I am Vivienne Daguerre, and my rez date was April 12, 2004. I have been active continuously in Second Life since that day with no significant periods of absence. I have operated a business in Second Life continuously since 2004, Black Rose, and I own two private island estates which I purchased in 2005. In Second Life terms, I am as old as virtual dirt. I don’t play other online “games” and do not view Second Life as a game as much as I do a creative and social outlet.

I know that Linden Lab’s new CEO is receiving a stream of advice from Second Life residents. Why not throw a little more at him? I think he is up for it. Here is my advice.

1. Do not lower tier.

I think the biggest challenge to new people is to find and connect with other people. Second Life is big, very big, and surprisingly so considering the cost of land. Even with high tier prices, the drive for the core group of Second Life to create and share with others is strong enough that people are willing to shell out the big bucks for their own regions. That is an amazing fact in itself that must make “game” makers drool.

Many want tier to be lowered so more people can buy land. I would strongly recommend not lowering tier for several reasons. I want Linden Lab to stay profitable, because I want Second Life to continue to exist, improve and grow. More important than that, if more people were able to buy more regions, the number of regions would increase. Already there are not enough people to populate the regions that exist now. People are spread out, isolated, and all clamoring for people to come and see what they have created. Some people want to be king, to have the world the way they think it should be. That is not a bad thing.

What is a bad thing is that there is too much space for too few people, and that makes us spread out and isolated. It makes it harder to find and meet people. Please do not increase tier, but please do not lower it.

2. Fix the event listings.

When you are trying to find people interested in things you are interested in, you naturally turn to the event listings. They are not much help. They are choked with club and commercial spam. No, I do not want to be a model or attend an “event” at your store to see your new releases. I do not care about who is best in red.

Fixing this would cost money. You need someone to actually pay attention to event listings and moderate them to enforce rules about commercial spam. It would be money well spent, because it would make it easier for noobies and oldbies alike to find interesting and fun things to do, and meet people with similar interests.

3. Make search more useful.

When we want to find something, groups, or events that interest us, you need to do all you can to help us do that. With event listings being choked by spam, we turn to groups to get notices about what is going on that may interest us. Make it easier for us to find groups of interest to us with the membership numbers clearly shown. We will find out how many are in the group anyway once we join it, and we can and do often leave after doing that, but why make us jump through that hoop? List the number of members clearly in search so we can find the most relevant and active groups to join.

4. Help us make interesting experiences for other people.

A friend and I have been working on a quest system for our sims to provide fun and free items to others. We have hit a couple of stumbling blocks that the experience tools would help with if they are ever released. Pathfinding is a good thing, and we are working on huntable animals, but we need more. Release the experience tools, and give us more scripting options.

Here is an example of something that takes people out of immersion and makes it less intuitive and more difficult for noobies. I wanted to make a blacksmith make a sword for you. To do that, you have to find coal and iron and mine it to bring back to him. After mining for a couple of minutes, you are given coal and iron. You return to the blacksmith, and you click on him. He asks, “Do you have the iron and coal I need?” Now you have to open your inventory, find the objects named coal and iron, hold down the control key and drag them from your inventory onto the blacksmith. That is simple enough to script, but it is clunky, and breaks the immersion.

We tried working on a quest hud that would eliminate the need to handle actual coal and iron objects and communicate through listens with the blacksmith. This is a very difficult task without arrays. Strided lists are awkward to work with. I don’t want to have to learn php and go out to a website to handle the data.

Second Life is not a game, but give us better tools to let us make fun challenges and games within it please.

Well there is my two cents worth Mr. Altberg, if you find time to read it.