Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Legend City Online: Another one bites the dust
14:39 | 
Posted by
Rock
Graphic the property of Liqueur, all rights reserved
For those of you who are not too familiar with Legend City Online (LCO) here is a potted history of their rather chequered existance.
Origins
Legend City Online was announced to the world on the 26th October 2008, and was created out of Central Grid, an Opensim-based virtual world. The team at that time was the proprietor Lala Xevious (aka Lala Legend), Asri Falcone, Sam Portocarrero, Aleister Holt, Melanie Miland (RL name Melanie Thielker, one of the core devs at Opensim, former CEO of Xumeo, a German continent/grid that was accessible by teleport from LCO, and current CEO of 3dHosting), Haplo Voss, Khalied Jameson (aka DocWes, see Trouble at Mill below), and others.
LCO had taken over Central Grid some 4 weeks previously, and pretty quickly established a hypergrid link to a German continent/grid called Xumeo, owned at that time by the aforementioned Melanie Miland/Thielker. Avatars could teleport between these two interconnected grids, and take their inventory with them. There was an initial small rush of sign-ups, especially when they announced that the regions they had for sale had more prims than Second Life, and was a lot cheaper. However, clouds were gathering.
Trouble At Mill
On the 16th November 2008 a very prophetic article was written by Prad Prathivi at metaversallyspeaking entitled, Why LCO is doomed to fail. Prad made the following observations:
The thing is, people don’t like change. Second Life has the market share and LCO is basically the “StarOffice” here. Yes, LCO offers you more prims on sims, a much lower tier and has avatars already made up. Yes it emphasises protection for designers, and it has cross platform connectivity with Second Life to transfer created content over.
But at the end of the day, it looks and feels exactly like Second Life. And the vast majority of SL users will see little appeal in moving over to this new grid. What would the point be when all their inventory is on SL? Additionally, there’s the lack of trust.. who is Legend City Online? Who is it owned by and what do we know about them? Their website is awfully basic, which doesn’t paint the greatest corporate image.. how do we know that it won’t be a “Here today, gone tomorrow” case? Despite all the flaws with Linden Lab, we’re pretty certain that they’re not going to be disappearing any time soon.
In the Comments section of that piece, DocWes, one of the LCO team made the remarkable claim that he had not been paid by Lala for the work he had done in LCO, and advising people to stay away from LCO.
The following day, on the 17th November 2008, LaLa was interviewed by Bettina Tizzy at npirl. At that point LCO consisted of 303 Regions: 181 public regions, 69 regions on the separate continent of Xumeo, and 53 private regions, and had 5,214 registered accounts 2,196 of which were unique accounts since LCO took over Central Grid.
Bettina asked LaLa a crucial question:
Why should we believe that you will not disappear overnight? People would invest in your grid, buy land, create content and set up shops... why should we believe that you will still be around in five years?
LaLa: Why would you believe that Second Life® would be? Our promise to our customer is this: We are working to create a lasting environment, where people can come and realize their goals and dreams at Legend City Online. We plan to be here for the long term.
Hmmm.
The following month, in December 2008, more controversy involving LCO surfaced. Catherine Fitzpatrick (aka Prokofy Neva) posted an article on Second Thoughts entitled, SL Legend Simone Locked Out of Legend City Online. Basically the complaint was that the prominent Second Life clothing designer Simone Stern had been given some regions in LCO, free of charge, and Simone in return had enthusiastically provided lots of free and cheap content that pleased newcomers to LCO, and contributed to a rise in server sales. However, the relationship with LaLa soured when LaLa started charging Simone tier, when Simone believed the arrangement was for both free sims AND free tier (the agreement was never written down), and Simone, like DocWes, was then locked out of LCO and all her assets in there were no longer accessible. LaLa was then accused of 'theft' as Simone's content was still being 'sold' in LCO, but who was the money going to?
LaLa responded in the Comments to this article, saying that Simone was locked out of LCO simply for none payment of tier, but committed the cardinal of posting (supposedly private) chatlogs, and even a link to an LCO webpage with even fuller chatlogs to prove her point. However, the logs did seem to show that LaLa was not acting unreasonably. On the 2nd January 2009 Prokofy was hit with an attorney's letter threatening to sue over the defamatory and libellous article. Prokofy reported in March 2009 that the threat of libel proceedings was unsuccesful. The underlying issues of this debacle were nicely summed up by Jessica Holyoke over at The Alphaville Herald.
Demise?
One year on, and it would appear that Legend City Online (LCO) is no more. Their grid has disappeared, along with most of their website. A visit to www.legendcityonline.com now just produces a single page saying "Where the Adults come to Play" with no further pages or links. This has been the case for a few weeks now. I have not been able to locate any official announcements from any member of the LCO team.
Rock