Philip is, true to his word, going to have an inworld meeting with SL customers, but to attend one needs to fill out a form then hope to "win" a spot in a drawing. It's hard to imagine how else would be better to do it, because things are so lop-sided (lots of people want to attend, few people can attend because of the limitations of sims to bear numbers of avatars, even besides the chaos factor). It points up a crucial failing that limits the use of SL for mass entertainment and busy business and education uses, although for many purposes the avatar limit is fine.

I'm happier since giving up attempts to put on live entertainment, as we just never knew what was going to happen, especially in the last year of performing. Although a lot of that woe was caused by a bad and unpredicted combination of mono-compiled scripted attachments issuing a one-two punch to the sim when avatars TPed in or out, there is an avatar sim cap that is well under a hundred.

I remember eons ago a pile-on called on the preview grid to test new server software that enabled the avatar limit to be raised until the pile of green dots reached almost to the moon - at least a hundred people. That must've been before ungodly scripted attachments were usual, pre- everything else, too. It's horrible that A) it was impossible to know how important limits would be, B) what people would do in their limit-pushing in their desire for fashion and money would be so extreme (i.e. avatars routinely wearing 300 scripts or more as copybot-paranoid shoe and hairmakers load their no-mod wares with badly scripted resizers), and C) the much-needed relief expected from the inclusion of mono has instead caused a new set of troubles that will only be eased when mono itself revises and SL can move to that new version.

There was no way to predict these things, and it seems SL is in a very difficult moment (I hope it's just a moment) that may melt like spring snow if a few things resolve and hardware/bandwidth takes another step up. Then again, everything in the world is somewhat in disarray at the moment (well, for the bottom 99% of us, anyway), so as usual there's no way to predict what will happen. I see great value in what SL has to offer, and I'm glad Philip is a calming presence. I have no clue what the future brings, or how LL is directing their energy, but two things are clear: Second life has a passionate and engaged customer base even after all the garbage LL has hurled at us over the years, and every alternate virtual wortld must deal with the same global difficulties. If we can get past this rocky patch the future may widen again and the way may be clear.