Tomorrow marks Second Life’s fourth birthday and it got me thinking about how SL has developed over the the 14 months I have been involved in it.

The result of this thinking has actually led me to downgrade my account!

I’ve been a premium member since the first week I became aware of SL. Etopia from Entropia told me about it in passing so I gave it a try - and loved it!

I hardly slept that first week and I spent loads of money. I had bought from the lindex on day one and had my first land by day four.
The biggest difference between then and now was that as a European I would walk around for hours in relitive peace and just see occasional people - most of the friends I made or people I met were from The US which was nice.

Compared to today:
Today I logged in and was instantly attacked by a noob with the basic avatar (jeans/white t-shirt). I’ve gotten pretty used to this so I quietly left and went to another place - same thing.
Five or six people speaking German and ignorantly pushing into me enough to register on “bumps and pushes”.

While I have no issue with people speaking another language it does cause a feeling of alienation - and translators are simply annoying when they flood the chat window.

Grief and alienation aside, when I look at my avatar I see that my eyeballs are spastically moving in different directions, something Torley Linden describes as “a pain and we do hope to fix it soon”.
According to LL’s support area this is now fixed but I can guarantee 100% that it is not fixed.

Anyway all that aside, I’m now a freebie account and below is what I put in the form to LL on the downgrade page;

I can do everything I want without owning land. (checked)
Creating things is more work than fun. (checked)
I had too many technical difficulties. (checked)
512 meters was not enough to build with.(checked)

While I love SL it is plagued with problems - too many problems that I should be paying for it.

As a developer I stopped creating for SL a long time ago simply because the platform is too unstable with such problems as inventory loss and scripts that steal inventory being allowed to run amok.

There is also too much sex in second life and would like to see LL try to remove a lot of this - why not create a porno/sex grid where these people can go to whack off at poser models?

When big changes come, then I may re-subscribe.