Lately, we’ve been getting a lot of feedback about Twinity, not all of it positive, but we’re listening. I wanted to take a few moments to share some of the feedback, and what we’re doing to try to continue to make Twinity better for you.
- Release notes don’t come with the release. This has happened in the past on a few releases. We’ve been moving towards a more controlled release process during the past couple of months, and we should be in better able to produce the release notes at the time of release moving forward. You will have seen that the last release, last week Thursday, had release notes within 1 hour of the release going live.
- Too many newsletters. There’s a lot of fun stuff going on inside Twinity, and we’ve wanted to showcase that to all interested Twinizens. Going forward, we’ll try to be a bit less frequent with those, and we’ll instead publish events here on the blog, and of course, on the Twinity events calendar.
- Not enough transparency. This applies to a couple of different areas – development and operations. We’ve heard questions about our server infrastructure, regarding its sufficiency, and our development roadmap and timeframes. From the operations side, we will commit to informing you when there are server or infrastructure-related issues, and share with you the reasons and the solutions, as best we can. From the development side, we are working to include information on the immediate roadmap and any current hot topics from the development team in the newsletter.
- Unable to connect to Twinity. We’ve heard this from some members, and particularly from Mac owners. We’re looking at a number of different solutions, but in the immediate short-term, we are focusing our efforts on increasing the quantity and quality of our logging. Those logs can be sent to us via our Twinity diagnostics, via our crash reporting, and of course, our customer support team may need them in helping you connect. We’re starting a new effort to confirm the ability to connect to Twinity from a variety of environments, such as Internet cafes, libraries, DSL/Cable home lines and corporate networks. We’re looking to work one-on-one with anyone experiencing chronic inability to connect to Twinity. If this is you, please let our support team know, and they’ll contact you to try to set up a time to test together.
- Twinity performance. We’re currently working on tweaking Twinity’s performance with a content delivery network. This should ensure smoother teleports and loading of assets for all Twinizens worldwide. Aside from that, we’re reviewing key sections of the code that can have a big effect on performance.
- Encouraging the discussion. I’d like to personally invite all Twinizens to comment more here on the blog. Most of the feedback mentioned above has come via individual emails and messages. By moving more discussion here to the blog, the conversation can be more opened, and followed by the whole Twinity community.
Comments 8
In the past, I have published both positive and negative feedback on Twinity on my blog, and you have regularly mentioned or even linked to the negative feedback here, too. I have always appreciated your openness in that regard. Well done!
Cheers,
Sered
@sered, I’m glad that you’ve been happy with our openness. I have a Google Alert set up for Twinity and your blog comes up often, hence the trackbacks 🙂
I’ve also appreciated your feedback.
thanks, jeremy
Well, I have to be honest– this latest entry from you has been very encouraging, because it’s showing that Metaversum is finally realizing how vitally important it is to keep testers informed of all the technical progress that you’ve made, what issues you’re aware of, as well as what you’re currently working on for the next patch/ release.
In fact, had it not been for this entry, I would have quit Twinity indefinitely. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say that for many people, the lack of transparency, release notes, and status updates left us feeling frustrated, uncertain, and even a bit demoralized about the future of Twinity.
This is because without the information, everyone was just walking around in the dark dealing with one bug and crash after another, having no real information with which to gauge Twinity’s progress and no sense of urgency from Metaversum itself.
This unfortunately resulted in people either feeling like the beta was at a standstill, light years away from being ready, or worse yet, regressing with each new release.
So I think that it’s great that Metaversum is finally coming around on the whole problem of informing its users of what’s going on. But please don’t delay– you really can’t afford to keep putting users in the dark.
@Dee Riley, I’m glad that we’ve managed to keep you in Twinity. Your comments are really appreciated, and we’re making every effort to do better. If we reach a point where you are feeling this way again, please let us know.
best,
jeremy
I was impressed by the last patch, another step improvement. My “@” key still doesn’t work and a few others either, like “‘”. What’s happening with playlists?
Occasionally my little person freezes, still smiling but unable to move, has anyone else observed this? Only way out is to logout.
@Daphnee, Thanks for your feedback on those. I’ve asked our support team to check those issues and post a follow-up here. You can also send those issues to our support team at support (at) twinity dot com (change as needed), but here on the blog would be good to get other people to chime in if they’ve had the same.
thanks!
– jeremy
Hi Daphnée,
Regarding the @ symbol: As you mentioned in the forum, there appears to be a problem with this symbol on UK keyboards. The development team is looking into the issue, however, a work around until we get this resolved is to type the symbol in a text editor then paste it in the client. Although it is not possible to paste in the chat bubble, it is possible to paste in the chat window (icon in the toolbar). I know this is a little “out of the way” just to type one symbol, however, you may want to give it a try.
Regarding Playlists: Because of potential intellectual property issues, we decided to focus on streaming and removed the ability to upload mp3’s (or other formats). We realize that many members have become accustomed to uploading their files and creating playlists, however, there are quite a few sites that provide streaming service which can be found through a search.
Regarding the freezing of the avatar: We have identified the cause of this issue and it will be fixed in the release that we have planned for later this week. If this issue still occurs for you after that release, please let us know!
Thanks,
Craig
As a recording artist i wondered about the copyright issues…For that reason I uploaded my own music for which i own the copyrights, and publishing. I miss my theme music, but i understand your position. Maybe a letter to ASCAP can get things rolling. Fun problems we can overcome in time…peace
R