We still know little to nothing about this new platform. The description is appealing but very enigmatic. An excerpt of the official announcement tells us this :
"We believe that there is a massive opportunity ahead to carry on the spirit of Second Life while leveraging the significant technological advancements that have occurred since its creation."
This introduction means everything and nothing.
A new platform with the latest technology implies that not everything would be transferable there (confirmed by Linden Lab) but they also want to carry the active content creators over there (cf "same spirit of SL").
However it's a huge challenge and I don't really see how they're going to fulfill it.
The various feedbacks on SL point toward constant issues that had never been fixed. These issues can be resumed in three words : lag, expensive, broken.
1. Lag : since the beginning of SL, lag has always been a problem and all sort of work-around have been used, all of them more or less successful (limit the script sizes, the script counts, the prim weight, the number of avatars on a region, etc...). Before the implementation of meshes, lag was reduced to the minimum and SL was very enjoyable then the meshes have been added in SL and the lag is back worse than before.
2. Expensive : the cost for users to log in SL (both in terms of land prices and hardwares) are very high which is definitely against productive. It can't be a world-wide virtual world when only a minority of high end computers can enjoy SL at its best graphic performance. Of course, not everyone has to have the graphic settings on ultra or high, however the hardware requirements have to be lowered to allow more users to log in.
The second part of the costliness is in the land fees and prices which have increased months after months and tuned down the competitiveness of SL to the other open sims.
3. Broken : rezzing, scripting, using items in SL don't work as intended as often as expected. This problem often leads to unscheduled maintenances and combined with scheduled maintenances, SL is under work 4/7 days which is too much. SL should be accessible 5/7 days minimum while actually it's the opposite. SL is under work, broken or unstable 4/7 days.
None of these issues are new and all of them are recurrent from the start. As of today, none of them had been fixed in a consistent way therefore we can only wonder how they're going to build a successful SL 2.0?
