Sion Speaks – Apologizes – Hires PR!

{ August 1, 2009 @ 2:45 pm } · { Business }
{ Tags: Fizzwiggle Raymaker, Greenshamrock McMahon, Second Life business, sion chickens, sion zaius, SL chickens }

Yesterday another (We’re on a roll!) notecard was circulated amongst the groups from Sion that stated the following:

“I wish to let you know what has been going on with the proteggtors and transport boxes. There has been a lot of Confusion about them, and I apologize for not talking sooner. Engish (sic) is not my native language.

Linden Lab has reported to me many problems with chickens and the amount of sim resources that get used by them, resulting in many complaints to Linden lab from residents concerned about poor sim performance.  In response to this, I c ame out with the lagless chicken update that greatly reduced the amount of physical lag that the chickens made, and this was after a previous update that greratly increased script performance.

However, after the update was released, there were still a lot of non-lagless chickens around, and contuned (sic) to be an issue for Linden Lab, resulting in the unwanted return of chickens to people’s Inventory.  I gave my Support person, GreenShamrock McMahon a tool to help restore chickens returned in this manner, and it has kept her very very busy.

So I made the desision to release an update  in Proteggtors and Transport Boxes that would delete non-lagless  chickens. First problem the community had was that the inital release of these also accidently deleted lagless eggs as well, and for that I am very sorry.  I updated them again, so that only non-lagless eggs and chickens would be deleted.

I see now that this too was a mistake on my part. Both for releaseing this kind of update, and not letting everyone know in a timely manner.
Effective immediatly, I have put out new proteggtors and transport boxes that no longer delete any eggs or chickens. They are in the Vendors as of the time of this notice.  However,the Proteggtors and Transport boxes will not box up non-lagless chickens. But they will no longer be deleted.

There is currently no means to update v11 non-lagless to v11 lagless at this time. However, the upcoming v12 update (more on this later) will allow any v11 chicken (non-lagless and lagless) to be updated to v12.

Also, I  have hired someone to handle Notices and announcements, and to be the Face of Sion labs to the community. His engish is better than mine (darn right – Fizz)  and he understands my alienness and can translate for me, and can let me know what your concerns are.

GreenShamrock McMahon is still customer support and any issues regarding problems with sion labs products should continue to go to her.

Fizzwiggle Raymaker will be my voice and ears for all of my Engish speaking customers.

I thank you all for your support of Sion Labs over the last few months as we have grown very fast and have gone though many changes.  I will strive to improve Sion Labs and make it better for all of you.”

Sion Zaius
Sion Labs

So, apparently, the unspoken attempt to rid the grid of these horrendous lagophiles backfired and people were getting all of their eggs deleted by the proteggtors and transport boxes as they will no longer be supported by Sion Labs. From this notecard, it seems that he’s learned that after-the-fact communication does nothing but incite anger and resent, as well as loss of business as quite a few people quit and took to their blogs to discuss their dissatisfaction with his protocols in updating without advance notice and his overly emotional response to one criticizing customer by claiming he would cease the sale of food until he apologized. When people set out new food dishes the day after the Plague of Dead Eggs, they were met with the following message of the day from their food bowls:

“sionChicken food set for breeders: Message of the Day: All sales of SionLabs will be stopped at 00:00 until Aeryn Rau has apologized for attempting to blackmail Sion Labs.”

Apparently, the customer in question had a great deal of money invested in Sion’s product, and suffered a huge loss as a result of the update. In fact, the customer had threatened to sue, citing fraud. This resulted in Sions shocking reactions which would have allowed everyone’s Chickens to starve to death with food made unavailable.

Enter Fizzwiggle Raymaker into the picture, completely from left field, and who appears to have no past in Second Life as everything in his profile is associated with chickens, and any experience he has within the community is untraceable as the almighty Google has no record of his existence either. Now, he is the “face” of Sion Labs, although GreenShamrock is still customer support. We should take comfort in the fact that Sion is expanding his body of help, as the size of the community alone is overwhelming. However, an excitable and impulsive content creator as Sion has exemplified this far is really the bottom line – are these people intended to run behind him and fix things during any potential tantrum?

We’re all guilty of behaving emotionally, especially when someone does or says something to us unprovoked. But you cannot do something that affects the whole of your customer base in a negative way and then tuck tail and run for a couple of days. It is the work of an amateur, to say the least, and to his credit, people, he is indeed just that. I’m certain he didn’t expect this windfall of attention and income or the attention that it would stir in the larger scope of things. It’s likely he was completely unaware that the Secondary Market for his product would come with so many relying on it’s financial implications in one form or another. Would any of us truly be prepared for that? Not to mention that, pressure of performance notwithstanding, we all know how some people, in any community as big as Second Life is, can be unreasonable and irrational. Knowing that, and being aware that Sion likely didn’t anticipate finding himself on such a pillar of responsibility, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt. This is all a huge learning process as much for him as it is for those who participate. His PR addition, despite his seeming manifest from sheer nothingness, is an effort on the part of Sion to improve things. Whether Fizzwiggle proves himself to be an asset or a bit off the cuff as GreenShamrock has been in the past is yet to be seen, but we will hope for the best!