Looking Back at Emeraldgate

Yesterday, Team Firestorm celebrated it's eighth anniversary party. All were happy with the celebration. But eight years ago, the team was rapidly formed in the middle of a scandal that was sinking the team behind the most popular viewer at the time: Emerald. Known as "Emeraldgate," it started in August 2010 when a key member of the development team took advantage of a weakness in the viewer code to launch a Denial of Service attack on the website of someone he didn't like. The aftermath was a drama in which one woman brought people together to lead a new team, while others ended up banned by Linden Lab.

Read the story in Events.

Avination Celebrates One Year Aniversary

From Thursday to today Saturday, the Avination Grid has been having it’s first official Anniversary celebrations. Conducted mostly in a sim appropriately named Avn1B, there were live concerts to attend, as well as a few freebies to pick up and a few amsements, such as an amusement park ride and a maze sim. There was also a raffle in one building on the northeast, the prize being getting an Avination sim rent-free for a year.

Dropping by on Friday afternoon, a Carah Nitely was singing. While the crowd at 26 residents would be considered great for a typical party in Second Life, it seemed small considering the magnitude of the event. Among the crowd were some of Avination’s “A-Team,” the equivalent of Second Life’s Lindens. Chatting with someone with customer relations, she admitted things were a bit smaller and simpler here, but the A-Team was far better at listening to the residents and dealing with problems.

Avination has had great success as well as challenges in it’s first year. It grew rapidly, then more recently began leveling off. There has also been a debate about Avination having a less strict gambling policy than Linden Labs, some saying it gives the residents more choice, others expressing worry about the gaming halls. It was partially because of their allowing gambling that Paypal and Avination almost parted ways but reconciled. There were also rumors floating around that Avination hired JCool/Fractured Crystal of Team Emerald to work on their viewer. Although the man in question was later booted from Avination for trying to access Second Life again after being banned, there has been no solid evidence to support the rumors.

For Saturday, from 10AM-2PM is the “Avination Networking Event “at the Avn1B region. From 3PM-5PM is the Avn1B Final Party with DJ Volkmar Taurog at Club Wastelands in the City Center region

For more information about the anniversary event, contact Micheleh Center at helen@avination.com.

Sources: Avination Forum, Avination Official Blog, Hypergrid Business

*Addition* The winner of the free sim for a year was Isis Ophelia. Also, the A-Team later published a youtube of their event.



They also have some photos on their Flickr account Here.

Bixyl Shuftan

Team Emerald Heading to Utherverse/Red Light Center

In the week since the discredited Emerald Viewer was blocked from Second Life, the remnants of Team Emerald are heading off to another virtual world. Their departure, however, was conducted in a less than professional manner.

The day Linden Labs made their announcement, Team Emerald member Arabella Steadham, officially the Communications Manager, reacted badly. She wrote an angry post full of rants and insults, the professionalism she had shown up until then stripped away. She attacked rival viewers, she attacked her former teammates whom had defected to Phoenix, and she repeatedly attacked Linden Labs. She ranted the “dunderheaded buffoons” of the “pond-sized American company” had bullied them for no reason other than their viewer being more popular than theirs, and the blocking of it’s use was part of some underhanded conspiracy to force the users to use Viewer 2.0. Second Life, she branded, had no future among virtual worlds except as a backwater.

The following day, Arabella announced that Linden Labs had terminated her account. Banned. She made a few more words defending her rights and branding Linden Labs as dictatorial “Thought Police,” warning readers they could be thrown out for the slightest criticism. Then basically stated she no longer wanted to be part of Second Life.

According to an article in the Herald, Phox, the Team Emerald member whose refusal to resign led to several members quitting and forming Phoenix, was also banned. Fractured Crystal, the member who resigned following the Distributed Denial of Service Attack, was not banned but apparently vanished on his own.

So where did they go? Blue Mars? OpenSim?

A couple days adrer Arabella announced her banning, there was another announcement.
...Second Life isn’t the greatest virtual world software. The only thing that makes Second Life so great is the people! We think that all the same people will be able to enjoy better software, and a better viewer by moving over to a competing platform, the Virtual World Web.

The “Virtual World Web” is the platform of Utherverse. This virtual reality company offers users the ability to access “a Virtual World Web of interconnected 3D communities ” that they call superior to the Internet. Of these virtual worlds, only one, Red Light Center, has gotten much attention. I’ve only run into a few who used it, and none were particularly happy with it’s performance.

Modular Systems has been officially invited to participate with Utherverse, the company behind the VWW, in advising on new viewer features and possibly on future client development.

"This is an enthusiastic group of developers who also love spending time in virtual worlds. They know what a Viewer needs to do to make the user happy because they use it themselves," said Brian Shuster, CEO of Utherverse. "It's shocking that their talents weren't properly appreciated by Linden, but the popularity of their work speaks for itself. We are very happy to have started up a new relationship with Modular Systems developers."

The freind whom I’ve discussed Emeraldgate with often chuckled over Team Emerald going to what he called a third-rate virtual world, being among those I ran into who tried it. He felt Utherverse was so eager to get more users, they were not stopping to think of the potential damage that could be done. The chance that they could rise above being a backwater, to borrow Arabella’s word for what she saw as SL’s future, was just too tempting.

But he felt “the real battle is in SL,” reminding that there were still these Emerald viewers with “spoofers” to get around the Emerald ban. Depending on whether or not they continued to make them available might make the difference in whether or not Linden Labs would take legal action.

The Utherverse is offering incentives for those in Second Life to change over. But in my opinion, this is likely the last we hear of Team Emerald, at least for a long time.


Bixyl Shuftan