Linden Lab So Responsive to SL User Feedback That The Company Won't Fix a "Bug" That the Community Has Turned Into a Feature, Says Linden Vet

Dave Kap's memoir of going from Second Life user to Linden Lab developer last week included this passage:

Getting inside the office and seeing how much people were trying to do the right thing by the residents was kind of sobering.

Reader Soda Sullivan was skeptical, writing in Comments:

That would have been such a huge statement, if he had followed it by just listing one single example. Just. One. Single. Example.

So I asked Dave for an example, and here's what he said:

“What residents did to hack in their custom animations is an example of how things in Second Life end up being designed, from my perspective. The sobering thing was simply how much time was spent trying to get things where residents wanted them. Whereas I had previously thought there was more iron-fist design and planning behind everything. Because [Linden Lab developer will] forever be trying to get it to where residents want it without breaking it for all the workarounds people have made."

As for a specific example:

"I think invisiprims were the first major example of that — it's a texture hack that almost got removed until it was realized people were using it to make better custom characters." For instance, see below. "This was before animations let you fold your character into itself. So thanks to residents, the ‘bug’ of invisiprims never got ‘fixed’.

“So basically," Dave tells me, "what it comes down to is: Pick any positively-received feature you want from the entire development of Second Life and I guarantee that some part of it was shaped by how residents reacted to it.”

And that's why, say, Iris Ophelia's tribute to the machine gun leg from Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse was possible:

First image via Darien Caldwell 's fun tribute to the history of the SL shoe industry.

Comments

[Alric]

Linden Labs is a joke. They don't care about their members who actually pay to buy the currency they use called Lindens. I spent well over a thousand dollars a month, until they locked my account to investigate me for fraud. I called and laughed at them, yes I committed fraud by purchasing Lindens with my bank account which they had on file. I deleted their stale game. Saved me thousands. But I won't be treated like a criminal by a group of idiots that without people like me wouldn't even have a job. I give Second Life maybe 2 years before they close their servers. More and more leave that game everyday and most who stay are free players.

[Gin]

Where's a "Bye Felicia" gif when you need one? Adios, Alric. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. If Bellisseria has proven anything it's that premium members are alive and well. With the number of folks clamoring for more homes to be released I'm betting you're talking out your ass. NWN itself has shown that there has been an increase in premium members https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/05/sl-premium-subscriptions-linden-lab-tyche.html
And that was tallied prior to the release of the new premium homes so you go ahead and do your little foot stomp at the indignity of Linden Labs covering their ass and doing their job responsibly. I mean how dare they do their part to make sure your bank account wasn't being scammed. I mean gosh... FFS

[Soda Sullivan]

First let me start by saying, SL is not a joke. They do care about their memeber/customers so i don;t want to come off as one of these cry babys always downing SL.

That said, i think in his effort to give one example as i requested, Dave sort of proved my case. Instead of providing an example of how committed Lindens are to doing "the right thing" for their customers, he gave an example of how the SL residents took a Linden lemon, and turned it into Lemonaide on their own.

I would like to see the Lindens become less reactive to us residents and more PROactive and maybe try to get out in front of things. Talk to people. Don't poll them, TALK to them and see what they are looking for. And also, sometimes being proactive means not listening to us (*cough* game engine *cough*). Dave seems sincere, but his description of the goings on at LL do not fill one with the confidence I think he was trying to project.

[Crybaby]

"They do care about their memeber/customers so i don;t want to come off as one of these cry babys always downing SL."- Soda Sullivan

If only we held LL's cheerleaders in as much contempt as their crybabies. What happened to all the laughter of the adult Sansar children playing reindeer games, making movies, and hosting talk shows? Ebbe publicly smacked down over a half million active users and bet the farm on anybody but them. They are currently keeping a 13 to 7 staff resource ratio between half a million trauma victims and a corpse.

Crybabies, like me, are fawning over Linden Homes. They're fresh, but they aren't a starship. I won't even let myself think about how much they resemble a $10.00 a month tent city in a 15 year-old platform. They have us dreaming so small for 10 bucks. If you're not one of us, crybaby customers, just look at what carrots they are willing to dangle for free.

If this is really caring, then show me a company in existence that cares less about it's customers.

[TDGunner]

So let me get this straight. His example was of doing nothing. Huh. So Lidens care so much they don't do anything. Yep that is SL in nutshell.

[Better then Ezra]

Yeah Soda you really fizzed out on this one!

Linden lab took years of money and development that could have been used to really upgrade SL pouring it instead into that blue mars clone..chasing those big cooperate customers who are never going to be locked into someone else's proprietor platform.

" If only we could get the lindens to talk to us the customers"

LOL imagine how many of the big brands in SL are linden alts or linden family members? (I know more then one mesh body maker is!) they know about everything going on way more then you think! and all the thousands of things residents have begged for at least going now on two decades! After all changing the terrain textures on the mainlands is a task even gods cannot achieve LOL!

I think these two thoughts from lemon & johnc really help me see the real perspective, personally speaking of course.

"In the 35 plus years, I was an owner of three different successful software companies, my businesses upgraded our software used by our customers in both minor and major upgrades. When you have multi-million lines of code in your software applications for both the user interface and the backend applications this competitive requirement is how you create a great and financially successful software business. My companies competed in multiple markets with lots of competition and I cannot think of one single competitor of mine that did not do minor, major and full code rewrites to remain a market leader.

In the 15 years, I have been an almost daily user of Second Life, I have never seen a major update or full code rewrite of what we call Second Life by Linden Research. There have been thousands of minor updates almost always bug fixes, but the menu, build tools, backend problems, the LSL code seems to me to be very similar to what it was in January of 2004 when I started using Second Life.

Why is it like this? The answer is not simple. There is not one reason, there are many. But as a software industry veteran, I can point to the three reasons at the top of a long list of reasons why.

That first reason is the culture of Linden Research. The people in the topmost senior management of Linden Research from their limited or almost nonexistent use of Second Life have never seen or experienced on a sufficient scale any reason why Linden Research should expend the funds to give Second Life, both front end and back end code a major upgrade at least once a year.

The second reason is during the growth period of Second Life there was no competition to the Linden Research primary product and the Board of Directors began their “cash cow” policy of why spend money on something so silly and frivolous as this stupid “game” when there is no competition, and none of them on the board uses it and it provides them income that would only be reduced if capital funds were spent on upgrades. Hence, no major upgrades would be approved.

Third and most sadly the hardest to understand. Not all companies have good or even intelligent senior management. Some companies simply don’t connect with their customers or understand how to really stay on top. Think of it this way: Say that your company has forty-million registered users and your database has kept their contact information even if some of the email addresses are obsolete. And out of these forty-million registered users, you’re only getting maybe a half-million to log in regularly. Do you spend your capital funds to so greatly enhance your core brand name product that it gets huge new media attention and your marketing to your forty-million registered users garner, say 5% (two-million) of them to come back and try the totally new upgraded product? Or do you spend that same amount of capital funds and alienate your current half-million users and write a new technology and start from ground zero all over again.

After 35 years in the software business and meeting hundreds of successful technology company owners, I’m willing to say that almost everyone I have ever met would spend their money on a core brand name product huge upgrade revision and go after their old registered users instead of starting all over. This method has proven over and over to get the most results from new sales and additional revenue.

You can’t tell me it would be impossible to fully rewrite the current SL into a whole new world. I’ve done the impossible with my software companies code and I’ve competed with my competition who have one-upped my company with their impossible. But when you have a culture in a company where sales and new revenue seems to be the last thing on the agenda, well that is another story.
Posted by: Simple Lemon | Wednesday, May 08, 2019 at 09:32 PM"
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/05/sl-viewer-ux-linden-lab.html#comments

"unfortunately you are talking to a divided company.If SL were its only product then of course everything would be concentrated there. But there is this Sansar thing, that secretly has priority, although of course this must never be said openly, because the favored product needs the lesser to survive. SL is the dumb sheep that is kept in a pretty pen and fed relatively well in the hope that it does not notice the slaughterer hovering in the background, or hear the constant grinding of the carving knives that, in very small almost unnoticeable ways, constantly removes thin slices of flesh from its bones. Let is not fool ourselves SL is the cash cow that is fed and watered to provide funding for the pathetic creature Sansar, that is nurtured on the blood of and life of the far superior sacrificial victim ."
"Posted by: JohnC | Thursday, April 25, 2019 at 03:44 AM"
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/04/linden-lab-ebbe-altberg-second-life-sansar.html

[ex-Xan]

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Limits#Groups - Very simple, old example: group limits were too low. It was a top- ranked feature request in public jira to increase them. There was an analysis done on distribution of groups joined, and the lab came up with 42 to cover the 99.9th percentile. The # 42 was chosen as a wink to the community because it was such a hotly requested item, and that the new limit was the answer to life, the universe and everything. Day-to-day improvements were ongoing. IMO the bigger misses since then are strategic. No mobile, Sansar, VR, etc.

[vwfan]

"I think invisiprims were the first major example of that — it's a texture hack that almost got removed until it was realized people were using it to make better custom characters."

Realizing that better custom avatars could be made... imagine that. Who would've thought.

[Galatea]

"Talk to people. Don't poll them, TALK to them and see what they are looking for."

They do this, a lot. I used to show up for Andrew Linden's office hours regularly and talked with him and other Lindens on a variety of topics for several years. There were several changes to their plans and implementation of the things they were working on that were made due to the input of myself and a number of other residents that regularly engaged with the Lindens during the time I was a regular.

[Wagner James Au]

The challenge with talking (and this also came up during my Linden days) is that direct user feedback inevitably biases feedback toward hardcore players who for whatever reason have inordinate amounts of time to give feedback, often at the expense of casual and mid-range players who may have *totally* different kinds of feedback to give. (If they had time to give it.)

[Soda Sullivan]

Those of you attacking me as being some cheerleader for SL, obviously don't know me and have not been reading what I have written.
Just because I don't think Second Life is a joke, or that Sansar is somehow an blight on SL, does not mean I am a LL fan. There are a LOT of things that LL could be doing much better and cheaper and faster. Replacing the garbled up engine with a standard game engine for one. Land pricing for another. That is why I took a personal objection to Kap's claim that his observation showed a group that is very interested in what their customer wants, or more importantly, what it needs. It actually showed the exact opposite. What I am sure of is that the solution to making Lindens interested in what the typical user wants or needs is not going to be achieved by acting like an asswagon and hurling insults at them when they do try to improve something.

[TDGunner]

@Soda Sullivan. We get what you are saying Soda. I do not think you are an LL cheerleader but let's be clear. I know of no other business that I deal with daily that is as tone deaf as Linden Labs. So the hate is justified because we love SL; we want a better SL and the Lindens instead choose to ignore the very people that are paying them. Can you imagine if McDonald's did that?
I want a cheeseburger.
I hear you. Here is a hunk of grilled tofu.

But time and time again LL gives us more tofu. So we hate them. I hate them. They are not bright business people and they do not care about their customers.

And... we are going to continue to hate them until they change or the platform goes offline. I'm betting on the latter.

[JohnQPublic]

Meanwhile Deviantart (another linden lab) after nearly 20 years is completely rewriting the software and updating with great help from its new parent company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=CoP0mrJb1ks

A good example of really making the needed painful changes.

Maybe linden lab needs a sugardaddy?

[Jules Jones]

I see so many complaining about Linden Homes, does anyone read the fine print? You get 1024 square meters free with Premium in place of those shitty 512m homes with 117 LI. That's 300 LI and double the space, all you have to do is get off your asses and find the land to purchase. Seriously, some people...