Roadmaps

Can I Escape  by Divine Ashby (used with permission)

Back in 2013 when the Terms of Service pretty much took away our rights to our own work (not quite but enough to make some giant waves) and a fair amount of folks were not able to even log in to get their money transferred out or even close thier accounts because doing so would be breaking real life business contracts  ---- well, it seemed unbelievable; yet it was real and it happened.  I am not sure what percentage of folks we lost then, maybe ten percent?  

Many artist in all realms left. 2D, 3D writers and particle effects makers were the most vocal it seemed. Plenty of folks just clicked through without reading and went on with there lives.  One hard-working citizen took the time to compare the old TOS with the NEW complete with notes, red underlines and indications of movement.  It was a landmark year and not in a a good way. 

It was confusing when it happened. It didn't make all that much sense WHY did Linden Lab needed all those rights.  It took me quite awhile to figure out (none of this was ever confirmed) that the POINT of it all was migration of our inventories over to Sansar.   

If you read through the very long threads where Ebbe answered questions it is fairly obvious that Ll "planned" to do that. They thought they could migrate many of our goods as well as our"virtual selves"; and needed the legal means to become virtual moving vans.  In fact that was an excellent idea and it probably would have made Sansar more successful.  Many things COULD have been moved over with no changes; I certainly uploaded SL goods to Sansar without tinkering much.  But it turned out the devs really couldn't pull it off.  

Such is the way with ideas and roadmaps.  

Note that all this documentation with links to forum posts if they are still active are available in this blog's archives for anyone wanting to peruse.  Start looking at August 2013 and later months.  They may also be linked from Google.  

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Reading through current official blog posts as well as long forum discussions it seems  that something is coming.  "Could it be? Yes it could. Somethings coming; something good -- if I can wait."

There appears to be a plan and we can hope it turns out well. Then again, it may not - for some folks anyway. 

We don't need to rehash all that has happened (scroll back though the last two month if you missed out on all of that) but it was messy.  Along the way we had a LOT of "good news" to negate the obvious problems.  New Belli homes were unveiled (I thought Belli was complete but shows you what I know), extra land impact for Belli houses became a popular bonus , and now free MESH uploads for some levels of Premium.  

Other perks included linden dollars for using the phone app daily, a computer give away as well as more groups and animesh attachments --- and just recently gifts from Seraphim creators.  That isn't NEW by the way' more than fifteen years ago (NOPE research says fourteen years) a similar feature was a brief perk for Premium account holders. I  remember the first pack a friend picked up. Mudhoney (a top creator back i the day) was one of the creators.  Later of course the gifts were Mole-made and not quite as exciting for mainstream stylists.  

It seems clear that Linden Lab wants more folks to buy into Premium levels for the perks.  That isn't too surprising since most of the new benefits cost LL very little. There is a big contingent of folks waiting and hoping for more land impact for NON-Belli plots. We will see if that happens (apparently not now). 

There is also the new web viewer.  Plenty of things that have "sort of" been announced have gone quiet so we certainly don't know what will and what won't happen in the future but keep your eyes open and stay alert; it is likely that more changes will come to pass. 

I will just be waiting quietly in my little corner of our virtual world hoping we don't go down the rabbit hole again.