Glow

At the height of Bellisseria, I started attending the Concierge & Land User Group meetings because I wanted the latest tea on what was happening with Bellisseria, Mainland, and land in general. The meeting has since been renamed the Land & Support User Group, and in the beginning, I actually thought it was pretty productive. The Lindens in charge listened to feedback, answered questions, and residents had a chance to bring up things that mattered to them.

Over time, though, I started wondering how much these meetings represent what the average Second Life resident actually wants. The people who attend regularly are obviously going to have the loudest voices, and sometimes those voices result in things the rest of us have to live with. I will never get over the ugly bridges connecting parts of Bellisseria. Instead of one long ugly bridge, couldn’t we have had a cute little island between the two themes, with little boats or walking paths connecting everything? There were so many ways they could have made it cute, but somebody wanted bridges, and now we have bridges.

There are actually a lot of official Second Life user group meetings happening regularly, and I think more residents should attend them, especially if you care about where Second Life is headed. You might be surprised by what other residents are asking Linden Lab to change, and some of those changes will eventually affect YOUR Second Life.

I’ve also been watching recordings of some of the other Second Life user group meetings on Pantera’s YouTube channel, and that’s actually where I first heard some of the discussions around the recent Marketplace changes. One of the new policies will automatically unlist products that haven’t sold in a year AND belong to a merchant who hasn’t logged in for a year. I think requiring both conditions makes the policy way too lenient. In my opinion, it should be products that haven’t sold OR merchants who haven’t logged in. Otherwise, we’re still leaving a lot of unpopular products and potentially unsupported products sitting on the Marketplace.

Sometimes I listen to these meetings and think Linden Lab may be listening a little too closely to whichever residents happen to be the most vocal in the room. Maybe some of these ideas will work out, but I suspect they’ll eventually find out that a few of these policies didn’t accomplish much, or made things worse overall. That’s also why I think more people should attend these meetings. If only the same group of residents shows up every week, those are naturally going to be the opinions Linden Lab hears the most.

My look for the recent Land & Support User Group meeting reminded me of a peasant, which felt very appropriate for a land meeting, LOL. Landed Peasants, reporting for duty! If you own land or care about what happens to Second Life, I really do encourage you to attend one of these meetings sometime. The more residents who show up and speak up, the more voices Linden Lab gets to hear.

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