Cross-posted open letter from a comment made to Linden Lab’s blog (Link found at the bottom.);

EDIT: Tagged on the replies to my comment. Don’t say I report one-sidedly.

“I’d love to see a workaround for the age verification process, adult content restriction, (rumors of) the teen grid being merged with the adult grid and general business sense of a rotten tomato that LL shows their clients (We, the SL residents. We who have payed monthly, quarterly, yearly fees for our accounts on top of land rental prices on top of prices to upload things to make content, or content itself. We, who have been here for one, two, three, four, five or even the whole six years of SL’s public history.) by forcing upon us content (restrictions), a constant stream of viewers that force us to upgrade our hardware and software in sometimes ridiculous ways and recently with drivers that weren’t ready for the majority of the people who were forced to install them in order to use the new SL viewer, forcing upon us things that we can’t stomach.

You’re losing paying customers, for what?

Make a stand. Bring out the big guns. Tell us once and for all, in clearly defined words, what it is we can expect from you in the coming year.

What is your business plan? What are you going to do to the world we spent hundreds, thousand, uncountable amounts of our local currency on to shape it into this world you market to your investors?

I want to see a workaround around this secrecy. This “we’re going to do what we want when we want to do it with as little information as we can give the public before we thrust it upon them” mentality is COSTING YOU MONEY.

Many of us are leaving the grid (indefinitely) because of your tactics.

Be the men and women you say you are; get your plan out in the open so we can converse about it as adults and come up with these workarounds to the problems YOU DON’T SEE YET because you’re focused on a goal that’s so blurry that your support staff doesn’t even know how to describe it.

Own up to your commitment to SL. Speak up and let the bughunting begin before we end up with a grid that’s falling apart at the seams and people blinking in confusion and wondering where it went wrong.

Seriously. I’m trying my best here to keep the tone civil. You’ve hurt me and many of my friends deeply by your recent actions. It’s starting to look not quite unlike what Sony Online Entertainment did to their Star Wars Galaxies MMO when World of Warcraft came out. The Combat Upgrade they thrust upon their userbase did more harm to their gameworld than World of Warcraft alone could’ve done.

Don’t make that mistake.

Stop what you’re doing and talk with your userbase. Come clean with your plans. Let us help you make Second Life a virtual environment that can last for years to come.

If not for us, do it because you’re going bankrupt if you continue in this way.”