Schlechte Nachrichten für die Befürworter der alten Nachnamen:
[Update] - Last Names Roundtable
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03-01-2012 04:15 PM
Hey folks, firstly thanks for all the discussion in this thread on my my.secondlife profile. I had more to say on this than would fit in there, so I’ll post it here in the forums but will link back so we can continue the conversation there.
It’s kind of morphed into a sort of unofficial roundtable discussion. It’s been enjoyable and even though this one has not brought about a change many of you would like its been a good process. Low key and direct feedback off the radar, I like that.
So when it comes to last names, I have spent a lot of time going through all your comments and chatting with the team here. I learnt a lot. Firstly, as I already knew identity is very important, and the last name issue is extremely polarizing. What I didn’t know was how big a negative impact it used to have on new users signing up (the data is startling at how much friction it added). Folks just wanted to create their own name; they became even more annoyed if there was a pre-done last name that could fit but that had already been taken. The namespace hijacking issue was not solved by pre done last names.
But that’s the downside. The upside? It’s just great to be able to have a last name as your master identity. Rather than “horationelson” people want “Horatio Nelson.” Not least because although display names give you complete freedom to choose whatever you want, we still reference “.resident” in a few places.
This is just the functional benefit though, I would argue an even greater benefit is the bonding those fixed last names gave people. The shared last name kinda made you “family”, it was a unique system, and I don’t like losing unique systems. Tangled up in this is something that has been gnawing away at me for some time. Conversations with many old Lindens and Residents have led me to conclude that we have lost something of the old frontier feel. Like we were exploring the world together, you knew people, you would bump into them more. I have some ideas on how we can bring this back more (something along the lines of a new mainland like region or making mainland better or rethinking the whole way Linden Homes works.) This will be the subject of the next little roundtable, which will follow this one.
But back to the matter at hand. As I promised if we couldn’t figure out a way that was a win/win for folks who want complete freedom vs. a list of last names, we wouldn’t do it. We couldn’t, so we wont.
However what we will be doing is adding in at least one and maybe more special characters like a dash when you signup so you can make a more normal looking name. So you can have “horatio-nelson” for example, which is impossible now. Work will begin on this as it slots into the task list.
Secondly we will be taking steps to remove more places where the dreaded “resident” last name appears inworld. If you have any places where you see it often that we might have missed it would be good to hear.
Thirdly I will be kicking off another monthly roundtable (probably Monday) to chat about getting that family/frontier feel back with an eye to some area-like project, although some of the early ideas (like you get to pick a prefixed last name after you are a resident for say six months) can also be chatted about.
Thanks again for all these comments and discussion. It’s a pity that the first one couldn’t come up with a clean solution that solved all the world’s problems (or cats’ problems) but it was valuable nevertheless.
I will leave the original thread on this topic open and kick off the new one next week.
Quelle:
[Update] - Last Names Roundtable - Second Life
Kurz zusammengefasst:
Die alten Nachnamen kommen nicht mehr. Es wird an einer Änderung des neuen Sign-Ups gearbeitet, die es ermöglichen soll so etwas ähnliches wie Vor und Nachnamen zu generieren. Dabei sollen einige Sonderzeichen, wie beispielsweise ein Bindestrich erlaubt werden, was dann für jemanden, der Max Meier heißen will den Namen "max-meier" ermöglichen soll.