The State of Second Life:

Hey all, just wanted to cover a few key points to ensure everything is clear with everyone that is involved with CCS in some way within Second Life.

Its been a rough couple of weeks for Second Life and CCS in general. Linden Labs fired 30% of its staff, the Linden dollar devalued in response to that by around 10% of previous economic figures (means you pay more for Linden dollars and get less in return for selling them back), M Linden came out and showed everyone his skill at corporate double talk, throwing most old school grid citizens a bit of a curve ball since we're used to a bit less bullshit than that, usually. And to top it all off Linden Legal disavowed responsibility to take action against a user proven to have illegally used the CCS Software base to create a competing product and instructed us that it was our responsibility to seek a damages judgment in the situation rather than Linden Labs, themselves, taking any responsibility for taking action against an account holder that is in proven violation of their own DMCA policies.

Yep, its been a rough start for the summer here in Second Life, but that's pretty much just how things happen sometimes. The Linden economy snaps and twitches all the time in response to things the Lindens do. And back in 2005 when I first started in Second Life the Linden Dollar was trading at around L$375 to 1$ USD at its high, over the last five years thats come down as the value of the platform has increased due to Linden investment and of course user investment.

In simple terms, we're in a rough patch, as a grid, not just CCS, but the grid as a whole. And these things occur and you weather them as best you can.

Rumors In Regards to CCS and the State of Second Life:

To address some rumors I will go ahead and state that, yes, I am not happy with Linden Labs right now. The Linden Labs we're dealing with today is not the Linden Labs I remember from five years ago where Concierge reps would literally teleport to your location to help you personally with issues even if you were a minor land holder. Their service has degraded from a level of personal service that I found absolutely amazing, five years ago, to the same crap service you'd expect from any other online services representatives. File a ticket, wait days or weeks for a response, call Concierge and no one has any answers or even understands what you're talking about because you as a land owner and developer know more about Second Life than half the people they have answering the phones. Please file a JIRA ticket that might get noticed if you can get enough people to vote on it as an issue, thank you. A democratic process towards QA and Bug Tracking is pretty much the dumbest idea since the inflatable dartboard.

Things have changed kids. Thats the long and short of it.

The "rumors" state that I will be leaving Second Life and taking CCS with me. This is a patent falsehood, I have responsibilities to my users and my sim owner/admin clients that I will not abandon simply because I find the state of Second Life to be unsatisfactory to my expectations of what I believed Linden Labs and Second Life to be.

CCS Service will remain active in Second Life, my commitments to our player base and our sim owner/admins will not be abandoned simply due to my change in stance in regards to my support and belief in Linden Labs.

CCS will continue to provide service, updates, upgrades and systems additions, as planned, until such time as the grid is either shut down, or the Lindens literally destroy the role playing communities of Second Life out of their own idiocy. I will service this grid until there is no grid left to service, end of story.  

I have considered alternatives, I have looked at potential escape hatches for CCS to use, to get off the grid and better its situation elsewhere and the simple facts are, unless there was a situation where I could transition every single member of the CCS Community in a method that allowed for no real "loss" to them, I wouldn't do it.

So, Linden Labs turning into Yet Another Online Service Company isn't going to break CCS, nor is it going to break me. I will just call them on their bullshit, plain and simple and keep on trucking as normal.

CCS v1.0.2 - The Bugstomper has Stompethed:

CCS v1.0.2 is on Release Candidate 4 now in the testing group and the testing group has been widened out from just CoLA GM's and Global GMs and has added in a lot of our 3rd party developers so they can work with the unit and see what they can find in regards to problems.

The http-in development is in the RC4 unit and appears to be working flawlessly, we're working on getting some frontend functionality on the database frontend for sim admins and GMs to use for more functionality control and convenience.

All known bugs in the 1.0.1 release have been addressed, 1.0.2 RC4 is, at the moment, producing very few bug reports and will likely hit the live environment very soon, pending any late breaking issues.

Also in v1.0.2 we've got the fully implemented API percentile damage system in place, so developers are testing that and finding the ins and outs of it and whats problematic and what isn't. It is our hope that we can find a great middle ground in API usage that turns the API market back into a helpful and useful market for the players and not in so much a pay to win system as 3 years of somewhat confused development and occasional out of standard development has made it appear to be.

As always I will post no date for the release of 1.0.2, the RC4 candidate went out to the testing group last night, I am watching for any major negative feedback but so far, so good, no issues have arisen, so given a few more days of QA from the testing group and we should be ready to go live with the 1.0.2 build.

Once we finalize that, we'll be working on adding in the respec on demand features and XP transfer system. Hopefully to have those completed and available as profile based features by the end of July at the latest.

So, anyways, we're here, we're not going anywhere cause to be honest, theres no where to go that wouldn't harm the user base in some way.

So CCS stays on the grid, til there is no grid to service. My feelings on Linden Labs have absolutely nothing to do with my professional conduct in regards to the administration of this game.

Thanks for your time all.