SL9B = Linden Lab Fail

The word "fail" keeps coming up more and more with Linden Lab lately. The more recent truly epic fail has been the attempted switch to Direct Delivery in the Marketplace. (Merchants losing their products, items randomly switching pictures, perms changing, deliveries stopped -- yep just about everything bad has happened and continues to happen.)

So when you're already in a hole with your customers (the citizens of Second Life), what do you do? Naturally, Linden Lab brought in the earthmovers and started digging themselves in deeper.

In case you don't know, SL_B (Second Life # Birthday) has been a yearly event sponsored by Linden Lab focusing on resident builds and creative stuff. Yeah sometimes it gets laggy and a bit too commercial but that's just a reflection of SL in general. The key thing is that Linden Lab has always donated the 20+ sims needed to make it happen so everything can be in one place.

But, WTH? This year we were greeted with an announcement by teh Lab that this year's SL9B was just going to be a collection of special event notices and that oops, residents, you're on your own. If you want to do something in "celebration" of Second Life's 9th year, then you have to supply the resources, sims (tier), etc., etc.

So here's the announcement:

Help us celebrate Second Life's 9th Birthday

Which was immediately met with a longgggg thread in the SL Forums:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Upcoming-Events-and-Activities/The-SL9B-Fail/td-p/1489323

And after that went on for about 25 messages, we got this:

A tone-deaf response by Linden Lab

Condescending spin is what it comes across as to me. Let's get real. I think LL is looking at the bottom line and saying, "let's cheap out" and force the bandwidth and resources required back on those who are already paying for it rather than, god forbid, give something back to our customers. You know, the ones who pay for tier, premium memberships, $L, merchandise and everything else that floats their paychecks.

Kind of like, so long and thanks for all the fish. Anyway, those are my thoughts.

Crap Mariner has a different take on it.