I move with the movement and...

The old land store returns. Best laid plans of men and Lindens, I suppose.

And the rolling restart-and-reset of all regions just gained another day. Wonnnnderful.

And the more things change, the more they stay the same...

Seriously, has anything gone right, grid-wise, this Aprille? Advances announced nearly every day, most of them flawed on deploy, or having to be reset, redone, recoded, substantially altered...Region resets taking a handful of days now instead of hours...Massive rise in (at least perceived) content theft in addition to asset server problems, distribution problems, login shutdowns, mass grid instability...

When the 'old' players start screaming for basic playability to return to the grid, the 'new' players jump ship for WoW and other platforms, and some major corporations are pulling out and selling off...

I keep thinking, this is the way game platforms die. But I just don't know. Is all this flux and chaos indicative of the death throes of the grid, or just growing pains? How can we tell? Who do we ask?

And there's still nothing out there that quite does what the grid does...yet.

But there are platforms out there, in development...it may take some time for one to work in quite the same way, and in the meantime, users are leaving for the second-best, the third-best...

What happens when something finally meets the needs of the end user on the grid? How many of us will leap for something, at this point, anything that's more stable than what we have? How many players are the Labs going to lose before they recognize there are more important things than shiny new toys?

It's a test for them, in a sense, and based on their previous test scores? It's one they're quite possibly going to lose.