Rodvik isn’t the one who decided to release rigged mesh incomplete.Long before he was hired, the Lindens in charge of that project freely admitted they did not understand what content creators would even do with mesh. To this day Oz considers the patch that would fix rigged mesh too much of a hassle and not worth the effort, even tho most of the work was done for him.

Many of SL’s design and content creation tool issues get shut down on the Jira on a regular basis. They appear to have no art department, no art director who’s job it is to understand the content creation tools and provide internal feedback to management in how best to develop them. Instead, these issues to go programmers and support staff with no training or understanding in anything relating to those aspects of SL.

Similarly, if memory serves, it was Philip who decided to remove the orientation experience!

I don’t necessarily expect the CEO to be an avid SL user. His job is to guide the company, not babysit individual projects. He’s actually pretty smart in expanding LL’s portfolio, but to properly guide the company he really needs some new people in charge of the SL product itself if he wants it to remain a viable revenue source for Linden Lab.

SL needs an art director to oversee development of the tools as well as the presentation of SL itself (windlight settings, new user avatars, Linden owned sims such as welcome and orientation area art assets), they also need someone in charge of the experience, someone skilled at level design and interactions who can also have input on the content creation tools, as well as overseeing creation of SL’s orientation and tutorials (and SL should have a lot of official tutorials, no Torley’s videos, while a good move themselves, do not quite cut it), SL needs someone in charge of the social/interface experience as well! Why are SL’s profiles so limited? How come our communication options in SL look outdated next to a vintage copy of AIM from 1998? Why is it so difficult to spread the word about content in SL?

These are all critical to SL! Much of it is “long hanging fruit” as well, easy and inexpensive for LL to address, yet it’s been left to rot on the vine.

Read my complete blog post predicting SL’s Amazonian here:
https://theslrevolution.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/amazon-sl-marketplace-buy/

What next from SL? What wondrous offers? Or do I just watch the Blu-Ray version of Lord of the Rings that arrived in the post?

Lots of people love to shop for fashion and skins and hair, jewelry, houses, trees and you-name-it.

There are many hunts for free stuff, even with more than 200 creators participating.

Many many designers and chstomers even collected US$ 25000 inworld to support a designer in a legal dispute.

So SL isn’t read, someone at LL just needs to find out what people really like, not advertize what they think they like.

I have done photos for over 500 fashion shows since 2007, and I have not seen that stuff got worse or people stop buying stuff. And I am willing to take many more in the future.

Tillie

FWIW, neither I (as author) nor my publisher had anything to do with how Amazon categorized my book… it goes wherever the Amazon marketing person of the hour of listing thinks it is most likely to generate sales.

It was Linden Lab’s choice. The packages are labelled “Game Connect” and that seems to be a program in developer beta that Amazon debuted last summer.

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/07/13/amazon-announces-game-connect-new-free-to-play-game-service/

It looks to be all about connecting Amazon accounts to game accounts and allowing the purchasing of virtual items through Amazon to receive them in games.

So this might be the beginning of these packages on Amazon. Maybe other old premium gifts and other things will crop up over time.

What I find embarrassing is that nobody at Linden put enough thought into the free promotion: L$4000 for US$0 that can be turned back into US$4? I can just see the followup blog posting: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would use this promotion to make money.” Sigh.