The kids are alright

Three months of feedback and Jack Linden shows that Linden Lab really do listen to the community by parcelling land on Zindra to make it easier for people to choose parcels. There you go, customer service at its finest.

Actually I'm only half kidding, the fact that they have cut parcels has came after residents asked for it so this is a response to residents, it's an easy one but it's still a response and that should be welcomed.

More interestingly Jack clarified the position of kid avatars on Zindra and I agree with his approach, on the blog post Jack said:

"Are child avatars allowed on Adult land? Child avatars are allowed on adult land as long as they are account verified like any other Resident. Those choosing to represent themselves with a child avatar do not represent a minor as the account holder. Not all adult land is going to be hosting adult content either. There is plenty of protected land on Zindra that will technically be adult but safe in terms of content. This however does not change any prior policies regarding child avatars. Sexual ageplay is not allowed anywhere on the grid, regardless of rating."

That's a sensible policy, the hoo-ha over kids on Zindra blew up on empty land for goodness sake, nobody has moved there. A kid AV in an orgy room would be bad, a kid AV standing in a monorail station shouldn't be bad and call me a prude but I don't see the need for people to be whipping out their avatar bits on every square inch of Zindra and nor it seems, do Linden Lab.

On Monday the almighty mess that Linden Lab have created moves onto the ticketing stage and the great land scramble. This will be ugly and this will leave plenty of people upset. People will lose neighbours and they will lose scenery. Many people see their virtual land as more than just server space, which is why Second Life is successful. This is another point Linden Lab have ignored as they consistently demonstrate that the people behind this decision don't have an appreciation of the inworld experience.

Accomodating Zindra means people lose search relevance and location. Landmarks become obsolete. The side effects of this almighty nonsense include a new search system designed to help predictability that penalises those on PG land and to some extent mature. How many people are Linden Lab trying to tick off over this?

There is still no help being offered to those who are on estates, neither estate owners or estate tenants have received any real consideration.

They should have simply setup a new adult continent, offered voluntary moves, enforced their TOS on adult terms appearing in PG search and let the place grow organically. All they needed to do with search was add an adult content checkbox. Estate land should have been left to estate owners to police and ensure people weren't being exposed to explicit content, estates should have some degree of autonomy.

Mature land should have defaulted to mature content, putting the onus on the parcel owner to determine whether the content was mature or not, flagging mature content as PG content would be an easy to define offence, those who genuinely had PG content could have happily flagged their land as such, the same goes for classifieds.

That was all they had to do, they should have built a PG continent too but that's another issue. Instead they've created a mess, an almighty one. Are the Australian government involved in this? They seem keen to create an almigthy mess too with their filtering policies. Why make minimal changes when annoying lots of people is so much more fun hey?