With the upcoming imminent demise of the Second Life ratings, there is now a review of some of the 3rd party rating systems at SLNN. I’m less than thrill with this entire situation. First, it means people who have accumulated a large positive rating will see it disappear, so much for that investment. Next there is obviously a large group of competing rating systems, all incompatible with each other. Lastly, they all have some degree of cost at some level to be useful.

I’m also not happy with yet-another-HUD to try to run, install and fit on my already cluttered screen. Or some obnoxious close to an advertisement balloon hanging over my head, screaming “rate me”.

Why couldn’t Linden Labs come up with a better solution? Or at least some sort of common API for these vendors to plug their rating systems into so that the scores would show up on avatar profile and being able to rate them through the client. But then that would have defeated the purpose that they eliminated the rating systems in the first place, they didn’t want to host the data. Fine, then extend the API to plug into someone else’s database. Seems like a dump and run on Linden Labs’ part.

Now I feel slightly compelled to try to pick one of these services out and use it. Anyone else feel the same way? Any going to use one over another? Forget ratings entirely?

-Veyron