The official Second Life Facebook page recently featured this post promoting a user-made video tutorial for the Catwa Bento Mesh head, one of the most popular and bestselling user brands in Second Life. Some SLers have called this company favoritism and free promotion for content that has competition in the virtual world, and that's a very worthwhile debate for another time.
Perhaps even more notable, however, is this question: Why is Linden Lab promoting mesh-based content that is so resource-heavy, it substantially degrades the user experience for nearly every Second Life user? As reported last year, the top-selling mesh bodies in Second Life -- Maitreya, Belleza and SLINK -- are extremely resource-heavy, and tend to degrade performance of everyone around them, including the users wearing these bodies.
They're so resource-heavy, in fact, a former Linden Lab engineer once told me that using them is effectively like launching a DDOS attack inside Second Life. And now, Linden Lab is effectively promoting those attacks.
But wait, this is just a Facebook post about the Catwa head, not a whole body -- just the head can't be that bad, can it? I asked SL graphics expert NiranV, developer of the acclaimed, graphics-optimized Black Dragon SL viewer, to take a look in the Catwa shop. This is what he found:
Linden Lab Should Show More Interest in Optimized SL Content... and Less Favoritism to Resource-Heavy Creation (Comment of the Week)
Massive discussion over last week's post about Linden Lab promoting Catwa, culminating in this rant by Soda Sullivan.
For the record, I didn't "dismiss" that fact, but instead wrote "that's a very worthwhile debate for another time". And by all means, I'm totally happy if "another time" is now!
Soda goes on to dismiss SLers who resist comparing Second Life to AAA games, which have better graphics and much better optimized mesh content -- and spares her chief ire for Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg:
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Posted on Monday, August 26, 2019 at 02:29 PM in Comment of the Week, Economics of SL, SL Mesh | Permalink | Comments (12)
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