Linden shows its colors, again. Although I think Second Life is pretty neat (if not terribly useful aside from those who are entertained by scripting and 3d asset creation), I tend to be extremely cynical about Linden Labs, its developer. Occasionally I wonder if I’m being too harsh on them, and then I read this BBC article, which served to assure me that I’m not. Linden, as far as I can tell, operates on a policy of intentionally misleading and essentially lying to the press either directly or via their PR firm. Here are the relevant quotes out of the BBC article linked to above. The quote is from Joe Miller, their VP of platform and technology. In other words, someone who knows exactly what the performance limits of their setup is.

Mr. Miller is quoted as saying, “World of Warcraft touts a six million or larger active user base - but they shard their world off into smaller servers so you never see 16,000 people in the same place.”

Quite true, and nobody is going to argue with that. You will not see 16,000 people in the same place in WoW. Mr. Miller goes on to say, “That’s unlike Second Life, where tonight you will see 16,000 people enjoying exactly the same world all able to communicate with each other, all attending the same live music event should they wish to.”

Come again? Perhaps someone could explain how that is not a flat-out, bald-faced lie from the guy in charge of their technology? 16,000 people in Second Life attending the same live music event? Please. Second Life can barely handle 75 avatars in the same place before it starts having problems that make it effectively unusable. Try putting 1000 avatars somewhere, much less 16,000. The sound of the resulting crash will come milliseconds later, despite their CEO’s claim that they are “perfectly scalable.”