Reel Expression

With all the issues of Sl for the past 24 hours, many of us have had the time to reflect on all that is wrong. Generally whenever SL gets this bad, you end up with a large cat fight between LL fanbois and those of us who are past fed up. Since building and uploading today is out of the question, I trolled the forums and saw a lot of people talking about just waiting for something better to come along. In all honesty, that’s what I (and I think many others) have been doing for years.

In the forums today Pie Psaltery wrote:

Thing is, what do you want from an alternate platform? Because there really are a lot of options out there for most of what SL does, minus the customizable content.

Personally I think what every one really wants *IS* SL, just with a molecule of customer support and perhaps an ounce of stablity.

I think he answered his own question within the first sentance. The only reason why there hasn’t yet been a mass exodus from the pile of crap SL has become, is that there isn’t a single other place for content creation without extreme limitation. Therefore there isn’t actually a true alternate platform - yet. As it stands now, the new trend is “developer programs” that each new platform has varring degrees of difficulty to get into. The only thing that is remotly close is There but they have extreme limitations on what you can make, an approval system, and a wonky exchange. Those other platforms will get the users who have no desire to make anything and just want to play with shiny bland things that “professional” developers have made. Personally, if that’s all I wanted to do I’d just only play shiny MMOs and go back to just film editing. The only reason why SL as a platform has had any type of sucess over premade worlds IS the content creation. People want to express themselves and you can’t do that with only someone else’s objects. Don’t agree? Why then does myspace allow for custimization? It’d look a lot better if people could only use “professional” templates, but I doubt it’d be as popluar. Same goes for blogs and websites.

While I agree with the second line, many of us have lost hope. Instead of better customer support, they cut off lines of communication. Instead of better stability, they continue to fix 1 thing while breaking 2 unrelated working things. And lets really be honest with ourselves, things work a lot worse now then they did before. Until late last year, I’d never had a single person not recieve what they purchased. I never had an upload fail, espeically at 6am SLT. I never had textures snap back to where I have to almost always change them 10+ times on a new and empty sim. I used to be able to close group spam IMs. I’m not saying everything worked perfectly fine back then, we did have a lot of issues, but now there are more days I can’t work then I can. Programs are supposed to get better, not worse if they want to actually have paying customers. The fact is until something better comes along, LL can do whatever the fuck they want to and there is absolutly nothing we can do about it. That has always been the problem with monopolies.

Because no one actually reads the forums anymore, I’m going to paste what I wrote here. Maybe the 1509 of you who visted my little blog last month will find it mildly interesting. Who knows.

What do I want from an alternate platform?
- Unlimited content ceration. Not the developer programs that these newer platforms are doing. Yes SL has a lot of crap, but there is a lot of good stuff made by people who started out by making crap. Making content should not be limited to people who start out already knowing how to create. If you do, all you have is a squeaky clean world, where the residents have no stake, and little to no innovation. If SL closed content creation to just the developers group everything would look like the bland corporation isles. I’d rather wade through crap to find a dancing cow that makes me laugh then to log into a bland world.

- Ability to create animations. Well… that’s what I make and I have yet to see another platform offer this at all. I’m also pretty sure that LL has cornered the market on scripting. Where is the fun of making cool stuff if you can’t make it do cool things?

- Currency exchange.

- Stability. Or at the very least a company that understands that stability is more important in the scheme of things then whatever new shiny they feel like working on instead. I pay $195 a month for my isle and haven’t been able to do anything on it for over 24 hours now. That is more then just wrong.

- Updating that doesn’t break the few already working stuff. I’ve been here for 3 years now and LL still hasn’t figured out how to fix 1 thing without breaking 2. Most people give the excuse that it’s new technology and other BS, but the fact of the matter is is that they wrote the code and have been working with it for long enough to understand how it works.

SL is a lot more complicated (and not a game) but the closest I can compare it to is other MMOs. From my experience, during beta and the first part of release is pretty bad but usually within a few months they start working the kinks out and updates stop breaking already working stuff. Actually when this happens, I usually laugh and tell SL update horror stories.

SL has been out for 4 years and by now we shouldn’t still be living through this. Not to mention the fact that many times they wait months to fix what they broke.

- Scalibility. Or even at the very least a company who makes it scalible BEFORE they open the floodgates. I do not understand how the hell they didn’t know all this was going to happen before and during the massive PR rush to get millions of signups. I do not feel sorry for LL at all about the issues happening, as it was their own mistake.

- Customer Service. I actually don’t think I’ve ever seen worse customer service. Every single problem I’ve ever had, I’ve had to fight to get past the wall of “it’s your fault” support. I seriously spent months trying to get support for my laptop that SL wouldn’t read the video card drivers correctly. Every single issue I had was always closed for having an unsupported video card, even though it was supported. I had to sit through months of 40fps for 10min then drop to 1fps for 5min before someone actually believed me through proof of my dxdiag. Finally ended it with “it’s a bug” that still hasn’t been fixed a year later. You’d think that concierge would be better, but they just respond “it’s your fault” quicker. Brand new empty sim and textures keep snapping back? “It’s your connection.”

I want a company that doesn’t put all the fault on the user and will admit mistakes. Every single bad thing that happens LL pushes it off as they aren’t responsible and are actually the victims. With an attitude like that, it’s no wonder they make the same mistakes over and over again.

People who will respect their customer base, espeically those of us who have hung on for years. I’m tired of being talked down to by LL as if we all are a bunch of morons. I’m tired of all this bloody double speak and the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. I’m tired of never answering questions. I’m tired of LL touting content creators in the press then turing around and treating us like insignificant bugs to be ignored. This is not saying bow down to every single grievience, but listen to the customer base and take thoughtfull steps in order to keep us as customers.

I have seen an increasing amount of people over the past 3 years say the same thing: as soon as something better comes along, I will leave. Personally I see that as a partial threat and partial truth. I don’t really believe that most of us want to see SL fail, but just want a program that works more often then not. If LL doesn’t shape up prior to a real competitor coming out, there will be an eventual mass exodus. It will start as people trying out the new platform and most of those will be the disgruntled content creators. Next will be creating content in both platforms until the only presense they have in SL will just be a store they never update.

A few fanbois will stay and uninformed new residents will join, but the damage will be done. Without something better, the few who do leave are rarely missed as someone new is always there waiting to step into the spotlight. There are only a very small amount (Starax for example) who really are irreplaceable. The difference being is that a new platform will be a lot easier for those salavating for greatness to compete at the starting line. While we will see those try to take the place of those who left, if the competition is that much better, they will only be shooting themselves in the foot.

A year or so ago there was a lot of buzz around about competitors. Saddly that never panned out, but I do remember LL’s (Philip actually) smug response of being able to “out update any new company.” I think many will agree that they will take working updates that happen fewer then weekly broken ones. This not even remotly understanding the userbase and the “we can do no wrong” attitude will be the eventual downfall. Sometimes I want a good competitor to come out only to knock LL off their high horse to see the laggy and bugged filled mess they’ve made.