Apparently, that long-winded catlady Prokofy Neva has discovered that Deadlycodec died (probably suicide).  All I can say is: “Thank God.”

You may call me horrible for this, but having an idiot like that follow you around and try to get your e-autograph all the time before “declaring war” on you kinda gets on your nerves.

My condolences to his family for having to put up with his shit.

As Linden Lab is now restructuring and firing 30% of their employees (Cyn, Blue, and George are confirmed gone, Torley is still there), not to mention recoding the viewer in a browser-based language (source), I think it’s time to conduct a post-mortem analysis of Second Life and Linden Lab since users are jumping ship faster than rats from the Titanic.  So, what went right?  What went wrong?

What Went Right

1. User-Generated Content

   Linden Lab chose to ignore the industry standard of not allowing users to provide their own assets.  Instead, they came up with the novel and original idea of User Generated Content.  By doing this, they opened up a vast new economy of buying and selling objects, clothing, and scripts.  Although this came to be challenged later on due to rampant copybotting, it’s still a powerful choice that allowed Linden Lab to succeed over all others.  Up until now, anyway.

2. The Grid

   The Second Life Grid was an amazing idea that was probably ahead of its time (I think cloud-based computing was still a while off).  Being able to literally walk or fly from one server to the other without a loading screen (until the failure of mono) was an astounding technological advancement in 2001.  Although region crossings eventually became too burdened by serialization lag (primarily due to a bug in Mono), the concept itself was amazing to behold.

3. Land/Estate Sales

   In most other games, you cannot lease or buy a server to be integrated seamlessly into the game environment as part of the in-game universe.  Even fewer games offer you the ability to buy just a slice of a server, and the ability to rent out sections of a server or parcel you own, as far as I know, is unique to Second Life-based grids.

4. Scripting

   The concept of allowing users to run even simplified and limited scripts would scare most other companies completely shitless.  Someone at LL was drunk enough to do it successfully, although the language itself eventually revealed many deep flaws.

What Went Wrong

1. Support

   Taking two weeks to respond to tickets is simply wrong, and LL is notorious for having piss-poor support.  Oftentimes, one support person will direct you to one department, who will redirect you to the first department, all over the span of a month.  Other times (and frighteningly frequently), the team that handles banning bad users will ban the wrong person (and I’m not talking about myself) and force the user to go through a drawn-out appeals process that is frequently ineffective.

2. Stability/Maintenance

   Linden Lab chose to direct most of their efforts into adding features (of varying levels of uselessness) to the viewer and servers rather than fixing the multitude of bugs each subsystem had.  The first I remember was voice, then Windlight, then sculpties, and now UI changes and meshes.  On the other hand, group chats have been crippled since 2007 and have been steadily becoming worse.  Several third-party viewers can now route group chat through XMPP or IRC protocols, a feature LL has not implemented yet.

3. Business Direction

   Seemingly oblivious to the community they have cultivated, Linden Lab began introducing policy changes (starting around late 2008) that tried to bring corporate users into Second Life.  Linden Lab either ignored or was ignorant of the significant adult industry presence on their grid and only ended up driving their corporate users away.  In the ultimate shoot-self-in-foot move, they reacted by segregating the adult industry to their own in-world continent, forcing them to move and lose valuable landmark links from their customers, and this happened far too late to halt the tide of corporate customers leaving SL.  This ended in a large amount of adult industry users simply closing their doors, dropping the amount of income Linden Lab could “tax”.  A smart company would have embraced each sector instead of betting all their chips on one. Second Life mostly drew in private users anyway.