Sunday 16 March 2008

Something Wrong with the State of Texas Instruments

Tonight I thought I would take one of my periodic peeks at the sims dotted around those belonging to Millions of Us. I have been aware of a Texas Instruments sim for many months, but on all previous occasions it has been closed. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find it open this time, and popped in for a look around.

The sim is actually advertising the company's DLP high-definition screen technology, and features a number of examples where you would see the benefits. There's also an attractive auditorium. As all of this is the work of MOU, the build quality is as you'd expect. And all of it is placed on a fairly small island in the middle of the sim. So far, so good.

Now for the not-so-good. I don't know when the plan is to open this island to the public - maybe it already is - but someone seems to have made a blunder with permissions. Right now, the island appears to be a Griefers Paradise. There seems to be no build restrictions at all, as far as I could tell, and all manner of oddities are already appearing... a helicopter, a luxury yacht, a few extraneous islands, a number of "money pyramids" and at higher altitudes there is more construction work underway. OK, to be fair, most of the "defacing" to date seems to be people treating the place like a perpetual sandbox. However, there are signs that less innocent souls are at work.

While I have had suspicions in the past about companies using "free to build" as a mechanism for driving footfall (I won't mention the events in question), I don't think that this is the case here. Besides, despite my cynicism and paranoia, I still err on the side of 'cock-up over conspiracy'. I will be mildly intrigued to see how this pans out.

Here's a few snaps (you might just make out the dodgy pyramids in the first picture):

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Welcome to the world of the tekkies who run Millions of Us in SL as land managers who have heavy ideological precepts that are impossible to change.

May I remind you of where CNET is? What property? Where the infamous Anshe presser took place? On MOU.

I've been to any number of events, builds, etc. on MOU and been appalled to see no autoreturn on, no scripts turned off to non-group, etc. etc.

And when I race to tell the managers, I find utter, cynical, cold, bland indifference. This is part of their extremist philosophy of how you run an SL sim -- like a sandbox.

So good luck trying to perk up this awareness to Reuben Steiger. But...I'm not sure he doesn't support his staff in this.

I think it's appalling, and has been. The Anshe thing would never happened if these people's ideology had not been allowed to prevail.

Prokofy Neva

Anonymous said...

I'll look into this. We've just hired a community manager to help us out with island management for exactly this reason. Thanks for the heads up, and I'll be sure to follow up on our other island's permissions.