When is LL going to realize how to improve SL?

[Dominic Damiano]

SL like any other MMO has had its peak and is now in decline. People and regions have left to never come back. Some of the most beautiful places on SL are gone forever. It is sad that only a few of the more popular places are left. Mainly this is due to cost and the failing economy. The adult entertainment indusrty dominates the economy. Building and creation have seen a drastic demise. The cost of using SL servers to host land is way over-priced and you don't get much for what you pay.

With games like Minecraft and Landmark gaining populairity SL should take advantage of this and bring in some people from those platforms and offer them the ability to expand their creativity. They could follow most MMO's and charge a monthly flat fee of $14.99 and allow self hosted servers to connect to the grid. The grid size would exponentionally grow in size and it would also allow many benefits. Regions would be able to be created and saved locally and also shared or sold as templates. Designers would not be limited to the size of the space they can afford or the strict prim limits. When regions close they can be preserved with backups for future use.

Sure SL servers would take an initial hit by some people switching to their own servers but the cost could easily be offset by private servers. 

1 sim at $300/month vs 20 private sims grid connected at $15/month The operation costs and load on their servers would be much less. 

It's time to stop being greedy and start growing SL again. OpenSim has a pretty large following and the main reason is that it is free. The social interaction might not be there yet, but I can socially interact on SL for free. Why not combine the best of both worlds and have affordable creation and social interaction? SL could even sell mini servers that one could install in their house to get started. I am sure they will not perform as well as an enterprise server with high bandwidth internet connections, but how many sims actually have the traffic to require this anymore?

Just some thoughts.....

[Alwin Alcott]

you'r making the same mistake as most others: comparing sl to other "games".

SL isn't as others, not even possible to compare it to the nephew Open Sim, it's not without reason SL is still bigger than OS after all this years, OS is just not able to compete with all the possibilities SL gives.

What's fun about a virtual world when at least half of its sims is offline?, because that's what you get when you depend on machines owned and runned by individuals..

Accept the limitations ....just as in rl.

[Perrie Juran]

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Dominic Damiano wrote:

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They could follow most MMO's and charge a monthly flat fee of $14.99 and allow self hosted servers to connect to the grid.

</snip>

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I didn't know that MMO's allowed you to connect your own server.

Have you looked at High Fidelity?  Because a lot of what you are talking about are the things Philip is working on.  One thing you'll find is that it is all not as easy as you assume.

[Sassy Romano]

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Alwin Alcott wrote:

 

What's fun about a virtual world when at least half of its sims is offline?, because that's what you get when you depend on machines owned and runned by individuals..

 

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Maybe a torrent type model for distributed content could work but then again, LL are already working on something new, clearly the OP hasn't seen the other threads discussing this before.

[Perrie Juran]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

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Alwin Alcott wrote:

 

What's fun about a virtual world when at least half of its sims is offline?, because that's what you get when you depend on machines owned and runned by individuals..

 

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Maybe a torrent type model for distributed content could work but then again, LL are already working on something new, clearly the OP hasn't seen the other threads discussing this before.

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I hate to kill a thread by saying  it has been discussed to death, but yes, it has been discussed to death.

[Coby Foden]

They have realized that it is not worth trying to improve this old world; instead, they are doing this:

Linden Lab is building a NEW virtual world

Which is great. :matte-motes-smile:

(Surely they are still taking care of SL as far it is profitable for them.)

[Dominic Damiano]

I see some good arguments but in the end SL will die along with most of the content. Yes a "NEW" SL will be better but in order for something to survive the test of time is has to be able to evolve not die and be redone.

As far as the hardware issues of sims being offline. I host webpages on an old Android Phone. The site hasn't been down more than 1% of the time and that is only when there is an internet outage or power outage. I'm sure that would not be the major issue.

SL is no different than any other MMO. Massive Multi-Player Online. They may have different porpuses and fanbases but the goal is the same to bring people together for a common cause.

I pay for premium and land and have done so for a long time. I just think it would be an interesting concept to try allowing the SL expierence at a much lower cost. Even at $49.95 a month it would still be reasonable.

I could have as many sims as I wanted and choose when they were online at my disgression. Sounds like I am beating a dead horse. But to me it would be better than connection to an OS grid just to play around.

[Syo Emerald]

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Dominic Damiano wrote:

I see some good arguments but in the end SL will die along with most of the content. Yes a "NEW" SL will be better but in order for something to survive the test of time is has to be able to evolve not die and be redone.

As far as the hardware issues of sims being offline. I host webpages on an old Android Phone. The site hasn't been down more than 1% of the time and that is only when there is an internet outage or power outage. I'm sure that would not be the major issue.

SL is no different than any other MMO. Massive Multi-Player Online. They may have different porpuses and fanbases but the goal is the same to bring people together

for a common cause.

I pay for premium and land and have done so for a long time. I just think it would be an interesting concept to try allowing the SL expierence at a much lower cost. Even at $49.95 a month it would still be reasonable.

I could have as many sims as I wanted

and choose when they were online

at my disgression. Sounds like I am beating a dead horse. But to me it would be better than connection to an OS grid just to play around.

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Hmm...no?

Its not like your typical gaming MMO. Not in its structure and not in its people. There is not even a common cause to be found. Everyone here creates their own goals and follows a path of own enjoyment. There is no big pre-set thing all residents are following. There is just a world and we fill it with whatever comes to our minds.

Oh, and your example with the websites...you kind of answered it yourself. If server would be in the hands of residents, a lot of them would be not online just because. And personally, I don't want to see the maintenance and everything technical in the hands of individuals instead of a company which knows it servers and gets its ass up to do maintenance every week.

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

Sl will have 11 million users when it has built in elf-killing, raids, the ability to pay to reach the maximum level, and 100 'points' for each time you jump on a sexbed.

But that's not the kind of thing SL is.

Like it or not - Virtual Reality as a concept is not mainstream.

No matter how many 'we will build the better sandbox' silicon valley techies you throw at it - most people don't care for a sandbox.

As for all the popular places closing. The cool places I used to go to in the 1980s are all gone too. RL is obviously failing and about to go out of business.

 

[Christhiana]

Allowing residents to rub their own service would be a too great of a security risk. LL needs to be able to protect IP rights and keep L$ transactions secure. If you let residents run their own  server software it becomes very easy to rip mesh content for example. So I'd rather not see that happen.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

After being in SL for four years, I am really surprised you think SL is just like any other MMO.  SL is way different from most MMO's. Most MMO's can download most content to your computer once and just update as needed.  SL has to do it everytime you go someplace because the content keeps changing all the time.  MMO's are mostly games not free form virtual worlds.

Personally I am glad people don't host their own sims on their own computers.  Half of them or more wouldn't have a clue how to maintain them properly and there would be more problems than there are now. Running a sim on a server is far different than hosting a webpage on your phone. (Actually someone else is hosting it and you use your phone to access the controls for it.) 

The reason you think it would be better if you could do it with SL rather than Open Sim, is that you have more content and people here.  But there are IP considerations that would be a problem because each sim owner would have full access to it full perm, which is why most content creators aren't interested in selling in all of them, only the ones with strong IP protection where they have confidence in the operator. 

Even at $49.95US a month you are talking $599 a year, which is still beyond the reach of most people.

[mikka Luik]

Why are you seeking SLers to feed your (grid or game or whine). Seen this again and again. SL is the bigone- live with it. We are here because it has it all.. full stop

[Poenald Palen]

SL and VR is like those guns you use on shooting games, fun and everyone seemed to see them and try them but how many own one today? Sure, Nintendo had duck hunt and that one cowboy shootout game at the arcades was always busy. But the shine wore off, they are like pop stars. Some carry on, they do well and have a cult following that buy thier latter works. But many just shrug and say stuff like "are they still around? Wierd." because some just move with the pop trends for a time and move into a different phase of thier life with different identities and challanges.

SL made an opensource sim available for people to run and worked on intergrid teleporting with IBM, if my memory serves me correctly.

You basically you CAN join up with other grid owners and run it on your own server.  Some TPV handle opensim based grids.

In otherwords, been there done that applies. This was all before minecraft.

Minecraft is more like Blockworld and Patterns. Those where SL offerings, one has died (patterns) and Blockworld lives on. They are doing fine financially, since they make money from server hosting and don't want to make inventory available on other grids running opensim we have not seen any change.

They (not LL but some of the people involved in VR and maybe some employees at the time) thought that the internet would be basically converting all over to 3D, at least some did see a huge market for it. It didn't seem to materialize, people used 2d facebook for communication, despite the controversey surrounding it.

SL was to much stuff to do just to chat and play around. People claim snail mail is dead, but people do still send letters and post cards. Dying art forms never do actually die, we live in a different world than the one that had large illiteracy and high costs and threats to information. Even though threats existed to information we still have documents from many many years, cave paintings are to some degree carriers of information also so maybe those should be included to?

Mobile phones took over, although now there are mobile clients it is one of those things where you may not be able to run it on every device and some may actually be attracted to having a second and thus seperate time for SL.

We will see, the new tech in Hi Fidelity is surely to be interesting. But these things are for VR fans and enthusiasts, some will spend some money and enjoy it but the majority will maybe only use it at an arcade.