Linden Lab Official talk:Events
Submissions seem to be limited now to 5 listing per person in a day...no matter the date(s) of the events; not 5 listings per person per event date. This is problematic for clubs who have several events in a week to get events posted in advance. Our club likes to keep event listings formatted so we don't want a lot of cooks in the kitchen. We have around 32 events per week to deal with. Simple edits SHOULD NOT count against listings...mistakes are made, things happens, but it's still just the one event!
The character count is no longer shown in the form forcing us to use a text editor that has a decent character count to write our listings. Not a horrible thing as long as the text editors counts characters the same as your form interface.
The ampersand is being translated to code "&" in SL event window.
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WHY SECOND LIFE IS DOOMED - at least for us! INTRODUCTION I am an experienced businessman who has been at the forefront of tourism in the Highlands of Scotland for over 30 years, a director of the local Destination Management Organisation and of the local Chamber of Commerce. I have also designed visitor centres and invented the award winning board game Nessie Hunt. My discovery of Second Life in 2007 led me to wondering how I could use the platform a) to put my previously invented board game into a 3D interactive environment and b) promote tourism in the real Highlands of Scotland. After initial experiments on a section of mainland, I formulated a business model which would allow me to create everything I wanted to achieve both of my objectives above. In February 2009 we acquired a full sim and two homesteads to which we later added a third. It is the Scottish Highlands Estate comprising Inverness City, Urquhart, Augustus and Loch Oich.
OUR BUSINESS MODEL
Our plan was really quite simple. The game provided a great source of enjoyment for visitors to the sim. We added three exhibitions, four castles, two more games and other items of interest. We also created an Inn for networking and were working on a new Heritage game. The above generated a lot of real traffic, particularly as the Nessie Hunt game required players to spend up to seven or eight hours over several days completing it each month. This was REAL traffic. We have never used bots or campers. That real traffic caused our traders to do really excellent business. As rents were linked to occupancy the rents have been gradually increasing to the point where last month they exceeded L$75,000, yet all the time everything was kept in character and there was plenty of uncluttered Highlands to enjoy. In addition we brought on board four important tourist organisations and around 50 B&Bs and guest houses and these financed the shortfall in income. As I write this we had moved into profit and were about to buy at least one new sim and possibly two to extend our Highlands to the west. All of this has come to a grinding halt because Linden Labs have just provided the straw which has broken our camel’s back. THE MINOR PROBLEMS Over the eighteen months we have been operating we have had to cope with Linden Lab’s chaotic management activity. Changes in CEOs. Increasing the cost of H/S sims, trying to force traders into Xstreet and away from our shops, giving homes to people causing our tenants to leave and making the cost of O/S sims so great we cannot buy the eight we would like to surround our busy sims with scenery. Sorry not at US$75 per month each! We applied to work in partnership with LL to develop what we were doing in November 2009 and were told that we should, instead, go for Community Gateway status. We then spent four months changing the non-compliant areas of our sims, buying a fourth sim and setting up a first class orientation area. In early April our application went in. Two months later after innumerable tickets and attempts to contact the correct people we get a simple, “Sorry that no longer operates.” After so much work that is soul destroying even for a seasoned businessman like me. Some of our helpers were desperately upset over this. All their work totally down the drain. If it had not been for their dedication I would have pulled the plug there and then. Linden Labs was apparently being run by a bunch of primary school kids. No organisation, no customer service and a seriously bad “couldn’t care less” attitude. But we pushed on, adapted and developed our product. The product, if I can remind you, is that games, exhibitions and other events generate avatar traffic which spends money with traders who pay us rent. THE BIG PROBLEM We run five Nessie Hunt events each day and sometimes two or three other events. Our volunteers give up their weekends to post these events. It takes real time to enter up events. This month we discovered that the changes Linden Labs has made to the Events Listing system has totally wrecked our entire business model. So much so that we have traders leaving owing to lack of people playing our games. This is not that our games are worse, it is that we are no longer able to tell anyone about them! A crazy situation. Apparently in order to stop the events being spammed, some moron in Linden Labs has come up with a system which is destroying us day by day. As an avatar I am no longer allowed to post more than six events in any stint. That means that I have to come back over and over again to post events. However, that is not all, no event can be posted to take place within 24 hours of the previous one and a “this is a duplicate event” message is received. So we are now restricted to one event per day instead of five. Is it no wonder our shopkeepers are leaving? The avatar traffic has fallen by over 70%. At first we thought we could get around the one event in 24 hours by using another four members of the team to post the remaining events for six days. Then the next day we could all come back and post another five events per day for the next six days, but it doesn’t work like that. Once we have posted one Nessie Hunt event in a day we are not allowed ANY OTHER in the same day. It does not matter who is posting them. It even means we can’t have an event at the same time each day, it has to be 25 hours later. Madness. Thoughtless madness! Our final attempt at a work around saw us create four new parcels with signs pointing to the actual event and after doing all that work (half a day for two people) we tried to post an event and, once again, “you have posted a duplicate event”. To reiterate: • No avatar can post more than six events in a session and each event must be 25 hours after the first one. • Additional team members cannot post any to the same days. • We cannot even post to other parcels to use them as arrival points for the main game. • Our 130 Nessie Hunt events each month are now cut to just 24 (it takes 5 days to reset the game each month so no game 1st to 5th and one day in 24 is lost owing to the 25 hours between events’ situation). EFFECT The Virtual Scottish Highlands is exactly the sort of enterprise Second Life should be nurturing and encouraging, but in fact you are destroying it. The sims are beautiful, full of fascinating exhibitions, tourist information, literally fantastic games and have become the natural meeting place for so many from Scotland. It is all being lost! CONCLUSION This report is a total waste of time. No one at Linden Labs will even respond to it, let alone do what is necessary to correct matters in time to save us. Your single minded drive to rid events of spam has meant that real fun games and genuine events are being so restricted that, as a business, we will die in the next sixty days, not to mention the income you will lose from the tiers on four sims. If you want to save us you need to revert the Events Listing system to 5 events per day and people should be allowed to enter all of their events for a month in a single session so that they can do it at the weekend or late at night. As Linden Labs are not known for changing their previous catastrophic policy decisions I hold out little hope, especially as this needs to be done urgently and urgent for an SL ticket is currently about 2 months. We’ve tried live chat, writing to Sue and Jack Linden, concierge through our American owner everything. No ticket has received ANY response. Even worse, no one, not Jack, not Sue, none of the live chat people or concierge people can even find the name of anyone in the Events Team to write to, email, IM or talk to. It is like some sort of manic secret service. Absolutely incompetence in organisational structure. They even put out a notice here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Events but it has no date of issue on it and there is no one to contact about it. What an absolute shower of idiots? As the CEO of the Virtual Scottish Highlands, I will have to resign by mid November and I will advise my American friend who owns the sims to dispose of them. Second Life will have lost something beautiful and worthwhile and will have done so during a badly thought through random attack on a handful of spammers. The spamming could not have been too bad otherwise people would not have found our events to come to them. But you wouldn’t think of that, would you? You have prevented a worthwhile business, built from scratch to profit in 18 months, from telling people about its product. I hope you are satisfied with yourselves. And as I logged on to try the last work around I discover that the CEO who had come back to resolve all the chaos has now resigned with no one to replace him. You don’t deserve people like us as customers. That really is the truth of it! A G HARMSWORTH – 21st October 2010 http://slurl.com/secondlife/Inverness%20City/193/64/1001 - our sims http://www.VirtualScottishHighlands.com - see what we created and the Events Listing team have destroyed.
Gerald Wylie 15:57, 22 October 2010 (UTC)