If you asked me if I would be writing this 3 weeks ago, I would have told you that you are insane. If you asked me if I would be writing this last week, I would have said “possibly”.

Over the course of the past 7 to 8 months, we have lived in New Haven, the 27 region-sized RP town in Second Life. It has been a fun 7 months, going to events, sponsoring some of them, opening up our gym and settling into our house at Hampton Point. A month and a half ago, one of the owners quit, what followed was buildings in New Haven being wrecked along with landscaping, all with the former owner’s knowledge of it happening, you can read more about that incident here in this article. It was no surprise that Cara then went and opened her own place. The sabotaging of New Haven for Cara’s benefit wasn’t a surprise, to be honest. Everyone, including myself, thought this could be a fresh start for New Haven in the “Post Cara” era.

For a couple of weeks…it was.

In the beginning, Brian, the sole owner of New Haven got the help of about a half dozen people to replace the road and buildings and landscaping that belonged to Cara. This in itself was to be expected considering the damage that was caused. The problem was the time it took. It has been a month and a half since that incident. Most of the landscaping is still under Cara’s name, and the work done to replace the roads and some of the infrastructure took more than a week. Now, a month and a half later, the work is still ongoing, and a general feeling of a lack of direction is now covering the town.

Buildings floating in the sky for days and in some cases weeks, have become par for the course in New Haven

The road network, although replaced, suffers from numerous gaps, texture clashing, physics clashing, and physics ramping (where cars are launched into the air) and this has been the running theme of driving around in the city since the road network was replaced with no signs of it being fixed.

You can even see numerous texture clashes on the real estate videos which New Haven’s new marketing manager, Vic Mornington, has been uploading to the New Haven Facebook page.

Fit & Lit brought in, by my estimation, around 10 new renters into New Haven. All of them are friends with Lia, and half of them have said they have had problems with the landscaping, and problems with the house. Doors not opening correctly, doors doubled up, and in one case there was a house inside a house which took a week to get fixed. While all this was going on, the team which is now in place seems, directionless. Instead of concentrating on the fundamental basics of what makes renters happy, they seem to be doing beauty projects, like replacing beeches. While renters suffer in silence in houses and plots which have become not fit for purpose.

Is this the fault of the people doing the work? Absolutely not. Skol, Morri and the gang have done a good job, in very difficult circumstances. They have worked to replace sections of New Haven which could have come under abuse by one of the former owners alts or friends. However, these little problems are mounting up. The fact that New Haven now, at the time of writing this, has 64 open homes and apartments for rent says it all. There has been a wash of new names and faces popping in, probably because of Vic Mornington taking over marketing, something which he has a knack for…the problem is though, they are not staying.

There was a time, not too long ago, when you had to be put on a waiting list to get a house, those days are long gone. It’s these little problems which is the main reason New Haven as a whole, is on the brink of a tipping point which may see it have to shed regions.

Renters, especially renters who are paying a premium of above 2L$ per prim, like a nice looking and more importantly, problem-free experience. That is simply not happening in New Haven right now and hasn’t been happening for more than a month. Jobs which could have been done in a day, are taking a week, sometimes more than a month to complete. The case in point is the reason why myself, Lia and Lizzy decided to walk away.

Fit & Lit, the SML gym that myself and Lia ran, brought in thousands of visitors, literally. The visitor counter was over 4000, and that was after the first reset done 5 weeks ago, we are looking at a place which brought in probably over 9000 people over the course of the gym being open. It was New Haven’s most visited place…and it needed a bigger extension to grow.

The original ticket was open for one month. It didn’t get anywhere. A second ticket by Lia got the ball rolling with Vic making a new late 1800’s style Portland Red Brick warehouse as the new home for Fit and Lit…

For 2 days, Vic speed-built the warehouse. When myself and Lia asked Vic if Brian had given the all-clear for the build, all Vic could say was that he hadn’t given a clear answer. Today was the final straw. After another answer of “he hasn’t answered” from Vic…we quit.

That is the problem New Haven has. The problems facing the town are not the fault of the builders, not the fault of the people who are helping to keep New Haven going. The problem is the utter directionless leadership that Brian Lake has.

There are numerous cases of support tickets going unanswered or unfixed for weeks, numerous cases of problems with the base infrastructure of the town, and the one person who could rally the team to laser focus on those issues…is missing at the helm of the ship. The fact that New Haven has estate admins, landscapers and land managers living as residents and they were passed over to help in favour of Brian’s friends…says a lot.

Instead, we see Cara’s name still on the owner list of practically all the landscaping, we see numerous little problems all combining to make New Haven not quite the fun place it once was. You can see it in the chat, and the RP. Roleplay is dead, cause a lot of the roleplayers have left over the course of 3 weeks. Chat is dead because RP has died.

Part of the plan for the Flickr New Haven group was to bring outside bloggers and photographers in for the monthly 10,000L$ photo contest that we were going to sponsor. We brought in several Flickr posters that are friends with us, they have a combined following of 90,000 Flicker followers. All three of them told us that taking a pic contest here would…and I quote “be an utter disaster for your marketing, some of this place looks unfinished, some of it looks as if it was thrown down, and what the fuck is with the floating building?”

New Haven is a good community, but its a community now bleeding residents. Even with Vic Mornington at the helm of marketing (which is his RL job), the town, and more importantly, the support in the background for the town, is a disaster. New renters will see it within a week of moving in, and not renew their rent, and that’s why there are so many houses open to rent.

The Cara incident happened more than a month ago. New Haven, and more importantly Brian, can no longer use that as an excuse to the renters.

As for us three? Well, we’ve settled into New Babbage into what was our “holiday home”. Brian can learn a few things from New Babbage, a 14-region light RP town, that has had the same team and same owner for more than a decade…and has never had any problems.

Written by Fenella
No editing from Lizzy or Lia