Myopia

There's a lot of blogger talk about an open letter to LL with the theme of "fix the bugs, please." I think the timing on this is stunningly poor.

For LL to control competitors, they desperately need two features - voice and 3D model imports - and both will be on the main grid sometime this year, likely within the next three months. The other visible focii of their efforts have been increased grid stability with increasing numbers of residents online and finding ways to lessen the support burden of running the grid. All these focii are strongly tied to their financial survival, and that of the grid.

Until the two new features are rolled out, ambient suffering bugs just aren't high enough priority to get a lot of developer attention. When you're focusing on survival, anything not directly related gets ignored. As much as I dislike it personally, I recognise that bugs that are project-killers for me are meaningless to 95% or more of the grid's residents. How does one prioritize bugs like that? By financial cost, by number of residents affected, loss of residents related to the bug, amount of PR? Are they ambient suffering or emergencies?

Once those two crucial features are on the grid, I expect we'll see another update or three focusing on glitches, annoyances, and bugs of the "low hanging fruit" variety. We'll see steady improvement in UI usability and customer service processes. I look forward to it.