Wilderness Survey

Neva River by HivaAO Insoo

Written 14 May, 2012

Wilderness Survey

I've been following the Linden blog, so I was blindsided by an e-mail questionnaire the company sent me, asking about the Wilderness.

I've not been there and I'm not even sure what it is, but they made the mistake of asking how they could improve the Premium experience. Here's what I wrote in the box:

Stop trying to turn Second Life into a video game. It will never work. Stop pissing off your paying customers. Work on scalability. Reduce prices of sims; you'll get four times as many and make tons more money. Fix stuff that has been broken since 2003. Stop making stupid features like this supposed Wilderness-- your sim owners have already built fabulous natural areas-- see for instance my Whimsy sim and the sims around it. Stop getting rid of your experienced employees and the ones who actually care about the world. Clone the Australian guy and Torley; they're fabulous.

I mentioned the survey to Sweetie, and it absolutely set her off. Here are some highlights of her rant:

Stop trying to give us "experiences" on a quarter of a sim filled with badly textured objects.

Stop designing your "experiences" for 14-year-olds.

Stop making all your "experiences" look the same.

Stop blowing off some of the most creative people in the world-- your customers. Let US create the experiences. We're the experts. Give us places to express ourselves. Make big oceans and huge mountain ranges and jungles and deserts. Give us low prices for monthly tier on sims. We'll fill Second Life with fabulous content.

Oh, wait! We already frigging have! (See HivaAO Insoo's great photo, above).