Second Life: they come & go (premium?)
November 22, 2008 5:33 pmEric Reuters goes out
The Reuters Second Life bureau closes it’s doors. I guess this means you may secondlife.reuters.com from the feedreaders. Eric Krangel, the human behind Eric Reuters, writes at The Silicon Alley Insider about the ‘Why’ and gives a rather grim summary of his experiences in Second Life: “I wasn’t in Second Life to play, I was there on assignment for Reuters. The login server would crash. I’d try to reach sources, but Second Life’s IM window would hang on “waiting” all day when trying to figure out who was online. “Teleports” — the ability to move from point to point anywhere in Second Life — would stop working and I’d get locked out of my own office. These weren’t one-offs, they were my daily, first-hand, happens-all-the-time experiences. For all its bugs, Second Life is tolerable as a playground, but enterprise users will never and should never use it for business. Re-focus on the core mission: Keeping the hobbyists happy and converting potential recruits into hardcore (read: fees-paying) users.”
Yet Eric does not totally give up on Second Life as a platform: “For all the sound and fury over recent price hikes and layoffs at Linden Lab, Second Life has a community of fanatically loyal users. Since Linden Lab derives its revenue from user fees, not advertisements, Second Life is much more likely to survive the Web 2.0 shakeout than most other startups. There’s an incredible depth, passion, and camaraderie to the Second Life community that more popular online experiences like MySpace or World of Warcraft can’t match. And while I didn’t find it compelling, there really is something awesome about buying be able to “buy” a grid of blank 3D space, mold it like clay into an elven forest, a futuristic space station, or a bdsm dungeon, and then invite your friends to hang out.”
Eric Krangel has his own ideas on how Linden Lab can make Second Life more fun and a better business:
- Build good newbie-oriented content.
- Acknowledge that Second Life’s reputation is now a liability.
- Radically simplify the user interface.
- Abandon the idea that Second Life is a business app.
M. Linden is still staying
In the mean while, Linden Lab’s CEO M. Linden gave an interview to Mr. Dusan Writer (published here). The main tone of that? ‘All happy. All good.’ A quote: “80% of our business is focused on the consumer market — which of course includes content creators. We are putting more than 80% of our investment in the consumer market because a good part of our investment in Enterprise crosses over (shared media). We talk about Enterprise because we are doing new things there. We need to talk more about our plans for consumer because we have many big projects under way there.” Yeey, does that mean we get…
a.) More roads.
b.) More tier increases.
c.) More Teleport & Login failures
d.) Something else.
Excuse me my bitterness. But I still feel betrayed: a 2 year relationship, that you _know_ is dying. You still wish to fix everything, mainly because of the effort you put into it, because of you’re used to it and because of the mutual friends you now have, not because the butterflies are still there. You keep trying, attempt to be bedazzled again, but the other party just f*cks it up, each time. Eerrr… overreacting, me? :D
T. Linden - human: Tom Hale - comes in
I can’t help but cheer at - new -T Linden’s first blogpost, it’s a stroke of communication genius: share something personal, share your goals and instantly call out for feedback from the residents so they feel engaged. Tom Hale’s Mission at Linden Lab: “Bring a product focus to Linden Lab and to Second Life.” T. Linden starts by asking what could make a premium subscription truly premium? What would make the experience a delight for you? What would it take to make me sign up for premium?
What it would take to make me go Premium
- Visitor Statistics (Part 1) For every piece of land I own, I want to see visitor statistics. How many avatar visits/day, how many are unique, how long do they stay, which objects did they interact with on my land, how many purchases did they make, … . Let’s call it google analytics for SL.
- Object Statistics (Part 2) I want to be able to tag ‘tracking code’ to an object. Let’s say 30 month/premium user. I get a lovely web overview of how many different avatars own the object, how many are rezzed inworld, on how many different sims, and how many copies in total are out there.
- IM’s don’t get capped. Also, get me a web interface on secondlife.com where I can log into, see an overview of the IM’s I have not responded to yet, and can reply to them. (Reply email to IM delivered to mailbox to often fails.)
- Access to ‘import and export tools’ from different 3D software tools officially supported & maintained by Linden Lab. These things end up in a seperate ‘builders’ inventory.
- The guarantee that on Virtual Death / Suicide I am allowed to donate my complete inventory - be it no-trans items or not -
to another avatar. Without that avatar having to pay succession rights, duh! ;) - Account Babysitters I want to be able to allow at least 1, preferably 2 or 3 other people to log into my account, if I for any RL reason can not. They can access my inventory & make L$ payments, but can not convert my L$ to real money, nor can they add to my L$ balance with RL Balance. How would this work? I would allow them access to my account from Web Interface, putting their avatar names in as ‘babysitters’. This allows them to login using their Avatar Name + Password, after which they can choose to go into ‘babysit mode’ and use my avatar. Using ‘corporate avatars’ shared amongst a few co-workers would not be violating ToS anymore. That and somebody I trust could watch over my account & necessary payments if I ever decide to go sailing for two months.
- More than 25 Groups! I think we mentioned this already ‘nough times?
- Communications in (one off) my country’s official language(s) You charge us our local tax, I would assume important communications like tier raises, downtime warnings, … are brought to me in a language I flawlessly understand.
- Automated Sales Data Access API hooks + key to automatically process sales data, and use it for whatever we see fit.
- A Vote! For important issues - eg. openspaces - it can not be a bad thing to actually consult your ‘residents’. Polls can contain simple yes/no answers, or a bit more options. Supplied on the login screen when a premium resident logs in. Every premium account has one vote, and LL promises to actually take into account the results of those ‘referendums’.
And there are more things that would make me register for Premium, will update the list if I stumble over more current frustrations that could use fixture! See, still trying to fix our relationship, and hoping Linden Lab will not screw up this time! ;) LL really did hurt my feelings when Marc Kingdom stated “Premium subscriptions are immaterial in our overall business.”
What would convince you to go/stay premium, and how much would your ‘wishlist’ be worth in USD/month (without VAT)?
Tags: eric krangel, eric reuters, linden lab, premium account, reuters, rl press, second life, T Linden, Tom Hale
16 Responses to “Second Life: they come & go (premium?)”
I’m a lazy blogger, Vint, you perputually “beat” me at topics that are on my mind as well. Basically Premium accounts are not attractive to me, but with these (and similar ideas) they would surely make a difference.
I also would decouple Premium and Mainland Ownership, that would get Manland to bloom again (maybe I beat you on THAT blogpost).
Great ideas Vint.
I especially like (5) the ability to Will your inventory to another upon your avatar’s “death”
and (6) which is sortof a metaversal “Power of Attorney”
Statistics. IMs via web. More than 25 Groups. All Good!
Yes, indeed Zoe. Number #6 is used at browser based MMOG “Travian”, where ‘a low response time’ as it comes to sending troops, defence or resources was often needed. (Especially on the speedservers & the end races in the game.) Best way to do was to get a few different time zones in your alliance, and make sure all had ’sitters’ (as they were called) from at least one different time zone.
I feel the same need with LL sometimes, were IM’s to sales avatars should be responded to swiftly, payments should be made, etc. You could bypass this to let ‘offline IM’s’ end up in a mailbox which fwds to all, but that does not solve the problem if you need something from that avatar’s inventory or L$ balance whilst the prime owner is not there.
With the sitter system, one does not need to give out the password to others, and what they can do with the avatar is limited to in-world transfers.
You could also have ‘log data’, which shows you which sitters logged in when, and in the ‘transaction history’ annotate which transactions were done by which sitter.
If you were CEO of LL….
http://www.plurk.com/p/8nkn4
OMG, those premium ideas are fantastic! As a premium user already, you won’t convince me to “switch”, but I suspect they’d definitely attract more premies with a list of features like that.
How about a JIRA on this? We should vote for it/them!
Good one. I actually never understood why people would go Premium now. For ugly mainland or to have an alt they can have for free?
I couldn’t agree more on the premium post. If they included that, I’d happily pay $15-$20 a month for one.
Just thinking, maybe Linden Lab should offer - in joint venture with SexGen & Xcite - a ‘Premium Elite’ membership packet. All of the 10 items above, and free updates and new releases from both SexGen & Xcite. :D
Sorry,
I’m being the total pessimist here; Tom Hale’s post sits totally at odds with Mark Kingdon’s assertion that Premium subscriptions are “irrelevant” to LL’s business.
That is - they bring in zero in the way of income to the company, and as such, he (Kingdon) has effectively written them off.
Therefore, while the ideas (such as those posted here) for making Premium accounts more attractive to users may be good, they are simply NOT going to be implemented in any way or form by LL if they requires financial (direct or indirect) outlay on their part.
And in this, you can take “indirect outlay” as meaning the necessary time and effort to develop, test and implement the code changes inherent in many of the suggestions you outline here.
Why? Simply because a) Kingdon will not see the effort as being worthwhile given premium subscriptions are “irrelevant” to his business model; b) even if they can be justified in terms of increased user satisfaction, he’s still not going to OK them, because the up-front cost will outweigh any perceived bottom-line financial returns to LL.
As such - Like Kat Linden’s (un)memorable first post back in April - Tom Hale’s post is simply hot air.
Remember back in April? Persisent daily Asset Cluster failures leading to transaction failures around 2-3 times a day - WITHOUT any form of in-world notification from LL; major Tp issues, login server issues…..Then our vaunted new “Resident Communications Manager” makes a post about the forums & blog being her immediate priority, rather than something meaningful like actually TELLING people when things are going wrong.
And where are we seven months down the road from this? Communcations as bad as ever, and even the means to quickly and easily find information on the website suitably obfusticated - some might say BURIED - by LL. Job well done, Kat.
True, in-world notifications did return (for a week) after some of us (myself included) fairly bombarded Kat with messages to get it sorted while things were so particularly bad; but as soon as the requests to see in-world notices stopped…the notices themselves stopped. Once again, the exercise became a tick-in-the-box for LL, little more.
In this, Kingdon’s interview is much more revealing for what is both said and not said - and his views on Hale’s role as well, which sit at odds with Hale’s blog comment.
So I think it fair to say we can forget high profile ideas for Premium accounts, however worthy we may consider them to be. They simply don’t feature on Kingdon’s roadmap, other than to stir up “discussions” on the forum & give people a further (false) sense of involvement in the SL decision-making process.
Inara, no hard feelings, there must always be a third person that tells you to quit the relationship and stop believing things will turn out ok in the end. You get that job! ;)
When I said T Linden’s post was a brilliant communications one, I meant that in the ‘marketing’ sense of the ‘communications’. He really nailed all the principles down. And it awaits to be seen if he can deliver upon promises made. :d But well, I may dream out loud about improved premium functionality, it’s my blog after all, no? ;)
As LL has proved in the past (openspaces) they have no problem with ‘downscaling’ their products, I think it will end up something like this:
*was pretty long and ended up leading it’s life as a blogpost on it’s own*
[…] English spelling & grammar suffers from a slight concussion though. Oh, and T Linden is enquiring about Premium Accounts and what to offer […]
Vint,
I wholeheartedly agree on your view of Tom Hale’s post re: “marketing” more than anything else…hence why I didn’t comment on his whole “background story” element - that was clearly intended to simply draw people in in the same way as all good marketing tools.
As to the rest…see my post under the new accounts piece!! :)
“The guarantee that on Virtual Death / Suicide I am allowed to donate my complete inventory - be it no-trans items or not -
to another avatar. Without that avatar having to pay succession rights, duh! ;)”
And why can’t we have property insurance like iRL? If a thief robs my house the insurance company I pay will give me some recompense. There is also the chance that the authorities will be able to recover the property. Why not in Second Life®? An unrecoverable loss last year set me back over L$10,000 just in animals (Dragons from Wynx Whiplash, horses from AKK, other ‘pets’, etc.) plus more for avatars, clothes, and other items. Now I’m slowly replacing the items as my stipend and other meager income permits.
Yes, I could buy some $L and replace all that I can now, but since the losses continue I refuse to put too much RL cash into the virtual economy.
Even i’m (was) premium, i’m right now in a downgrading process. I agree about your “wish list”.
About your text:
Is kinda sad, but i think you described the general feeling of a lot of people, specially after M arrived.
[…] In tegendeel zelfs, T Linden heeft een rondje ‘wat verwachten jullie van premium accounts’ gedaan (mijn ‘eisen’ hier) met de residents, wat hopelijk - but don’t get your hopes up to high - tot een verbetering van […]
[…] like to quote here, to end this post, something Vint Falken wrote in a blogpost, something that explains also my feelings with Linden Lab in the last times: Excuse me my […]
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