Secondlife declining player base

[Sammy Huntsman]

OOh, one congratulations, do you wanna cookie? Um would you call mocking ideas, and questioning ideas, trying to reason through the ideas?

[Klytyna]

2 hours ago, halebore Aeon said:

OOh, one congratulations, do you wanna cookie? Um would you call mocking ideas, and questioning ideas, trying to reason through the ideas?

Shall we check your contributions to this thread? In terms of ideas?

A fraudulent at tech-illiterate pile of nonsense claiming people who make 3D meshes cannot make lods for them because it's too hard, this assertion being backed by your own failed attempt to make some mesh?

On 12 August 2018 at 1:34 AM, halebore Aeon said:

I totally understand, how hard it is. I am trying to make Mesh myself, and well usually games, and even Pixar have their models at high Poly. That is why Pixar, needs a big rendering computer, to even render in their models. Which, could take up to years, to even render in.

Pixar's resolution for meshes isn't as high as you might think, doesn't need to be, as they have better rigging, weight mapping  posing and rendering tools, they don't use "a big computer" they use "render farms", look the term up, loads of smaller computers linked together to share the load, and they are making hundreds of thousands of frames at output resolutions high enough to be clear on a screen 40 feet wide and 20 feet high, and at frame rates good enough for broadcast HD television.

A 110 minute animated feature might require, allowing for post production editing etc., 250-300 minutes of footage, at 60 seconds a minute, and frame rates of 30-60 frames a second. 

Nothing like SL.

On 12 August 2018 at 1:34 AM, halebore Aeon said:

That, and having to find workarounds, to create 4K textures, since you can't even upload in 4K. Make a lot of the graphics, pretty archaic.

First, "4k graphics" does NOT automatically require "4k textures", and secondly, if you are "finding workarounds to make 4k textures" then frankly, you are PART OF THE PROBLEM, not part of the solution.

And you wonder why I don't have "compassion" for the utterly worthless tech-illiterate gibberish you have "contributed" to the suggested problems. *rolls eyes*
 

[Love Zhaoying]

16 hours ago, halebore Aeon said:

I have one quick question, why do you feel a need to mock everyone, and think you are superior. Like you are pretty negative, and well it is kinda getting old. I was making a suggestion, and I think that the user base, would stay the same actually. 

Stick around, you'll get used to it.

[Love Zhaoying]

8 hours ago, Klytyna said:

"Worthless Activity Tokens" to encourage Land Flippers to mass produce chat-spam bots to earn "tier reduction" and introduce excessive levels of Chinese owned MMO style "grind" into the SLives of the "SL peasant underclass" to benefit the people able to pay pennies for major tier reductions via redemption of said "Worthless Activity Tokens" purchased for a pittance from the "peasant grinders" at ruinous exchange rates that make 5 L$ an hour "live human traffic bot" camping jobs seem well payed by comparison.

Yeah that one was CERTAIN to save SL, wasn't it.

How long ago was this? I missed it, perhaps during a hiatus.

*Edit* Ohhh...it was someone's "stupid idea", not something that actually happened. Lost track of the thread, sorry.

Edited August 14, 2018 by Love Zhaoying

[Rolig Loon]

It's hard to find a forum anywhere that doesn't have a few trolls.  The SL forums are remarkably sane and civil compared to many, and compared to what they were like even a few years back. With no trouble at all, I can find people here whose delivery style is the polar opposite of my own.  Some of them annoy the hell out of me at times. However, I rarely find people here these days who are genuine trolls.  In fact, a couple of the ones I find most annoying are clearly smart and have often made logical observations that changed my mind about how SL works and what it can be.  I don't mute people here or in world.  I figure my brain has a good enough filter to cut past rhetoric that bothers me and decide if there's anything worth hearing beyond it.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

However, I rarely find people here these days who are genuine trolls. 

There was that one Russian troll. 

[Rolig Loon]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

There was that one Russian troll. 

I said "rarely," not "never."

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Klytyna said:

Shall we check your contributions to this thread? In terms of ideas?

Discussion of ideas leads to better ideas. 

Taking a dump on everything leads to .....

[Love Zhaoying]

I have an idea!  Anyone try to get their RL friends to signup?

[Luna Bliss]

As I see it at this point in time, SL could be divided into 3 sectors:
1. Those who are dedicated to optimization of content, excellence in content.
2. Those who like to create but have no inclination to be the best, or have little time for such endeavors (learning mesh, for example).
3. Those who are in SL just to play around and have fun and aren't interested or have minimal interest in creating anything.

What are the percentages here? I imagine LL would know. Are they distributed fairly equally among the 3 types, or does one dominate?

I've been observing the growth of VR chat spaces, and also noticing they increasingly provide the means for creating & selling. I'm wondering if these will be the virtual environments most will flock to in the future.
Will SL ever be optimized enough for VR to function? Could they add better creation tools to give what the #2's need to sustain interest? Can they compete against this new trend of worlds with VR capability & easier inworld building tools?

[Luna Bliss]

15 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I have an idea!  Anyone try to get their RL friends to signup?

I did...and they just weren't interested after spending a bit of time inworld. I should ask why.

[Coffee Pancake]

19 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I have an idea!  Anyone try to get their RL friends to signup?

We used to evangelize, but that was based on excitement and passion about what SL represented and what it could become.

The issue now is SL's reputation is set. It has bad graphics, it runs slow, there is nothing to do, and is full of weird pixel-sex and regular pixel-sex. There's no shortage of other things to do on a PC capable of running SL (most of which being objectively more fun), and no shortage of other social venues that run on literally everything. The only reason SL still exists is that we're all invested to some degree.

The metaverse we all dreamed of never materialized.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, CoffeeDujour said:

The issue now is SL's reputation is set. It has bad graphics, it runs slow, there is nothing to do, and is full of weird pixel-sex and regular pixel-sex.

But: If I convince someone who is older (like me) to try it who hasn't heard all the negative stuff..and show them all the COOL stuff..

1 minute ago, CoffeeDujour said:

The metaverse we all dreamed of never materialized.

I think you have to make your own within SL.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

But: If I convince someone who is older (like me) to try it who hasn't heard all the negative stuff..and show them all the COOL stuff..

The issue now is SL provides a poor simulation, and it's one unique strength doesn't happen in the game anymore. Building in Blender adds nothing beyond raw assets, building in world required you to be in world, often for extended periods.

If they have played anything presenting an open world, they will have found something richer, smother and more engaging. 

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I think you have to make your own within SL.

 

The Oasis is a metaverse .. once you remove the techno babble and silly VR tech porn, it's a lot closer to what we all hoped SL would become. Only here the educators have left, the companies have left, and anyone trying to build games or interactive art now has dozens of alternative better performing outlets that can reach a wider audience.

 

If you weren't already part of Second Life. Why would you ever choose to make content here rather than literally anywhere else.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

19 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

If you weren't already part of Second Life. Why would you ever choose to make content here rather than literally anywhere else.

Because I’m not a “gamer”, have no RL friends into this stuff, don’t research different games. I only really ever heard about Second Life, so here I stay. I live in an SL bubble.

[Phil Deakins]

1 hour ago, CoffeeDujour said:

and it's one unique strength doesn't happen in the game anymore.

That's a huge gripe of mine. SL was a place where loads of people had a go at building, and a great many of them had a go at selling from their inworld stores. It was a huge part of SL, almost to the point of being what SL was about. Now, virtually nobody has a go at building with a view to selling, because it would require a great deal of time using a completely different programme. And the relative few who do go that way don't even need an inworld store. Just stick the stuff in the marketplace and, if it sells, it sells. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

SL is vastly different in a very negative way to what it was. I'd go so far as to say that it's been scuppered by LL.

Edited August 14, 2018 by Phil Deakins

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Phil Deakins said:

That's a huge gripe of mine. SL was a place where loads of people had a go at building, and a great many of them had a go at selling from their inworld stores. It was a huge part of SL, almost to the point of being what SL was about. Now, virtually nobody has a go at building with a view to selling, because it would require a great deal of time using a completely different programme. And the relative few who do go that way don't even need an inworld store. Just stick the stuff in the marketplace and, if it sells, it sells. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

SL is vastly different in a very negative way to what it was.

Aren't sellers with inworld stores to show buildings more likely to sell buildings than others? 

[Luna Bliss]

16 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

That's a huge gripe of mine. SL was a place where loads of people had a go at building, and a great many of them had a go at selling from their inworld stores. It was a huge part of SL, almost to the point of being what SL was about. Now, virtually nobody has a go at building with a view to selling, because it would require a great deal of time using a completely different programme.

Phil, I was speaking to a customer in my store once who was admiring a pond...well more than admiring...it was like she was in a kind of excited trance filled with a combination of longing, awe, and sadness.  She was so upset that she could never build such a thing because she couldn't do mesh. After I revealed it was created totally from sculpts she expressed shock and then ran off without even saying goodbye although we had been talking a long while. I could only assume she was so excited about building a pond now that she knew she could that the usual rules of social discourse left her mind.
I've run into so many creators feeling discouraged regarding the long learning curve mesh requires.
I wonder what would happen if LL put a lot of effort into enhanced building tools within SL itself. Are there lots of these people out there who would feel enthused about building again (without mesh) ...people that could keep SL growing.

[Coffee Pancake]

17 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Aren't sellers with inworld stores to show buildings more likely to sell buildings than others? 

It's not about the store presence, it's about the act of building the house in world that really matters.

If your in world spending hours working on something new, you will of course be doing other things on the side, being social, etc. Now you spend all day in blender and can't run SL at the same time as it takes resources away from modelling.

[animats]

3 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

It's not about the store presence, it's about the act of building the house in world that really matters.

If your in world spending hours working on something new, you will of course be doing other things on the side, being social, etc. Now you spend all day in blender and can't run SL at the same time as it takes resources away from modelling.

Sinespace has integrated Archimatix for in-world building. It's an intermediate level between working with prims and working with raw meshes. It's fast - almost like Fortnite building, but for real.

SL needs something with that level of fluidity. Maybe in-world SketchUp.

One way to do that would be to integrate SketchUp into the viewer, so that it draws into the SL view. But the editing isn't shown in world. Other users just see a big "Editing Object" sign or a cloud of dust or something until the edit is saved. Then it uploads and appears in world. Like "Editing Appearance" or playing animations locally.

 

Edited August 14, 2018 by animats

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

On 8/1/2018 at 8:24 PM, Ashlyn Voir said:

 Not to mention, there’s hardly anything to do in the game itself, sadly.

 

 

I agree, I build rebuild I do the KittyCats thing.. But when it comes down to it, the thrill I got having a store and making some money (and I did back in the day) there is not a lot to do in SL for me.  When I search for places to visit, all I get are 50 results for art installation.. Mostly (aside from a select few) just a bunch of vanity photos of their own avatars and photoshop edits... Where are the people? Used to be you could have nice conversations with people, now everyone is so defensive or down right rude... I spend maybe 5 hours a week on sl now as opposed to the 5-7 hours a day I used to spend.. 

[Nalates Urriah]

On 8/1/2018 at 5:24 PM, Ashlyn Voir said:

I’d say it’s because SL has a serious lag problem and not everyone can afford high-end PCs to play a chatroom type game. Not to mention, there’s hardly anything to do in the game itself, sadly.

Bolding is mine...

Over my time in SL I've seen this said many times by many different people. 

The idea that a high end PC is required isn't true. SL can lag a new top-end game machine as well as it can a 10-year old computer. It isn't the viewer that is the problem nor the servers. It is the content. Novice designers just don't optimise their creations. If we had ONLY the optimized content seen in professionally built games, the SL engine would provide amazing performance.

There are things the render engine could do better. It isn't newest tech. It doesn't use the newest video card features. The reason is the Lab is making it possible for more older systems to run SL.

Hardly anything to do... all my possible responses would be so derogatory. 

If one hasn't flown across in SL in a plane or sailed in a boat, they have no idea how much stuff is here. I'm trying to fly my helicopter around all the continents. It is taking some time as there is so much stuff I'm curious about and I keep stopping.

People with boats collect on islands and dance and talk. A whole crew of people play Get the Freight Out using planes, copters, boats, and trucks.

There is a ton of combat games for the shooters and strategists to the role players and mechanized robots.

The dancing, singing, music, karaoke, custom competitions, photo contests...

There is way more to do than anyone can list.

[Penny Patton]

35 minutes ago, Nalates Urriah said:

The idea that a high end PC is required isn't true.

It is if you want the game to run at decent framerates, with the graphics set to a level most people these days (who'd be into the idea of SL at least) would consider acceptable. And even then the graphics are nothing to brag about.

And yeah, I know, there's plenty of people already in SL who will argue that the graphics are fine to them, but we're not talking about them. We're talking about the broader group of potential SL users, most of whom are put off by SL's unreasonably high hardware requirements for mediocre graphics. If Linden Lab wants SL to gain more users than it's losing, this is just one issue they need to address.

39 minutes ago, Nalates Urriah said:

There are things the render engine could do better. It isn't newest tech. It doesn't use the newest video card features. The reason is the Lab is making it possible for more older systems to run SL.

Here's an important point: SL can look better and run better, without pushing out older systems. The problem is not the engine, it's the unregulated flow of obscenely unoptimized art assets being uploaded to the grid at an alarming rate. If you optimize the art assets used to build a sim (fewer, smaller textures and  more compact texture UVs) SL can actually run surprisingly well, even on older, less powerful hardware. I've been proving this for years with my own builds.

 LL needed to be smarter about how mesh would work, how they would discourage unoptimized content, and incentivize those content creators who put in the effort to create the best looking content with the smallest rendering impact. They ignored the input of every graphics professional with an interest in SL and we're all paying the price for it.

43 minutes ago, Nalates Urriah said:

If one hasn't flown across in SL in a plane or sailed in a boat, they have no idea how much stuff is here. I'm trying to fly my helicopter around all the continents. It is taking some time as there is so much stuff I'm curious about and I keep stopping.

I've done exactly that. Actually, it was a zeppelin. I built it myself and went on sightseeing trips across the entire mainland. I had fun, but let's be real here; Vehicles in SL are kinda awful compared to even bad videogame vehicles. There.com had far superior vehicles back in like 2005, maybe earlier.  The same goes for everything else you suggested. Combat in SL is a joke. Roleplaying HUDs are always a clunky, cludgy affair held together by sheer determination of a playerbase that is willing to bend over backwards to forgive SL it's shortcomings. 

Dancing and singing are hard to screw up, but SL's approach to them is extremely bare bones and lacking any polish or flair. Custom build competitions are increasingly rare as the in-world creation tools have been left to rot on the vine without developments to keep them a viable alternative to mesh in the eyes of most people. Not to mention the no-mod plague that's been allowed to sink it's stench into every corner of SL has killed much of the creativity that used to flourish in SL's modding communities (furries and anime avatar communities being the exception that embraced modding and still have a vibrant amount of creativity going on for them).

 And I'm not trying to poo-poo all over anyone's enjoyment of SL. I love SL too! But if we want to recognize why SL is losing people, why the player base has shrunk considerably and looks to continue to shrink until there's only a handful of die-hard addicts left to mourn SL's passing, we (or LL rather) need to take a hard, realistic, and extremely critical view of their product. See where it falls short, where it can be improved, what strengths there are to build on.

 Being critical is not a wholly negative endeavour, it's about seeing how something we all love can be made even better, and more appealing to people who might otherwise love SL as much as we do if not for some glaring flaws that they can't forgive as easily as some of us might be able to. And how that can be done without losing what makes SL appeal to those of us already here.

[MarieVanGoethem]

Sex sells. 

It  solves all the deficiancy mentioned above. Lonely? tick   Bored/Nothing to do?  tick   Learning to use interface..  tick ( big incentive to learn to use animations and chat ).

Of course we talk about creative tool and lag and all that stuff  and we do not promote the sex because we project into the virtual world the values and hang ups of the real world.

Let us call it intimate relationship? Whatever..  sell it!    Whatever else , rezzing prim, making shoes, whatever will follow.

"Second life A world for Adults"

Remember there are place in the world where woman cannot walk in public without a man, where to take your top off on a beach is illegal or to even walk into a bar. 

This virtual world is a liberating place!   Some will condemn but they are not the target we need.

"Second Life - Liberation"

A missing tool would be autotranslation in chat. SL should have google translate or something built in. Even a tiny percentage user base in china would explode the population inworld.

My english is not good please forgive

[Coffee Pancake]

5 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

The idea that a high end PC is required isn't true. SL can lag a new top-end game machine as well as it can a 10-year old computer. It isn't the viewer that is the problem nor the servers. It is the content. Novice designers just don't optimise their creations. If we had ONLY the optimized content seen in professionally built games, the SL engine would provide amazing performance.

You could put SL content in a game engine and get double the framerate with better lighting and shadows. But it wouldn't be SL if you did.

Plenty of game content makes it into SL .. and it performs just as poorly as stuff we make.

Optimization helps, but it's not a panacea by any means.

5 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

Hardly anything to do... all my possible responses would be so derogatory. 

Yes. There is an unlimited number of things you can do if making your own fun is your bag.

If you want to take part in curated activities .. then you're kind of sunk.

 

5 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

If one hasn't flown across in SL in a plane or sailed in a boat, they have no idea how much stuff is here. I'm trying to fly my helicopter around all the continents. It is taking some time as there is so much stuff I'm curious about and I keep stopping.

People with boats collect on islands and dance and talk. A whole crew of people play Get the Freight Out using planes, copters, boats, and trucks.

Unless you have played with vehicles on any other platform ever, in which case, you're in for a painful experience that highlights everything SL isn't very good for.

5 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

There is a ton of combat games for the shooters and strategists to the role players and mechanized robots.

Oh god .. please, go play some actual games. Combat in SL is a joke. The latency at every single point of interface with the activity is crippling. You have input lag, physics lag, viewer lag and server round trip lag all combined to turn the affair into a button mashing mess. Again .. from the perspective of a gamer, combat in SL is a sad joke.

Even other virtual worlds have managed to do it significantly better.

5 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

The dancing, singing, music, karaoke, custom competitions, photo contests...

And how does someone find these activities? Trawling though the event spam? Sitting online for hours on end in the hope you catch a group shout or notice? Checking your favorite club location habitually just to see if there are dots on the map?