* Two of my favorite online worlds have been bugging me out recently, and I've reached breaking point. In their present form, they suck considerably.
It wouldn't be a major problem if I had just lost a half-dozen of contacts I made within Second Life (or "SL", as we like to call it), or that I had got a bunch of pretty cool SL accessories, but the fact that I was bounced from the system after the exploit of Second Life's system. Now I have to change my password, in order to do that I have to remember the name of 3 best friends within the Second Life service, or the secret question. So after 3 weeks of not playing, I enter 2 friend names but make a mistake on the third a few times and am now permanently frozen out of the system. Call this number, it says, but I'm running the company, or running across town for Naviblog, or sleeping during that time, so not much help there. So I go to create a second account: find myself a different name, email address, look and feel, and am ready to go. Hitch again: "this is an Additional Basic Account" so you need to pay $9.95. Input the special character security thing at the bottom of the page, but it either tells me "special characters in box don't match" or "put in a valid email" when it is my valid hotmail address. So I'm giving up on Second Life, I'm bored. Once, twice, a couple of hiccups, sure, but not to this extent. I want something easy to use.
World of Warcraft, same accessibility problem. The in-game part is great, the problem is at login. "We are currently updating our service", so all realms are down for the best part of 6-7 hours!! Again, once or twice that would be cool, but I have tried to login about 4-5 times after midnight Japan time, and the same message. If this were a free service like Second Life, I would say, maybe that's a necessary tradeoff. But when you're paying a lot of money for getting in in the first place, which is a monthly fee, not logging in starts becoming akin to daylight robbery. What would I do if I run a guild? A permanently guildmasterless Guild? When I get back in, someone else has taken my place at the helm?
These may be issues that do not affect the common mortal, but in this brave new world where the line between real and virtual communities resides only in your brain, these things are pointing to the need for a massively multiplayer accessible world (MMAORPG), as opposed to simply being "multiplayer" with strings attached. Cmon guys, get your house in order so that enthusiasts like me don't get peeved off. You know we love what you do.
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