Wednesday through Friday this week, Linden Lab decided to skip starting some new Second Life users on their Orientation Island, as an experiment, and land them straight onto ten updated Help Islands instead.
We use the term 'updated' rather loosely here, unfortunately. Help Islands 201 through 210 had a few more exit signs placed around the island, and some SL-in-your-own-language signs. And ... that's about it, apparently.
Given that the orientation HUDs keep breaking, we can only guess that someone figured maybe going without instructions might be better than with instructions that are out-of-date or not working.
Help Islands 201-210 instead feature content that is out-of-date or not working. Prims are still misaligned from the original fouled-up replication of the island. Signage still doesn't work. At least one media texture is misaligned. Tutorials are out-of-date.
The original success of the first Help Island was as a living, continuously updated environment that was adapted to the needs, problems and queries of new users. Unfortunately that's been almost completely static for most of the last two years, and is far from serving those needs in its current state. Replicating it a couple hundred times doesn't improve things, unfortunately.
While we're sure the experiment is all a part of A/B testing, if this is a part of M Linden's notion of an updated first-hour experience, we're going to go cry into a round of whiskey-sours.
