Second Life/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Internet Backdraft: Came in full force when it was revealed Linden Labs was trying to make user profiles be like Facebook, privacy issues and all, and made their profiles public to the internet (to help generate revenue from advertising) instead of restricting it to be within Second Life. Only after the massive shitstorm did Linden Labs allow users to restrict their profiles from being displayed on the web... which also prevented anyone else from viewing their profile.
  • Knight(s) Templar: The JLU. A "proactive security" group themed on the DC Comics heroes that concerns itself with seeking out major griefing operations and eliminating them. While they effectively function as a non-profit private security firm, they are notorious for what some see as their shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude, filing mass abuse reports against people who haven't done anything on the basis that they will, because they associate with known griefers. Heavily implicated with the Woodbury incidents.[1]
  • Never Live It Down: SL had a real problem early on with every sim being an ad farm or some kind of sex sim. They've since made adjustments to eliminate the ad farms and creates some segregation between the sexual and non sexual areas but the reputation remains.
    • SL is a Mecca for practitioners of Gorean bondage role-players.
  • Ruined FOREVER: Free Teleportation. Voice chat. Gambling Ban. Age Verification. Viewer 2.0. Emerald ban. Zindra. Mesh Import. Teen Grid merge. Linden Labs divides the fanbase into yet smaller pieces each time they add a feature or change their policies on something.
  • "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: The attitude of many people when it comes to using free or cheap items. Apparently, only real men will spend real money to obtain good items.
    • The Griefers and those that oppose them. While some griefers are in it for the fun and some of the antigriefers are in it to help out other residents who would rather not be harrassed, other griefers have declared war and plenty of the antigriefers respond in kind (and are effectively griefers themselves.)
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Viewer 2 in spades. Complaints ranging from ugly UI design to horrible performance. LL has no intentions of changing viewer 2/3's interface, which caused users to flock to third party viewers that are based on the UI of viewer 1 and some of the 3rd party viewers are using features from viewer 2 (display names, alpha textures for the body, etc).
    • Phoenix Viewer, a 3rd party viewer that was made after Emerald Viewer was banned, was stated to have development for it stop after they import the mesh feature to it so that the development team can focus on improving their Firestorm Viewer (based on viewer 2/3) and have said that it takes tons of coding and time to be importing new features into an old Second Life viewer, which is why they want to focus on Firestorm. The fan base was NOT happy.
  • Uncanny Valley: Ever seen an avatar with lip synch problems? It's even worse when the speaker is highly emotional but the avatar is just standing there, apparently speaking perfectly calmly.
  1. Woodbury is a real life university in California that bought a campus on Second Life. The campus was left more or less in the hands of /b/tards, became a griefer hub and eventually the Lindens deleted the sim and made several accounts disappear entirely. There have since been two more sims bought in the Woodbury name, and both have had the same thing happen.