Molly Montale Talks About The Suburb Sims : Blumfield,West Haven & The Shermervilles

By Luc Fray


Saturday, May 26th 2012


"History is but the nail on which the picture hangs"
- Alexandre Dumas, Catherine Howard

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to talk to one of Second Life™ 's longest playing residents, Molly Montale.

Molly Montale

Montale had joined the game since 2005 after seeing an article about it in New York Times™. Though not as active now as she was before,mostly because of health problems, Montale still granted me the time of the day when she had agreed to talk regarding one of Second Life's biggest issue back when the game first started standing up on wobbly legs.

Montale confessed that, although she had played Sims 2™, she had not really had a great deal of knowledge regarding virtual worlds. Her curiosity was peaked, however, when she watched a Second Life trailer regarding solitary individual snowmobiling. She decided to give SL™ a try and created an account on the 1st of November of 2005.

Back then, she narrated, every new resident arrives at Ahern Welcome Area after leaving Orientation Island. After popping up in the middle of a dozen chatting avatars, she found it highly unexpected and quite surprising. She felt lost and a little more than out of place in the sea of strangers, and by the time she logged out of the game, she was unsure if Second Life really was for her.

She did continue to log in-game over the next few weeks just listening to people talk at the welcome area.Though she'd come and join events that could be found from searching in the game's built-in search bar, Montale was beginning to think that Second Life was something not for her. Her hopes rose though when she read on the blog about this new sim called Blumfield.

It was laid out like a small suburban community with streets and eighty 512 square meter lots with prefab houses.

Montale soon learned that Second Life began to be a "free-to-play" game a couple of months before she had joined. Before that, Linden Labs charged a monthly fee to access Second Life. The total number of residents that had SL accounts were about 33,000 when she had gotten into the virtual world, and around two to three thousand avatars would login-world at any given time.

"I had arrived in SL as part of the first big wave of growth for SL. The grid was around 1,000 sims and nearly all were the Linden owned mainland," Montale shared.

Picture of the BLUMFIELD sim

Montale also added that the mainland at that time seemed to be "a sprawl of haphazardly placed casinos,strip clubs and big box malls and dance clubs. Blumfield stood in stark contrast to what I had been seeing."

After that, Montale received an email from Lauren Linden inviting her to claim a house and lot in Blumfield.

The Lindens were a trying out an experiment to lure new residents to become premium even if the game was free to play.

Blumfield had something different from other sims that only comes with becoming a paying resident. However, owning a spot in the area was by invitation only. Grabbing that chance, Montale went premium on the 21st of November. She was excited about having her own little house and claiming her 512 lot, and it made a 180-degree turn of her original idea of leaving the game.

For the next couple of weeks, about 60 other residents claimed their lots in Blumfield. Each of them were new and had joined SL around the same time. They were trying to learn about this new experience with much enthusiasm, figuring out what to do with only 117 available prims. Patch Lamington, one of the new residents, began a Blumfield group and a small community quickly formed among themselves.

A month after that event, West Haven appeared. It was a copy of Blumfield and operated the same way the first sim did. Randomly selected residents were offered lots there if they become premium residents. "A friend of mine lost her waterfront view when West Haven suddenly appeared. Terraforming was turned off on these suburban sims.

Our only other restriction was that we could not list our new parcel for sale for four months.

We met with Pathfinder Linden a couple of times to see if our two new sims could have a covenant like Brown and Boardman had. We wanted to protect the residential quality of the two sims."

Picture of WEST HAVEN sim

During that time, there was no point-to-point teleporting. Each sim had a little Linden telehub that they can use to go to other places. Theirs was located in Fuchsia to their southeast. Games 1 was on their eastern borders.

Linden Lab™held contests to develop games for Second Life. The prize for winning was that the winning group would have Games1 sim for one year.Montale's parcel was immediately next to Games1. Accordingly, Max Case 's tower was just across the line from her place. It was said to be the tallest structure in the virtual world that time.

Also in the Games1 sim was The Black Library that sponsored a literary group. "Max built a wall complete with barbed wire along the sim border to keep the 'mundane, noob suburbanites' out of the rest of the mainland." The place was patrolled by teddy bear guards.

Montale went on to say that she had met Philip Linden one evening while she was standing inside her little house. He had went to come see the sim and, while in the process of doing that, asked her a few questions about the Blumfield promotional experiment.

Montale verbalized to him that she thought Blumfield promotion was a success and that she was very happy with West Haven and Blumfield.

He thanked her and disappeared.

Not long after that, a month later,Shermerville was announced.

"Nine sims patterned after Blumfield were to arrive off of the mainland. Perhaps the idea was to offer some privacy. One sim would have a central park complete with a sandbox area.

The Shermerville promotion would be slightly different.The invited noobs could claim a free 512 lot and house. They would have four weeks to decide if they enjoyed having a house before they would need to go premium in order to keep their lot. The nine sims quickly filled up."

However, the Shermerville promotions didn't have the same welcome from the residents as the Blumfield and West Haven ones. Most people did not become premium to keep their parcels.The sims become very empty. The remaining residents folded into the central park and one other of the Shermerville sims. The other seven sims vanished.

Violet took the place next door to the east whenGames1 was closed. The Shermerville sims moved off of the mainland and next to Blumfield and West Haven, and Violet and Fuchsia were moved.

It was then that Michael Linden built the bridge connecting Shermerville with Nova Albion.

SHERMERVILLE CENTRAL

SHERMERVILLE NW

In early February 2006, a mysterious sim named Blumfield2 suddenly appeared off of the mainland. It was another copy of Blumfield. No announcement was ever made of it, and the sim also dropped out of sight after about one week.

The first few months in the sim,according to Montale, were very fun. It wasn't difficult and surprising to have a tight knit community quickly formed. Ahern was just nearby and still the only arrival point for new residents. Visitors coming into the sim were nothing surprising.

"In July of 2006, 14 of us from West Haven and Blumfield decided to buy our own private sim. The community moved off of the mainland. Only three of us from that group of 14 still have our original lots in Blumfield.

Blumfield and West Haven haven't been the same since then. They are now just a sleepy,bedroom community across from Nova Albion," Montale commented.

Up to the present, Linden Labs is still experimenting with ways to attract and retain new residents and to develop communities. The four "city" sims of Nova Albion had been built prior to Blumfield. Since Blumfield and the other three suburban sims, Linden Lab has developed Bay City, Nautilus, and the Linden Homes sims.

Initially, there had been a lot of heated debates on the forum, in blogs, and in-world about whether or not Linden Labs unfairly competed with residents in content creation and land with the emergence of this issue. Some felt it was contrary to the idea of Your World. Your Imagination. You be the judge of it.

But as part of Second Life's history, let us remember Thomas Jefferson's wise words "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past."

TY for reading my article and a special thanks to Molly Montale for her time and words that made this article possible. My name is Luc Fray, reporting for OI Magazine.

References:

Molly Montale
http://forums-archive.secondlife.com/3/8b/89278/1.html

http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2006/02/12/apologies-on-this-new-phase-of-second-life/
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/12/we-have-the-dream-of-the-metaverse.html

http://forums-archive.secondlife.com/3/44/66532/1.html
http://wu-had.blogspot.com/2005/11/from-levittown-to-blumfield.html

Liza Veliz reports on Emerald mess, read about it here!

Sun August 22nd 2010

Cliff's notes of the whole situation, an old sl friend of sl reporter Liza Veliz

Details:

Companion Videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/TOBSDA

== Datamine Incident ==

Fractured collected avatar / ip combinations using scripted objects in the Emerald Point sim and the Modular Systems / Emerald RegAPI site in a central "Datamine". This was used to determine who was whose alt account and they he had created a web application that allowed him to locate any of said users on the globe with a margin of error of about 200 miles. Various emerald devs had access to this system, and they used it regularly.

Phox and Fractured stalked and hacked the third party who discovered the Datamine (a developer of a non-TOS compliant viewer like them.) They hacked his voice account so he would not be able to use SL Voice, and stalked him to a randomly sim when nobody had map rights. The sim was chosen and the user logged on when the third party found out Fractured had a "surprise" waiting for him. Phox and Fractured confronted the third party, saying they knew who he was and they'd called his house. He was apparently a student on financial aid and was living with his mother. Phox stated in private that he intended to steal the third party's computer so he couldn't mess with them again.

Fractured sends around the chatlog to people, laughing about how they had trolled the third party.

It turned out not to be the third party, and they had been harassing a random person.

The third party called Fractured at his house, to let him know that he knew all about the "datamine", and the information regarding it would be publicly released. Eventually an agreement was reached with Fractured that only information regarding who used the "Datamine" and who was in it, not any identifying information, would be released to the public so long as the datamine was removed from his servers.

Fractured apparently removes the datamine and associated code, the list of users who were in the datamine is posted on the Alphaville Herald.

== EmKDU Incident ==

Phox and Fractured attempted to get the third party's internet disconnected (again, a common tactic of their also used on Neil,) but were unsuccessful. Phox still believes he was successful and has gloated about it to numerous people.

Fractured and several other Emerald devs also worked on the Onyx project, a malicious viewer under the guise of a project to find security holes in SL. It was based on a client of Fractured's that had been banned in the past, along with Emerald. This client was used to harass and stalk others when they saw fit. They claimed it wasn't malicious, and was used for research only. The old source code was leaked. They claimed that it didn't have any of those features anymore and the viewer was just for research. Much more recent source code was leaked, and they didn't say much of anything, but the Onyx site was taken offline. They started hiding that they were using Onyx by spoofing their tag and channel name to be the same as Emerald's, but there were still a few pieces they forgot that identified it.

Someone found out a library the ModSys team had made was being used to leak information about Emerald users. It could be viewed by anyone who knew how to decrypt the message, and the source code to the library was not open to public scrutiny. The message was decrypted by others, using custom software, and it turned out that one was able to determine what version of Emerald they were using, and in some cases, what their username on their computer was. This is dangerous, because the information can be used to pinpoint who a user is in real life if their username on their computer is the same as their real name. It also enabled people to determine who was and was not using Onyx, along with several other unwitting Emerald derivatives.

They claimed they removed this info after several Emerald devs questioned them about it, and they promptly changed the encryption used on the message that was sent out. The message was decrypted again, and it turned out that the majority of the contents were the same, despite their claims. It was changed a third time, and hasn't been decrypted yet.

A core emerald dev decided to leave

One ex-Linden, Qarl decided to join.

== DDoS incident ==

This was all documented by the third party. Fractured thought it would be funny (apparently while he was drunk?) to add hidden frames to the emerald login screen that would load content from said third party's website (which they had stated numerous times was a website hosting malicious software,) and overload the third-party's server with requests every time someone logged into Emerald. The third party found out about it, saying he didn't really care if they wanted to attack him, but to not use their own users as tools to do it. The way the website was loaded, the third party's website could have launched exploits infecting the computers of anyone logging into Emerald, change their login location, or crash their computer.

Soft Linden, head of Security for LL, railed on the Emerald team in the opensource-dev mailing list.

Two core devs left.

Arabella then made an official post about the incident, whitewashing it by saying it was only one developer, who was disciplined, and that they were merely boasting about their traffic to the third party.

Another ex-linden, Data, joined.

In an audio recording, it was determined that they had known that Fractured may be adding the code to the login page before he had even done it, and nothing was done about it until someone complained. Arabella knew it was a lot more than just boasting about traffic, but didn't want to say so, as not to "scare the users". All mention of it on their forums of blog comments was deleted until they made the official response. Arabella thinks very carefully about whether or not to censor a comment from YET ANOTHER ex-linden, Pathfinder, that was less than complimentary of what they were doing to their own users. She and others censored the majority of other comments and posts that did not agree with what they had said in the original post.

== Aftermath ==

Emerald is removed from the Third Party Viewer List.

Fractured steps down from the leader of Emerald, and leaves Arabella in his place. Phox remains.


Ty for reading the article,
Liza Veliz,press pass reporter, Senior Writer

Also Check out Arabella's blog (Emerald viewer executive) for her view on the events that happened http://arabellasteadham.wordpress.com/