More Regions Disappearing from SL

Over at New World Notes Hamlet Au is disappointed to learn that one of the Next Big Things to save Second Life isn't doing what he hoped it would, namely, turn SL into the gamers' paradise he apparently wants it to be.  This latest revelation comes on the heels of his blog entry last week that hyped the "publish[ing]" of SL "on Valve's Steam distribution network", which is apparently the latest Next Big Thing that will save SL from the slow disintegration of the grid.
Some people are joining Hamlet in hyping this Steam thing as the feature that will bring swarms of 25-40-year-olds to the grid, injecting new life into it and making up for the loss of regions that has been taking place over the last couple of years.  Others are downplaying these developments as not having any significant impact on the number of new users to SL, and I happen to be among that crowd.  And there's a reason why we don't expect this to take off: the high price of land in SL and the inescapable fact that Second Life is simply not a gaming platform.  It never was and never will be.
A popular region called Hosoi just announced that, because of financial difficulties, the sim owner is forced to close it down and leave the grid.  And it's not just one but four full regions shutting down.
Now, this should not be surprising to anyone who has kept up with news of SL on NWN.  In May and September last year, and in June of this year forecasts predict a ten percent loss of privately-"owned" regions.  The single biggest reason for these region losses is the ridiculously high price of land in SL, with Linden Lab charging people up to $1,000.00 USD to buy a new region and $295.00 USD a month for maintenance fees on the server that houses it.  And since servers are shared by several regions, this means that each server brings in many hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month.  It's a pricing model that only barely worked back in 2006, when there was still the illsuion maintained that the U.S. and world economies were somewhat strong.  But that illusion ended in 2008 — four years ago — and it is just plain stupid to expect people to sustain what has become an outrageously expensive luxury when most of us are not even able to earn a living wage and the ones who are able are finding their savings being gobbled up by everything from higher food prices to economically-crippling medical bills.
Now, the simplest solution to bring in more revenue is to cut region prices by one half to two thirds, making SL land pricing competitive with grids such as OpenSim and InWorldz, both of which charge less than $100.00 USD for private islands — both the initial buying price and the monthly server maintenance fee are around $75.00) — and provide far more resources for those regions.  Linden Lab currently allows only 15,000 primitives (the basic building blocks that are used to generate the amazing constructs users have made over the years).  InWorldz allows up to 45,000.  If you had a choice between paying $75 a month for 45,000 prims and shelling out $295 a month for 15,000 prims, the choice really doesn't even exist.  You'd opt for a grid that charges far less and gives you far more for what you're paying.

That's exactly what SL region owners are doing.  OpenSim was reported this past February as having experienced a small explosion of new users flocking over from the ridiculously expensive Second Life, a healthy increase following a December 2011 report that OpenSim gained 915 regions with InWorldz being the busiest of the independent virtual grids.

It is simply foolish to market something that isn't a gaming platform as a gaming platform, especially when none of the tools are present for turning it into one and the interest from users isn't there. But that's exactly what Linden Lab insists on doing, and with its primary revenue base drying up without a replacement to make up for the losses, the company really can't expect to fund all the non-SL projects it wants to. The latest deal with Steam may be an attempt to secure a new revenue source, but I can think of plenty of more efficient, more viable ways to increase it than by trying to attract gamers from one virtual environment to one that is not set up for gaming.

That's why the Bloodlines clan I belong to is trying to raise funds for a full year for the Nocturne Project. Until or unless Linden Lab wises up and dramatically lowers land tier prices, it's just prohibitively expensive to try and maintain a full region unless you have the business acumen to rent it out at a price that bring in a healthy profit. You can have mesh and pathfinding and all the deals with Cloud and Steam and whatever going on, but at the end of the day it's still the economy stupid. And if Linden Lab refuses to wake up to that reality, it's going to price itself out of business within a few more years.

For an alternative take on this subject, go here.

Jessica Lyon Proclaims Her Utter Contempt for Phoenix Users

In an insulting blog post that can basically be summed up as, "Here's a half-assed attempt at incorporating mesh into Phoenix, you whiners!  Now go install Firestorm already because we're through giving our users what they want!", Phoenix development team leader Jessica Lyon just alienated another chunk of what is probably going to be a rapidly dwindling user base.

Phoenix 1185 was, is and will always be our most stable release ever. Please do not expect this phoenix viewer with mesh to be as stable, it simply is not. If it has stability issues it's because it is now a hybrid of two different code bases. The bottom line is that a V1 viewer with a lot of V2 code hacked into the render engine is not going to give you stability as you've come to expect it from this project. Mesh was NOT designed to work with V1 code. We deliver you this viewer on an AS-IS basis.

Wow, that was unnecessarily harsh.  As if that wasn't bad enough, Lyon goes on to send a volley of hostility toward RLV users.

RLVa has not been updated in this Phoenix viewer release. This was my decision, not that of Kitty Barnett. Although I said some time back we would update RLVa in Phoenix it became obvious that the work/time commitment involved in doing so was simply not reasonable or responsible. Kitty is a very valuable asset to this team and I refuse to take her away from the ground breaking work she does in Firestorm and v2/v3 to put a large time commitment into a dying viewer code base. She is worth far more than that. If you want updated RLVa I would suggest using the Firestorm Viewer or Kitty's own Viewer Catznip. I offer you my sincerest apologies for going back on my word in regards to RLVa update in Phoenix, however I believe it was the right decision.

And now the condiment on this shit sandwich:

Please don't complain if this release doesn't work perfectly. If you find the viewer to be unusable you can return to our 1185 version without mesh or switch to the Firestorm Viewer. Complaints about the stability and usability of this release will largely go unheard, we did not modify the mesh code to work in V1 and will only spend limited time trying to fix issues resulting from it. Complaints about this project removing focus on Phoenix Viewer should go to me at [e-mail witheld by me — A.M.] .

Now, I get that customer support isn't something elitist tech heads are known far and wide for.  But even this lunatic ought to have sense enough to recognize that she's just invited a flood of angry e-mails with this.  How can a person spend an entire entry insulting and scolding her own user base and then be stupid enough to invite even more scorn than she's brought upon herself?  And her finishing move:

Phoenix Viewer is becoming harder for us to provide support for at an ever increasing rate. Almost all our support team members are using Firestorm (by choice) as their full time viewer, and being that Firestorm is now our default viewer this should be expected. Support for this release and the phoenix viewer in general will be far more limited this point on. Support will continue to try to help you but in many situations may be unable to do so. Please do not get angry at them if they are unable to provide help for you. Also, please remember... Our support team is not required to help you, they do so on their own accord because they want to.

In summation, "Suck it, Phoenix Viewer users!"

Now, I could go on to psychoanalyze Jessica Lyon's unhinged entry.  I could tell you that it is indicative of a spoiled little child who can't for the life of her understand why her backhanded attitude and lame insults toward her own user base aren't garnering her the respect and unbelievable oral sex she probably expected in return.  I could tell you that Lyon's attitude reminds me a lot of the Democrat Party of today, which continually insults its voter base while bending over backwards to placate the far right GOP that will still never respond with anything other than total political warfare with the ultimate goal of forever annihilating the Dems (hence my becoming a member of the Green Party in RL) — the only thing doing the opposite of what your base wants and then insulting said base accomplishes is to drive said base to go with another party, and that's always going to be true whether it's a political party or, in this case, a third party Second Life viewer.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm glad that the Phoenix development team finally decided to get around to producing a mesh-capable version of Phoenix, which always has been and always will be far superior to V2-V3-Firestorm.  But the fact is that as much as the Firestorm viewer itself is responsible for perceived negativity toward Jessica Lyon and her fellow clowns, so much more responsible is the shameful, over-hostile, elitist attitudes of the whole lot of them.  This is why alternate viewers such as Singularity, Cool VL, Rainbow, and other V1-based viewers will eventually outstrip Firestorm and the horrible viewers it's cloned from.

Jumping the Shark with Mesh?

Rumors (and blog posts) are flying that some Whovian regions are using spiffy new mesh builds, with at least one sim going all in to completely revamp.  As I've written here and here, I think completely redesigning a region with mesh builds is premature.

For one thing, more SL users are still using third-party viewers that do not yet have the ability to see mesh builds in all their glory — stability issues with Viewer 2 and Viewer 3, and strong dislike for the crappy UI thereon, necessitate sticking with Viewer 1-based viewers.  This means that most SL users will not be able to see all those pretty mesh creations.

Another problem is in the cost of mesh imports, not only in terms of money but in prim-count.  The more complex the import, the more it costs to upload, and the larger and more complex the build, the higher the prim count.  While this may be fine for limited mesh importation in full-prim regions by people with money to burn, most people will find it cost-prohibitive.  What good is rebuilding a region completely when prims are limited and too many people won't be able to appreciate the work put in?

Does this mean that mesh is too impractical?  Initially, yes.  But things won't be so for long.  Third party viewers such as Cool VL Viewer, Singularity, and Phoenix have either already developed mesh-viewing capability or are on their way to bringing it into their systems.  The biggest problem, then, will be the cost prohibition.  Wiser land-owners will want to keep mesh imports to a minimum to help keep prim-count and lag down, as well as save money.  It will probably take a massive user petition to Linden Lab to bring down the monetary and prim costs for mesh, too.

For a more positive outlook on mesh, here's a review worth reading.

More On Mesh: Marketplace Advertisements

I was perusing the SL forums for discussions weighing the pros and cons of mesh imports and found this thread by Flea Yatsenko:

Today I was thinking and it kind of occured to me that PE weight being influenced by the size of the object is going to make it nearly impossible to market.

What are you going to do if someone buys your mesh and then scales it larger and then complains that it cost more than advertised?

Can't you cheat the numbers by scaling your object down to a smaller size (for example, call it "teen sized") so you can advertise a lower PE Weight, and then when people buy it they have to make it larger, thus costing them more prims than advertised?

I'm not thinking of doing it, it's pretty shady. But it seems to me like a lot of people are going to be doing this. I just was experimenting with some trees. At 15m tall, the PE Weight was 20, at 9 meters it's 11.
But now it puts you in an awkward sitation. Do you sell the tree at 9 meters, which is pretty small, or do you deal with everyone else doing it too and you looking like you have a high prim crappy mesh with the 15m mesh? It's all the same thing, but to the casual shopper on the marketplace it's going to be a nearly 50% difference in prim cost when advertised. It's essentially punishing honest merchants and rewarding shady ones who have no problem cheating and lying about numbers.

Has anyone even thought about this? I don't even know of a solution. Even if you had the client or server detect the PE weight and automatically add the PEWeight value to the database for the marketplace record, you'd still have people shrinking it down.

And I realize that you can just flat out lie for legacy content and say your 10 prim table is really 5, but if you do that, you're blatantly lying. If you misrepresent your PE Weight, you're not lying, you're just pulling a Fox News and bending the truth to benefit yourself. How would you get in trouble? I could just say I sold this tree as a 5m object for 9 prims and if you want it bigger you have to deal with it.

This does indeed appear to be a tricky subject.  Is this something that could have been predicted by Linden Lab?  Did they predict it?  If so, did they care?  I don't pretend to know the answer to those questions.  The first person to reply to the above-quoted post suggested that dishonest sellers probably won't last very long because they will develop a nasty reputation and ultimately go under.  While this is probably true, what of those initial victims who bought mesh-based items having been told something that wasn't true?  They'll have wasted money on something that costs more than advertised, and the damage will have been done.  And then there are honest sellers who may not fully understand what it is they're selling or how to advertise it properly so that buyers understand what they're investing their money in.  Do they get caught up in that category, even though it may not really be their fault?

Like I said in my last entry, mesh will probably be here to stay.  After reading some more on the subject, I'm reaching the conclusion that it will be slow to catch on, and then settle into a niche similar to sculpties: created and imported by people who have the talent to make them (or at least upload them from other sources, a feat that could prove difficult to trace), but for everyone else, a pretty but ultimately expensive toy that may not be worth the bother.

Just my two cents, for what they're worth.

Thoughts On Mesh and Rebuilding

With mesh imports now becoming a reality in SL, I've been seeing blogs wherein the writers boast about revamping their regions with all new mesh builds, including buildings, vehicles, and the like.  It's their regions and they can do what they want with them, but I have to admit I'm a little puzzled as to why so many people are being so quick to replace as much as they can with the mesh imports.

The fact is that a huge chunk of SL users will not be able to even see mesh imports (properly) because not all viewers support mesh.  Sure, some third party viewers, like Firestorm, are cloning Viewer 2 in hopes of being able to adopt mesh, and I think someone told me that Kirsten's Viewer is mesh-compatible.  But most people still seem to be using Viewer 1-based viewers, including Phoenix, Singularity, and Rainbow, which cannot yet support mesh (although the Singularity team is working on bringing mesh import-and-viewing capability into its viewer).

Then, of course, there is the prohibitive cost of importing mesh objects.  See, sculpt maps cost only ten Linden Bucks to import, seeing as how they're actually texture-images you import like any other image.  Mesh objects, on the other hand, are apparently priced according to the level of complexity, and they are said to come with a prim-cost.  So the more complex and the larger the size of a mesh build, the more expensive it is to import it.  Given this, why is it expected that anyone but people with surplus disposable income (a group the size of which gets smaller and smaller by the day) will even be able to afford a lot of mesh imports?  While I don't begrudge the right of people who can afford to toss away money like that, it does puzzle me that anyone thinks that something so cost-prohibitive will catch on quickly, if at all.  If anything, with the real-world economy causing people to tighten their belts, I don't expect nearly as rapid a switch to mesh from sculpted and reguler-prim builds as is being claimed in some circles.

I've made no secret about my opinion toward Viewer 2 and its clones, and the elitist attitudes of its proponents.  But there is a practical aspect to this whole craze over mesh that some people may not care to recognize.  Most of the grid can't and probably never will be able to see mesh imports, unless people switch to a viewer like Singularity once they are able to add mesh to theirs.  So a lot of mesh-importers will probably begin to lose visitors to their regions once they start having to deal with people coming to their sims, seeing a bunch of blocks, spheres, and ovals instead of the supposedly super-awesomely-detailed mesh imports they ran right out and spent money bringing in; then the cost issue will begin to slow the growth of mesh importing.  If region owners and moderators don't handle these two tricky issues correctly, they'll only turn people off and end up hurting their own traffic rankings, and in SL, losing traffic means losing a lot in donations and vendor sales.

Now, will mesh eventually become the standard of SL?  Probably.  I just don't see it catching on quite as fast as its proponents want to think.  One thing Linden Labs can do to avoid that is to lower the cost, both in Linden Bucks and prim count, of mesh imports.  Yes, it took a lot of time and labor to integrate it into the grid.  But charge too much too soon for your nifty new toy, and don't expect a lot of sales.  The second thing Linden Labs can do is to go back to the drawing board and bring back the Viewer 1 user interface for its current system, or something as close to it as possible.  If nothing else, at least give users a choice instead of turning them off with the current cruddy viewer that seems designed only to frustrate people.  Other grids, such as InWorldz, are catching up to SL in terms of stability, and they use viewers that are user-friendly and easy to learn.  By lowering the cost of mesh imports and producing a better viewer than what is currently being pushed on us, I am confident Linden labs can avoid shooting itself in the proverbial foot.

Just my opinion, for what it's worth.

Phoenix Viewer Gets New Update, But Developers Promise it Will Break

The Phoenix development team is announcing its latest update.  As is typical, they are trying to dismiss concerns that Viewer 1 will no longer function by addressing questions that don't seem to have arisen.  You can read the condescension here.

What grabbed my attention, though, was the following comment:

Both Singularity and Cool VL Viewer are in the final stages of having mesh implemented. It is wrong to think V1 and mesh are mutually exclusive. It might be that Phoenix will be left behind, but there sure will be mesh capable V1 viewers pretty soon.

I don't expect the Phoenix development team to give a straight or satisfactory answer, but that's not the only comment worth noting.  (Note: I asked a similar question in the blog thread.)  I've experienced this myself on the latest Firestorm beta release, and received nothing but dismissive answers in the past, which is why I uninstalled the viewer and left the support group.  Here is a comment that sums up the problems many of us face when trying to use ANY Viewer 2-based viewer, not just Firestorm:

i'm TRYING to get used to Firestorm, if the webkit crash can be fixed :( Right now it crashes for me as soon as I load the viewer, and then i'm stuck... search does not work, some group chats wont work... we've been goign back and forth on JIRA for a couple of weeks now (thank you Whirly), I've even submited logs! HELP!

The general response, other than to repeatedly sing the praises of their Viewer 2 clone, is to either ignore the issue or write it off as a troll post.  In this light, it isn't surprising that the Phoenix development team is rolling out at least one last update for its superior, Viewer 1-based viewer.  In spite of claims to being #3 for users, Firestorm is still in ultra-buggy beta mode and it is based on a viewer that only a fraction of the SL user base even bothers with.  Most people I encounter in SL are either on Phoenix, Singularity, and Imprudence, with Singularity starting to appear more common — especially among users who signed on to SL before Linden Labs rolled out its cruddy Ukrainian made viewer.

So what the Phoenix development team is saying is that even though Viewer 1-based viewers will no longer work, they'll still work, or something along those lines.  They'll just break so that they become unusable, which doesn't mean Linden Labs is effectively blocking them.  But unless they are made by a development team with the skills and patience to resolve the issue, the inability to work properly means that Linden Labs is effectively blocking them by making them unable to function properly, if at all.

Can you see the contradictions in that train of logic?  Yeah, I thought so.

Anyway, I'll keep you posted about Viewer 1 and Viewer 2 developments.