Tuesday, September 28, 2010
In preparation for the Team Leader display, I have added an Anonymous setting for Procyon game owner accounts. If you own a game, you can go to the Customer section and tick the check box for "Anonymous Leader". If you don't do that, then your name will appear as Team Captain in the Team Ranking listings.
Nobody's name is appearing yet. I haven't enabled the Team Captain display. I'll give everyone a few days to set themselves anonymous if they want before doing so.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
There have been some requests to add the Team Captain names on the Team Rank display page. Next to each team, you would see the name of the person who owns that team, the team captain.
Obviously, some people would not want their names displayed there. So I'll need to add another privacy option, one that would let you remain anonymous.
The question is, should the name display be opt-out or opt-in?
If it's opt-out, then all team captains' names would be displayed by default. You would have to check the box in your account options to enable privacy.
If it's opt-in, then nobody's name would show up by default. You would have to uncheck the "anonymous" option in your account settings.
What do you think should be the default? Post a comment to this blog entry to let me know (or email me).
Personally, I would prefer to make it opt-out. I'm afraid if it's opt-in then most people won't enable it. There's a lot of owners who don't even know this website exists. So the names would all be blank, and it wouldn't be much different from not having the name display at all.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
For the first time in over three months, the Linden Dollar showed signs of strength, as the current offer price for sell orders ticked down one notch, from 266 to 265. This is the first real good news I've seen on the Second Life economy.
Ram Linden has posted an "
Economic Spotlight" on June's Lindex meltdown. The official explanation is that when they merged people's XStreet and Second Life accounts, the extra Linden Dollars swamped the economy. Nobody seems to be especially convinced by that. I have my own suspicions, which I hope to be able to write up soon.
One other thing I'd like to comment on. In his blog post, Ram writes: "...we are committed to allowing the economy to fluctuate based on its own market forces." I'm sorry, but that's an outright lie. For almost four years, Linden Lab kept the price of the Linden Dollar artificially low, by selling massive quantities of their own currency on the Lindex through the Supply Linden account. The value never increased beyond L$259/US$. If the economy had truly been allowed to "fluctuate based on its own market forces," the L$ would be worth much more today, and content creators would have been compensated much more for their efforts. Instead, by artificially clamping down on the Second Life economy, Linden Lab was able to pad their income by millions of dollars a month.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
The Customer Support page now lists all the licenses you own.
Every Premiere Line game is licensed to your avatar. This allows you to redeliver new copies any time you want, and makes upgrades easier. Occasionally people forget how many licenses they have. If you click on a vendor, it will tell you, but now you can also see all your licenses in one place.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
I've moved a couple items on the website. The Team Roster and Local Scores pages which used to be in the Players section, have been moved to the Customers section.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
One of the features of Procyon Games is the Recent Games listing. Every Premiere Line game like En Garde and Can't Stop shows a list of recent games on its web page. This is a great feature for new players, who often don't know anyone else who plays the game, and lets them find other players. It's also good for people like club owners, who use the games as a source of traffic. It can direct people straight to their land.
But some people don't want their location advertised and have asked for a privacy mode. So now I've added that. There is a new Customer section on the Procyon web site, which can be accessed if you own a Premier Line game. In that section you can enable Privacy Mode, which will hide your games from the Recent Games list. This hides games played on your set. Any game played on any game you own won't appear in the Recent Games. But if you play a game on someone else's set, that will show up (as long as they aren't set private too).
Saturday, August 28, 2010
It's taken me two months, but I've finally got the Lindex Statistics back online. What happened? Linden Lab doesn't publish the Sell Offer volume numbers, at least not in an easy-to-download format like they do for some of the other economic statistics. The only way to get it is to scrape it off the website. A couple months ago they changed the way their website login works, and it took me a while to figure out how to deal with it. But it seems to be working now, so the graphs should all be up to date.
In the meantime, the Lindex dollar managed to stabilize itself. The sell orders that had piled up between the old value of 259 and the new 266 gradually filled, as people repositioned them at the new level. The total volume of orders shrank from an unsustainable 200M to a more manageable 100M. And that's where we are today.
It's still worth watching the total volume. If it starts to creep up again, that's a sign that we're in for more trouble.
I do have another post half-written, on some theories on what's driving the Linden dollar up and down, that I hope to get out at some point.
