Does LL want to fix SL

[greek Wingtips]

The persons that are the income to LL's need to be enticed to stay, the landowners to the creators,  am hearing members leaving or scaling down to save money,

I want to know what LL's is doing about this, Its like the overdue bill that one keeps ignoring, it will come to ahead when you have to confront it, but by that time it will be too late.

[ChinRey]

Yes, they do want to fix SL and they are actually working hard on it. They are beginning to learn how to work well too - at least the Lindens who stayed with SL all the time are.

But the list of sins of the past is overwhelming and they still make mistakes of course. Despite all the rumours, the Lindens are actually humans - or at least close enough to human they make mistakes.

One factor that seems to cause some extra problems right now, is that it seems several Lindens have returned to SL after working on Sansar. They are of course out of touch with how SL has progressed the last few years and it's going to take a while for them to learn the new ropes.

In any case, don't expect any big changes neither for better or worse anytime soon. No matter what happens, it will be a slow development.

[greek Wingtips]

is this inside information or your own thoughts?

[ChinRey]

1 minute ago, greek Wingtips said:

is this inside information or your own thoughts?

It's based on careful observation and analyzis of known facts.

[Alwin Alcott]

52 minutes ago, greek Wingtips said:

 am hearing members leaving or scaling down to save money,

the statistics don't show any proof yet of change in the slow decay that's going on for several years now.

Second Life Economic Metrics Repository

 

[greek Wingtips]

 

Well it be very stupid for LL to close or neglect SL, just for sansar as that is not 100% to be successful, 

[Alwin Alcott]

7 minutes ago, greek Wingtips said:

Well it be very stupid for LL to close or neglect SL, just for sansar as that is not 100% to be successful, 

get that idea out of your head, it's not true, and if you have figures for the statistics of Sansar, please share those, i'm very curious about it.

 

[greek Wingtips]

Well you seem to think the opposite where is your proof, its well-known people are leaving sl or scaling down, and most of these are the members, 

[Alwin Alcott]

1 minute ago, greek Wingtips said:

Well you seem to think the opposite where is your proof

read the blogposts, feeds, announcements, and all communication LL did send out last months, years ...

WHERE is your proof?.. where are your Sansar statistics that show the fail there?

hear say... nothing more unless you come with exernal reports

[ChinRey]

6 minutes ago, greek Wingtips said:

its well-known people are leaving sl or scaling down, and most of these are the members, 

It is but it's hardly new. In fact, if you look at the historical data, there seems to have been a tendency for the SL decline to slow down whenever Sansar got some media coverage. I think it's safe to assume that unless LL blow so much money on Sansar they go bankrupt, it isn't going to have any significant negative effect on SL.

However, if this is going to become a Second Life vs Sansar thread, I'd like to rephrase the title a little bit: Does LL want to fix Sansar?

 

Edited November 19, 2017 by ChinRey

[greek Wingtips]

I do not have access to LL info, but your right,  Sl is in decline and if Alwin is cannot see that, then he needs to speak to members and landowners, am sure they collaborate what am saying, I not interested in Sansar, I have invested £££ loads in Sl, if Sl goes under or gets to the point when I pumping money in a bottomless pit then I will cut my losses and walk away,

[Alwin Alcott]

4 minutes ago, greek Wingtips said:

 Sl is in decline and if Alwin is cannot see that, then he needs to speak to members and landowners, am sure they collaborate what am saying,

you are panicking about nothing... the sky is falling... the sky is falling....

All statistics proof you are wrong. There is NO HUGER decline than in the past years yet.

I don't deny a decline, but i simply refuse to listen to your skyfall alarm while there's nothing different than a year ago.

8 minutes ago, greek Wingtips said:

, I not interested in Sansar

i'm still waiting on your proof of this :

53 minutes ago, greek Wingtips said:

 sansar as that is not 100% to be successful, 

 

9 minutes ago, greek Wingtips said:

I have invested £££ loads in Sl, if Sl goes under or gets to the point when I pumping money in a bottomless pit then I will cut my losses and walk away,

Virtual worlds are always a bottemless pit, you get nothing out it than virtual amusement and recreation

(exception for sussessfull creators)

[greek Wingtips]

Alwin , I think you do you not have a clue , I now stopped but at one point I was a very successful dj in sl, I never had a problem making 10k a week in tips and payment, everything I have in sl been bought from my work and creativity and  marketplace, so "Virtual worlds are always a bottemless pit,  " is rubbish, been in sl for around 8 years, so I not talking as if amI wet behind the ears, you only been in sl for 4 years,

[Chic Aeon]

As Alwin and ChinRey have stated, the decline (slow but steady over the last years) is NOT NEW NEWS.

There are still lots of people here doing their thing, having fun, creating.  Are creators working harder to make lindens? Likely many are. I see others producing what I call 'throw away' items, things that are nothing to write home about but fill up their stall at an event. THAT makes me sad, much more than the very slow decline.

And aside from the not new short-sightedness of the folks that make the major decisions, MUCH IS BETTER than it has been in a decade. 

And so far as Sansar, while I don't care at all at the moment, it IS just beginning. The folks that were in SL three years in (and that isn't me) can attest to ALL the problems in SL then. Even I can remember how cumbersome (and not very pretty) things were a decade ago.

So IMHO, the sky is NOT falling .

 

PS. I have had my top-- by leaps and bounds --  grossing (and net) income EVER this month and the month is far from over. So some of us are doing well.  

 

Edited November 19, 2017 by Chic Aeon

[Parhelion Palou]

11 minutes ago, greek Wingtips said:

I do not have access to LL info, but your right,  Sl is in decline and if Alwin is cannot see that, then he needs to speak to members and landowners, am sure they collaborate what am saying, I not interested in Sansar, I have invested £££ loads in Sl, if Sl goes under or gets to the point when I pumping money in a bottomless pit then I will cut my losses and walk away,

SL has been declining since before your rez date. SL will eventually go away. So will the planet. Big deal -- enjoy it while you can. I've rented land continuously since my first week in SL. I own a full region now. That makes me a landowner, so I asked myself if I'm worried that SL will go away. My answer was no. I've had many years in SL; I figure there could be at least another decade in it (assuming I last that long).
I've spent around $20,000 on land in SL over the last 11+ years and probably more on things to put on the land, donations, tips, etc. If SL goes away tomorrow I won't feel like I've been ripped off. The enjoyment, friendships, and memories are a fine return for the time & money I've spent.

[Penny Patton]

I believe Linden Lab has always wanted to make Second Life the very best product it can be, however...they can't. 

From the beginning, Linden Lab was created with the mindset of a software developer, rather than a game studio. They believed they only really needed software engineers. It never occurred to them that they might also need graphics professionals and experience designers. Their belief was "we only need software engineers to create the world and tools, and we'll leave content creation to our userbase".

 That is a flawed ideology to build a studio on. Because LL lacks graphics professionals on their SL team, the content creation tools were all broken from the start. The appearance editor gives us incorrect information because the software engineer in charge didn't think having a consistent sense of scale in SL was important. The shape sliders are all weighted in such a way that it is far more difficult to create proportionate human shapes, because the software engineer in charge had no understanding of human proportions. Second Life only allowed its userbase to use blended alpha textures for over a decade because no one at LL understood why blended alpha was awful for realtime 3D rendering. Land Impact doesn't take texture use into consideration because no one at LL understood the impact of unoptimized texture use on performance. Second Life lacks any sort of competent tutorial for new users, because no one at LL is qualified to create or approve such a tutorial. The long forgotten system skins only look ugly because the art assets used in the system were created in MS Paint by a programmer rather than a qualified artist.

 This complete lack of respect for skill sets other than "programmer" is built into Linden Lab's DNA. It colours their view of every bug report, every feature request, every interaction with their userbase. Linden Lab lucked out in that there is nothing quite like SL out there. Potential competitors all made worse mistakes than LL, or never made it past their initial stages due to a lack of investors. So LL has been able to enjoy moderate success despite themselves, just on the strength of the idea SL represents.

However, check out the attached chart from GridSurvey. It shows SL concurrency numbers from 2010 to 2017. Anyone asking fr evidence of Second Life's decline, here it is. If the decline shown in this chart continues at the same pace, then in a few short years SL will have only half the user concurrency it enjoyed in 2010. That's fully half of SL's userbase gone.

 Linden Lab has to be aware of this. Their options are to produce new products to provide alternate income streams, or find ways to revitalize Second Life.

 Sansar is their attempt at a new product. Will it be successful? Too early to tell, but the outlook is not good. There's no buzz. No hype. No one outside of SL users really care about Sansar, and the SL userbase is, on the whole, unimpressed at this point. I think VR will really take off in the next 5 years, but it's not quite there yet. Maybe Sansar will become really successful when that happens, maybe not. Right now it is not a money maker for SL.

 Little birds have told me that LL's confidence in Sansar is shaken and this is why we're seeing renewed development for Second Life, when just a couple of years ago the Lab indicated that SL development, outside of basic maintenance, would be over with the introduction of Experiences.

Linden Lab still suffers the same fatal flaw I described at the outset. They lack people capable of guiding Sansar and SL development in the directions it needs to go. They're blind to the problems facing them and just sort of stumbling around in the dark, hope something they do works.

I really hope they succeed but I can't say I'm confident. I'm not saying "the sky is falling". The sky fell about 10 years ago when the SL bubble burst. I'm just saying that I'm not holding my breath for any significant improvement.

[greek Wingtips]

One has to respect your views some nice info in what you say and sense too,  but I do not think its too late to inject new life in sl, I would think to fix the problems members are fed up with and also good advertising and marketing,  they still have a massive database, it's not as if they are starting new, there have been some well stupid mistakes, like allowing creators to make their own exclusive mesh avatars that are not compatible with each other, that was stupid. The doubling of prims to landowners was a great move, maybe now give people more SQft for their tiers or an incentive to keep existing members and landowners. I do think they can steer LL back, sansar I think will not work,   but I might be wrong.  time will tell for both LL and sansar.

[ChinRey]

4 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

From the beginning, Linden Lab was created with the mindset of a software developer, rather than a game studio. They believed they only really needed software engineers. It never occurred to them that they might also need graphics professionals and experience designers.

Not to mention, educators, sociologists, managers, economists, designers...

Something as big and complex as Second Life requires a wide range of professionals to run smoothly. It is understandable that they couldn't cover everything right from the start with only 12 people working there and they have filled some of the holes over the years. But there are still several huge gaps in LL's collective skill set

On top of that there are programmers and then there are programmers. I'm not talking abut qualities, I'm talking about specialities. Database programming, web programming, UI design - those are very specialised fields and a programmer isn't necessarily skilled in those even if he/she is an excellent code line writer.

 

18 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

This complete lack of respect for skill sets other than "programmer" is built into Linden Lab's DNA.

It is worth noticing that Linden Lab has had some very skilled content creators throughout the years. Two of them, Cory and Eric, were among the original 12 and they were programmers too so they could see both sides of the relationship between content and code. But as Penny implied, whenever decisions were made, they were always based purely on a programmer's point of view.

[Parhelion Palou]

15 minutes ago, greek Wingtips said:

One has to respect your views some nice info in what you say and sense too,  but I do not think its too late to inject new life in sl, I would think to fix the problems members are fed up with and also good advertising and marketing,  they still have a massive database, it's not as if they are starting new, there have been some well stupid mistakes, like allowing creators to make their own exclusive mesh avatars that are not compatible with each other, that was stupid. The doubling of prims to landowners was a great move, maybe now give people more SQft for their tiers or an incentive to keep existing members and landowners. I do think they can steer LL back, sansar I think will not work,   but I might be wrong.  time will tell for both LL and sansar.

You keep missing the point. LL doesn't tell creators what they can and cannot create as long as it doesn't violate the Terms of Service. It's free enterprise (mostly). If LL introduced their own mesh avatars (hopefully better than the abysmal starter ones from a few years ago) there's no guarantee that people would use them, at least not until enough content was created (by residents) for them. If LL didn't provide the tools to use to create clothing, makeup, tattoos, etc. then their mesh avatar would fail.

LL didn't double the land impact, except in one small case. Mainland regions went from 15,000 to 22,500. Estate regions went to 20,000 but estate owners can pay an extra $30 per month to raise the limit to 30,000. That's the one case where the land impact doubled.

[greek Wingtips]

My point was that LL should have made a generic mesh body that all creators can work with and create their own designs but most importantly all be compatible with each other,

Look at the end  it's up to LL what they wanna do, keep SL or sell it or do away with it. we can only give our views,

All I'm saying I spend lots of money in SL others spend loads more, and if they feel they wasting their money they are going to walk, it like any business it depends on the customers and right I feel they are in decline. Its up to LL now.

 

Edited November 19, 2017 by greek Wingtips

[Penny Patton]

6 minutes ago, Parhelion Palou said:

You keep missing the point. LL doesn't tell creators what they can and cannot create as long as it doesn't violate the Terms of Service. It's free enterprise (mostly). If LL introduced their own mesh avatars (hopefully better than the abysmal starter ones from a few years ago) there's no guarantee that people would use them, at least not until enough content was created (by residents) for them. If LL didn't provide the tools to use to create clothing, makeup, tattoos, etc. then their mesh avatar would fail.

I've always believed that rather than creating something similar to user created mesh avatars, LL should create an updated set of system avatars. Not replacing the old system avatars outright, they'd still be there so legacy content wouldn't be destroyed, but new users would start off with the new avatars, and we'd all have the option to swap between them as we pleased.

Improved models, improved UV, improved system skin and makeup (these were always great features, crippled by dreadful art assets), and providing the userbase everything they need to create clothing (system and mesh), skins, what have you right from the start (creating skins, tattoos, makeup and system clothes would all be very similar to the old system av, just with improved UV and the addition of materials support). LL could use this new set of system avatars to also improve the broken appearance editor. Break shapes for the new system avatars into heads, torso and legs so that people can easily mix and match the three, and allow the new system avatars to make use of bento face and hand animations.

Of course, LL has stated they will never do this so...

[greek Wingtips]

What gives sl its beauty is its reality to be a second life, and it has the ability to create a generic mesh avatar but maybe now its too late as Sansar is the to them the new kid on the block :-(

They have invested in this Sansar and normally investment is drawn away from other projects, I am sure this has been SL.

Edited November 19, 2017 by greek Wingtips

[ChinRey]

50 minutes ago, Parhelion Palou said:

You keep missing the point. LL doesn't tell creators what they can and cannot create as long as it doesn't violate the Terms of Service. It's free enterprise (mostly). If LL introduced their own mesh avatars (hopefully better than the abysmal starter ones from a few years ago) there's no guarantee that people would use them, at least not until enough content was created (by residents) for them.

Yes but even though I can't speak for Penny, at least that's not what I mean when I say LL needs professional content creators.

If I can use an analogy here, a car factory employs test drivers not because those test drivers are the only ones who will drive those cars. It's because to develop the best possible car, they need continuous feedback from professionals systematically evaluating the functionality of the vehicle from every possible angle. These test drivers have to be up to date with the latest development in the industry and they have to understand enough of the development process to communicate efficiently with the developers and to have a good idea what is possible to achieve and what isn't.

Except for a very short time period right at the start, Linden Lab never had those "test drivers" and they never understood the need for them. They still don't. Today they try to compensate with estensive use of user feedback. User feedback is very valuable in itself but it's a poor substitute for insider expertise because it's not systematic, it's not continuous, it's not necessarily professional and the users who provide feedback do not know or understand the development process as a whole and are not directly involved in the decision making. In fact, the more you rely on user feedback, the more urgent the need for professionals on the inside becomes because you need somebody to interpret that load of unorganized data and make some sense out of it.

[Parhelion Palou]

My response was to greek Wingtips' statement that it was stupid of LL to allow people to create incompatible mesh avatars. LL doesn't allow or disallow anything as long as it's within the TOS. His idea of a LL-provided generic mesh avatar that others could modify wouldn't have kept the market from expanding into a lot of incompatible avatars anyway. The range of shapes people want is too large for a single mesh avatar to handle.

I think Penny's idea of an additional base avatar has merit, though it would fracture the clothing market even more. I'd love to see LL at least give an easy option to switch from the standard top-down camera to one that's set up better.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with professional content creators. It sounds like you want LL to either hire or somehow support a group of professionals who would report back to LL on how SL is working in terms of content creation. I suspect they're already getting some of that from the user meetings they have on various topics.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

2 hours ago, greek Wingtips said:

My point was that LL should have made a generic mesh body that all creators can work with and create their own designs but most importantly all be compatible with each other,

Look at the end  it's up to LL what they wanna do, keep SL or sell it or do away with it. we can only give our views,

All I'm saying I spend lots of money in SL others spend loads more, and if they feel they wasting their money they are going to walk, it like any business it depends on the customers and right I feel they are in decline. Its up to LL now.

 

Why on earth do you think LL would EVER spend all the time and money to design, rig, script and put put out for FREE a mesh body that is on par with ones we can buy, when the users of SL are doing it for them? 

ETA.. Jebus wept.. They get a cut of each MP sale of a mesh body, plus land rentals for inworld stores.. why would they ever make that go away? 

Edited November 20, 2017 by Drake1 Nightfire