Taking Inventory
“Among my most prized possessions are the words that I have never spoken” ~ Orson Rega Card
Kitty is experiencing a loss of inventory issue that really highlights some of the reasons it’s so hard to pitch Second Life as a professional medium. Anyone who has ever tried to explain Second Life to someone in a business sense runs into a barrage of issues, and some of them are so fundamental to those who deal in data-as-commodity that it becomes embarrassing to fess up to the elements were Linden Labs drops the ball.
Let’s face it, maintaining customer data is the most basic of all online responsibilities between platform and user base. Web hosts, gaming, social platforms — all of these know that maintaining the integrity of their customer data is their bread and butter. They have procedures for recovering losses and the big players generally have backup systems for their backup systems.
When I had an inventory loss issue over a year ago, I had to make three separate customer service contacts before I was given the information that re-established my inventory. Three. And the procedure itself is simply idiotic (clear cache on SL and system, go to a low-activity/lag Linden sim, wait X minutes for your inventory to load and see if your items are magically restored). Really? That’s the procedure? I do the SL hokey pokey and I turn myself about?
Now, try explaining this in a board room, or in a phone conference. Try pitching the idea to advertisers or potential investors that virtual goods have value, just like real-world goods. Then try explaining that when those goods disappear the consumer has no real recourse beyond crossing their fingers and following some silly procedures. Then do the math on why corporations cannot deal with the Linden Labs model.
The really sad thing? This is not just a fail on LL’s part, it’s also a missed opportunity.
Pssst — hey, Linden Lab. Want to increase the number of paid accounts overnight? Offer paid accounts the ability to back-up their inventories once a week and give them one free “restore inventory from most recent back-up” per year. After that charge them $X per back-up. Sure, it’s something you should be offering in the first place, but your user base has so little faith in you and so little trust in your ability to maintain our data that most of us would probably pay extra just to have some assurance that you’ve got a baseline motivation to provide the illusion of security. You could CHARGE US EXTRA for it.