Eric Rice

My interpretation/translation: Second Life wants to connect with all the modern day services (Twitter, Facebook, etc), and that is causing panic amongst those who conceal their identity, genders, etc vs. those who aren't so much about the immersion-- augmentists.

My perception is that LL has to tip-toe around every. single. possible. change. or. idea. because the vocal part of the user base goes apoplectic, and invokes the textbook cries of 'fix this, fix that' (which will never happen since the very architecture of SL is so un-game like, that it will always feel 10 years older than modern technology. I've been in SL for six years-- it won't change. Sheesh.

No one wants to say this?

Home should be compared to Kaneva, not Second Life for better 1:1 comparisons.

It's an IMVU and/or Meez class chat environment

The core of the issue is public spaces with emphasis on interaction vs. public spaces with emphasis on gameplay (where social interaction is secondary).

This is one of the biggest challenges any worlds/chat maker has to overcome, then again, where have we seen wild success with open, social places (like chat), that could exist without excessive moderation and control by some entity?

I've found it hilarious how Sony's Playstation Home is criticized because of a) nothing to do and b) the quality of the user (read: dance raping) in one camp, and the other camp criticizes for lack of user-creation tools.

If you use Twitter, Facebook, post to blogs as an author or a commenter, you ARE doing the same thing that is done in virtual worlds-- there's just slight differences in UI.

Lively was an IMVU-esque 20% project within Google and isn't where Google's virtual world efforts will come from. Google can build, not *a*, but *the* virtual world, and the metaverse is just a layer on top of that we can modify and adapt on top of the engine.

The game industry will catch up-- that's my prediciton-- and they'll make good virtual spaces WITHIN a context that most people won't have a stigma over. Sitting in an inn or my safehouse garage in a racing game, is a wide-open opportunity to socialize, save, customize, *if I choose to do it*.

It's an option.

As long as sci-fi has sword&sorcery, dragons, spells, mana, castles, and elves, of *course* the genre can succeed!

Man, I LOVE crafting in TR, it's like engineering + enchanting (for my fellow WoW nerds). Being able to extract some upgrade (like resist fire) from a weapon that my class can't use, and upgrade it to maximum and stick it in my own weapons is fantastic.

Side note: do any MMOs the same tier-based system that TR does? I like the idea of being able to rollback *a little* instead of having to re-roll and start from scratch (like WoW, etc).

My wife's dev island kept on being billed against a card that didn't exist and LL had said 'oh you owe us 1300 bucks', which was met with a hearty F-U.

When I get referral money for my alts and friends I brought into the game 3 years ago, then I can't trust any of the billing systems or policies there.

If anything, the new mgmt is taking a more 'throw the notagame' rhetoric out the window. If SL was run like a game, it would have evolved and made fundamentally more sense to a much larger portion of the population.

Instead, we have silly comments like Meanwhile's above, but hey, who can blame him? That's the textbook snark and LL can't change that, sadly.

Bummer, I had suspended my WoW accounts to play TR full time. I really enjoyed it, the group of people I encountered were top-notch, and also just having something NON-fantasy to play.

Spin Martin/Orion server

It's funny, I got into EVE (after warcraft), and while capable and able to grind and level, the all-or-nothing PVP turned me off after about a year of casual play. EVE's a beautiful place, but dang, you can't just 'chill' if you want to. With all the stories about great wars and factions and this and that, I'd just as soon use my consoles for when I'm in the mood to slash and be slashed.

If there's a PVE option introduced, CCG gets all my monies again.

Annnd cue the lulzsphere.