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Default avatars don't look too appealing?


lucagrabacr
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10 hours ago, lucagrabacr said:

Almost all of them seems grumpy or angry, or uses too much makeups for example and generally have not been received too well according to what I've seen and heard both in and out of SL.

 

Then use the sliders until they stop looking grumpy or angry.

Anyone who finds that daunting probably won't do well in Second Life.

That's just the way things are.

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The starter avi's do their job. Could they be better? Sure, I suppose they could be, but they fit the role they were intended for. As a hypothetical, even if they were, I suspect that a lot of people wouldn't use them long-term anyway. People want to customize their avatar to their own liking in whatever shape or form that may be.  The desire to experience that starts almost immediately, as in their first day, or even those few subsequent days after.

I don't believe they were made sub-par intentionally, as Tari pointed out, they aren't creators. The selling point, in my opinion, is seeing what is possible. When I was new in 2011, I was enamored by all the awesome avi's I saw. I think that experience still resonates even today. New users lack general direction. That I believe, hurts retention more then anything.

 

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There is a simple way to make the default avatars look gorgeous, fix lag, and drastically improve your computer graphics rendering of the scenery.

 Go to the store and buy a cheap bottle of wine or two...

 

When we we first started in 2007 it was almost needed when your avatar was as ugly as the pictures above. :P

 

 

Edited by chardonay Babii
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The current generation of starter avatars looks better than anything we had before. They even look better than what a regular avatar in early 2010 might have looked like. The only thing that makes "normal" avatars look better is the simply fact, that the person behind it has put in a lot of effort to customize their avatar, to give them a "soul". But...thats nothing a starter avatar has to deliver. They are a starting point, meant to be sheed like a snakes skin, once you have become more used to useing Second Life and for that purpose, they don't need any drastical improvement.

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On 9/13/2017 at 1:23 PM, Skell Dagger said:

Yep, that's the origin of the term. Ruth is the mother of us all, and she looked like this:

ruth-avatar.jpg

Whenever anyone was ruthed their shape would turn into that one, replete with boobs (even the guys). She's still to be found in everyone's inventory library.

When I signed up, back in June 2007, these were the two main default avatars:

latest?cb=20080508212239

I chose the 'male goth' default avatar, being someone who loves black. And... yeah. 2007 was a cruel year to be a noob :/

theuglyduckling.jpg

I wish I could find a pic of the female goth starter avie, that's what I had. Omg, we were soooo not sexy back then, lmao! These kids today think they have it rough, orientation island was uphill, both ways, in the snow. All we had for fun were sticks and rocks....lmao! 

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17 minutes ago, Aislin Ceawlin said:

I wish I could find a pic of the female goth starter avie, that's what I had. Omg, we were soooo not sexy back then, lmao! These kids today think they have it rough, orientation island was uphill, both ways, in the snow. All we had for fun were sticks and rocks....lmao! 

and a torch :D

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On 9/13/2017 at 9:12 AM, lucagrabacr said:

I personally feel, and observed that the choices in the current default avatar selection are not too appealing to many people, especially young people (teen to young adult). Do you guys feel the same? I know they are just default avatars but they just seem off which is quite a shame because it might give a non-ideal first impression and feel to people who are just trying out Second Life for the first time. 

Almost all of them seems grumpy or angry, or uses too much makeups for example and generally have not been received too well according to what I've seen and heard both in and out of SL.

I mean I'm sure LL and whoever is in charge of making the default avatars are capable of doing a much better job at them (the avatars in the forum's banner and destinations categories' thumbnails look much better than the default avatars for example)

It's a bit far-fetched, but if LL is intentionally making the default avatars looking sub-par to motivate new users to spend some lindens to make their avatar looks better, I think it's actually doing more harm than good.

What do you guys think? 

 

Never ask questions here that the majority will disagree with because they will go off topic and derail it. 

But I do agree with you that first impressions matter and the default avatars have always been horrible. Simply updating them with mesh and different clothing styles isn't enough. I would add different shapes and sizes. Facial expressions too.  

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To the credit of the original poster... the starter avatars in SL are not competing with what they looked like in 2003. They're competing with what they will look like in other "free 2 play MMOs".

Look at the start avatars in other games, like Wildstar, Guild Wars, Tera, Final Fantasy, or even MineCraft. While MineCraft avatars are blockier, they also look more 'refined'.

In Second Life they look amateurish compared to all of the other contempary 'free to play MMOs'. And like it or not... that's the competition these days. Whether or not you consider this a game, it is an MMO engine, and is quite similar at a basic user level to your basic 'sandbox MMO' minus a good 'combat engine'. The hype of a "virtual world" is long gone. Now these worlds are common place, and all the others admit to their 'game' nature. People coming here 'new' are coming looking for an 'online game' to kill time with, more than likely between releases of some game they are more devoted to. Their first impressions is going to be based off of comparing it to that. Only later will other impressions set in.

 

I don't buy the argument that making them better would compete too much with merchant players of the game. I'd wager it would encourage people to expect quality more, and that could help drive sales as people sought out more distinctive looks.

But I think even more than the avatars, the clunky way avatars move around inside of SL is more off-putting.

Newbies often past the ugly avatars, get in world, and get confused on 'how to do anything' because it is all so 'different' from all of the modern competition. SL is the 'autoCAD' of MMOs. Maybe close to the oldest, but the one who's UI got left behind when all the others standardized.

 

There are two common movement schemes out there:

1. WASD - wherein A and S are left and right movement, not turning, or Q and E offer left and right, and the mouse while  holding down one of the buttons can offer turning, the other button allows turning the camera.

2. WASD again offers movement just as above - with A and S left and right. But now moving the camera turns the avatar and the camera is always looking where the avatar looks unless you enter a 'free camera' mode using some other keybind.

- Both of these also come with an 'auto-run' or 'auto-walk' keybind. Hit is, and you avatar continues to walk with the direction controlled by the mouse until you use a WASD key or hit that keybind again.

 

- These movement schemes allow for very rapid and even action based movement. They're common across almost every 'MMO' except for this one. Most of today's new players are more than likely to have already been active in one or more MMOs, and it will be 'off putting' how clunky it is to move here - where clicking the screen seems to interrupt your motion and start interractions all the time.

This could be simplified by having the mouse function like an MMO mouse until you hit a toggle keybind to go into 'edit' mode. But clicks on inter-active objects would still trigger their actions. Basically how some sandbox MMOs that have forms of building do it.


 

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