ontologically confused spammers. Spammers who do not quite understand the distinction between reality and Second Life:

I am Dr.Jude Benn Harris, a financial consultant. I have a client civil servant fron NIGERIA due for retirement come jude 29th 2007. He want to buy a residential property from you/your company as he intends to relocate to your country after his retirement.

While the Lair of the Fiendish Dr. Harbinger has a lovely empty-sim seaside view and quite reasonable rent, I think it might be difficult to relocate into from Nigeria, or anywhere on the material plane.

Dear Sir,
I am a Liberian Refugee, Lining in Ghana and also a member of Secondlife.com where I got your contact from. Pleae if you can help me with my project please let me know.
Sir, i wanted you to help me market Diamonds that I have here with me on Secondlife.com. I am ready to work with you and have the Diamonds sent to you if you can help me to market them.
Thank you and I look forward to hearing from you.

Gimme a second with the rez tools, and I'll have some diamonds in SL, too! Heck, stop by Pellucidar, and if you can work the power crystal generator, you can have a spinning, glowing power crystal! Nuts to diamonds!

I'm baffled by what American Apparel thought they were going to get. Putting some mediocre clothing, vastly inferior to what most residents sell, in a small store and then never doing any events, never changing anything... Did they expect to actually make real-world money out of SL sales? Didn't they understand the exchange rate?

As a marketing effort, it succeeded initially; like most people, I'd never heard of them before they came to SL, and I went and looked through their shop. But their clothes were unimpressive and uninteresting. I found nothing I would ever wear. They did nothing to hold interest. It's like putting up a bare gray web page with a low-rez picture of a shirt, and expecting to get a lot of sales out of it.

Companies who want to use SL for marketing need to make in-world products and events which are interesting in comparison to what is already in SL, and then funnel the results of that interest over to their real world product.

Nissan did much better. The SL Sentra is great. It's one of my favorite vehicles in SL, because it was designed to handle well in SL's alleged physics. They've put real effort into their sim; there aren't any regular events to draw me back, so there's room for improvement, but I still tell newbies to go there and get a good car. And when I next buy a new car in RL, they've earned at least a fair comparison from me by doing this.

Aloft have a good build, but didn't do any events, either. So the place was a ghost town. It was impossible to visit and not think of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, which I'm pretty sure was not the marketing message they wanted to send. Maybe they'll learn something with their relaunch?

Second Life, to a real-world company, is about marketing your brand. Marketing takes effort, not just one billboard or web page.

(And hey, anyone who wants some real, practical help with these things... IM me or send me email and we can discuss rates.)

Richard Bartle's asking over at Terra Nova about alternative design ideas for virtual worlds.

I'm a big fan of really weird gameplay, and creating new environments, but several of the ideas are way off. They seem to ignore the fact that virtual worlds (VWs) are SOCIAL environments. If you're not building it for people to connect and communicate, you shouldn't be making multi-player VWs, you should stick to 1P games (nothing wrong with that, I like both 1P and MP games).

You shouldn't take out direct communication[0], and you can't prevent indirect communication. At the barest minimum level, there's always blockchat (pushing objects, or even just walking, into positions to shape letters or numbers to dial on an external channel). Moreover, unless you have somehow made the greatest environment since sliced bread, people won't put up with heavy obstacles put in their way.

Artificial intelligence and NPCs are pretty close to the perfect example of things that shouldn't be in VWs. There are over 6 billion other primates on this planet, of whom 1K to 10M might reasonably be in the same VW as you. Who needs a crappy software agent pretending to be a person? Do you really need a dragon to slay, if you can instead go to a combat zone?

Do you really need an NPC shopkeeper, if there's a friendly player who'll make and sell stuff? In FFXI there were three economies: the NPC shops, which had hugely overpriced garbage, but were the only source of certain disposables and unique items; the official auction house system, which tended to have lots of crap at reasonable prices, but not much of the good stuff; and people with packs full of goods set for sale, where you got the good deals, and could often haggle with them, and could buy supplies from wandering merchants. They could easily have eliminated the NPC shops, and possibly even the auction house system, and made the world more social. I like running my little shop in Second Life. My sales boxes are basically vending machines, so it's not a 40-hour-a-week job to run it, but I'm often there to meet people and answer questions, and I sell more when I'm present for a few hours a week than I do all the rest of the time. Why is Second Life full of casinos and nightclubs? Because those environments let lots of people get together in one place and share some experience, and you get to meet lots of people. You could make all sorts of profitable solitary businesses in SL, but few people do, because they want to be with other people.

AI is great for 1P games, because otherwise you're all alone. But if you can't get the other players to fill those roles in a multi-player game, you are an incompetent game designer. I don't know how to say that nicely; NPCs in MMOs are absolute proof that you don't know what you're doing. I think Myst Online: Uru Live is a giant empty disaster, but at least in theory they got the right idea: the "NPCs" are role-played by staff at Cyan. Everyone else is another player, and mostly they stay in character.

Richard's dead-on about magic being overdone. I'm not without guilt: I've done my own share of Greek alchemy magic systems, but magic is ridiculous and obsolete and, worst of all, boring. Players will demand some kind of powers outside of the mundane, but it doesn't have to be the same-old, same-old D+D crap. I think Second Life has the best magic system ever. Anyone with intelligence and talent can learn to be a sorcerer who can make objects out of nothing and create complex enchantments that animate them; mundanes who can't script, paint, or build are mere consumer scum. If you're making a game instead of a VW, go ahead and give the construction system some fiction, even simplify it more than SL's system (the Lego Mindstorms programming tools might be a good model), but don't do another magic system. The Matrix Online's special abilities were pretty neat, and did something creative with the setting. If you can't be more creative than the Matrix Online, go home.

[0] The one possible exception being worlds for children. Frankly, I'd rather that parents acted like responsible adults and just supervised their children, but since they're often dumb enough to think the Internet is just like a TV set and therefore a mindless babysitter, censored VWs for children are going to happen.

Well, the town hall meeting about the whiny open letter is over. A few choice quotes show that at least the Lindens aren't delusional, and aren't going to freak out and change anything because of this:

[13:00] Cory Linden shouts: The answer, of course, lies somewhere in between. We are working to fix bugs and enable incremental improvement. At the same time, we are...
[13:00] Cory Linden shouts: building the foundations for the next gen architecture that will radically improve our ability to scale.
[13:01] Cory Linden shouts: We also expect that some changes that might seem incremental, such as voice, will actually be transformative in terms of the avaialble design space for residents.

[13:07] Cory Linden shouts: Patience obviously helps, but more than that, please help the community build the pieces it needs to make SL a better place...
[13:08] Cory Linden shouts: If you are a programmer, contribute to the open source project or come work for us...
[13:08] Cory Linden shouts: If you have bugs and can repro them, add data into thepublic jira...
[13:08] Cory Linden shouts: Help with the wiki and documentation...
[13:09] Cory Linden shouts: Spend time helping out in the welcome areas and help island...
[13:09] Cory Linden: As bill and ted would say, be excellent to each other.

And a hearty Party on, dudes! to you, too.

Cristiano Midnight's "Open Letter to Linden Lab" is making the rounds of all the usual whiny twits. I won't be signing it.

When I became a Resident 18 months ago, people were whining that the newest updates then had added bugs, and the Grid was unstable, and the end was nigh. Each new update comes out, right up to the present, same routine. It's really, really old by now.

There's a certain type of neurotic personality that ignores anything good and improved, cannot experience joy at things getting better, and can only see negativity, darkness, and corruption in any change. Unfortunately, these people also tend to whine the loudest, and they all sit around circle-jerking each other until they're convinced they're right. They're not right, they just all have the same mentally defect, and are fantasizing about a perfect Grid of the past that didn't exist.

18 months ago, the Grid sucked. You could trivially crash a sim, you'd drop an object and sometimes it'd rez and sometimes not, the client went down like a L$10 whore with herpes lesions and bad teeth. Client performance was negligible; on a good box, you could set your draw distance to 64m and turn off the few graphical features that existed (local lighting and ripple water didn't exist yet), and be happy to get 10 fps in most areas on a fast computer. Now, I fly around at 256m draw distance with everything on, especially local lighting and ripple water, and get 15-30 fps. It was very easy to lag a server to death with scripted objects; now it's quite difficult. Back then, 40 people per sim was an unattainable upper limit, and 20 would start to cause problems; now you can routinely do 40+, and many routinely handle 100.

Remember the big grey goo attacks? The firebreaks of dead sims across the mainland in a desperate attempt to keep them from spreading? Seen one of those lately? No, you haven't, because LL changed SL to make it significantly harder to make gray goo now. The only times I've seen a sim go down lately have been because of griefer attack. I expect eventually that'll be reduced and then wiped out, too.

Almost all of the specific complaints in the "Open Letter" are spurious.

• Only a few people seem to have experienced inventory loss, and while they've been vocal about the loss, they haven't been as vocal when LL fixes it. In any event, you can make backups of copyable items by putting them in boxes left in-world. This will also help your inventory load faster; if you have over 5000 items, pack some stuff away.
• Search and classified were broken earlier this year, but it's been working fine lately, and they gave free weeks for classifieds which didn't get shown. Again, the whiners don't acknowledge fixes.
• I haven't had a failed teleport or an attachment in an uncomfortable place in months.
• It's hypocritical to whine that LL won't block NPIs from the grid during heavy load, because all of the whiners were out in force opposing this measure as "anti-democratic" when LL proposed it. You reap what you sow.
• I haven't seen prim drift in literally years, and of course the whiners don't mention improvements like the upcoming sculpty prims.
• I simply haven't experienced these "transaction problems". It sounds like a scam to me. None of my customers have had bad item deliveries, AFAIK. I once paid a vendor and didn't get my product... And it was just a buggy vendor, the owner hand-delivered the item.

Linden Lab does make mistakes. The group IM bugs of the last week have been really, really irritating. I can barely use group IM right now... And just when hope is lost, here's Torley announcing a bug fix ready to go soon. They do in fact fix the stuff they break. When it comes to bug-fixing, they do about as good a job as you could expect from such a small company and such a large, complex program.

Despite the occasional bug, I'm having fun working on my adventure game sim. I'm bringing in friends and co-workers from First Life. I may soon be doing SL work as a day job. Things are looking good. And why? Because I don't have the mental disorder that makes me a whiner.