Retention rate explained

[Love Zhaoying]

5 hours ago, Ethan Paslong said:

even the very first new pants will look like they ...well lets say, have to change diapers.

There’s a joke with punchline, “the potato was supposed to go in front!”

[ChinRey]

15 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Keep right on laughing, it hasn't changed anything. 

The "basic" version of the client failed simply because they tried to target a section of computer "users" that they really shouldn't have.

That's the reality. 

You find it amusing that someone recognizes this and dares to state such, openly. 

That's nice. 

I suppose my replies came off as a bit rude.

Not only is it possible, LL has proven it. No matter what we may think about Sansar, the top level UI is actually good. Not quite as good once you start go down into it but still far better than SL.

Edited November 26, 2018 by ChinRey

[Prokofy Neva]

I found that very interesting, thank you. It was especially interesting because his "spawn" place is Iris, where there's an infohub where I guess some newbies are sent (I am never sure they still do this, or how they do this). We happen to have built a village next to that hub with all kinds of tutorials, freebies, etc. One of the things I put in steps from the Moth Temple is a phone with the text "how do I get out of here," since that's a question I find a lot of people first landing want to know. They don't like being forced to be in one place, especially a place filled with a dozen or more AFK or soul-less bots. 

So that's job one -- which I constantly raise, and constantly deal with on that sim: stop letting bots go to random infohubs. Make them go to the home of their deployers, or if that sim is down, let them go to some other hub created for that purpose so that they stop cluttering up infohubs where newbies especially are trying to orient themselves. It's a very unnerving experience to land there in Iris (as I do nearly every day) and find all those bots. I ask the Lindens to reset the server to shake them loose. Some of them are regulars as they have very poor handlers. But the real issue is -- bots should not come to these infohubs that are supposed to be for orientation. Create some Lindens sims where they can all be sent, the end. Or make it impossible for them to log on if their home sim is down. Do what you have to do -- but get rid of these crowds of dummies at hang-outs where people are.

I'll leave aside the issue of how this fellow is "the wrong sort" because he's trying to find a weapon and horse and fight in what is essentially not a war game, except on certain sims. All the points he raises are valid -- starting with the lack of people to talk to as they are bots.

So two, it's really crazy having avatars that are mesh and become removed the first time you try to put something else on or accept something being given to you The Lindens are chasing fashion  here and think they need to have fancy-looking and complex avatars "like the other games," but I imagine other games are not so modifiable and removeable with the avatars are SL.

So newbies should not have that experience of losing parts of yourself and having your torso be invisible or whatever, and seeing all the other people around you not rendering properly (when they land their arms are flung out somewhere -- often, hideously, their mouth is floating by itself in mid-air like the cheshire cat, etc. So don't have those avatars as automatics. Have people dressed in some kind of all-in-one at first until they learn about how mesh avatars get messed up if they try to put on something else or accept something to attach. I even have two kinds of boats at one location with warnings that one of the points will mess up mesh avatars or clothing so take the other boat that doesn't do that if that's an issue. 

Three, end the fear and shunning of commerce and have teleport boards to where people can instantly shop. Enable merchants to put up ad boards for money on Linden sims to accomplish this purpose. BTW, there used to be such ad boards in the early days of SL at the now-replaced telehubs! So even the commerce-allergenic early Lindens allowed this because some people put up "things to do" as well as shopping. It's easy to make those boards again, the rule can be no X-rated items, and thus someone landing and wishing to buy a gun, or go to a war RP sim, would immediately be able to do that. The ads used to rotate every two weeks. You could have a big bulletin board with multiple ads, as bars in SL do. Just do it, get over the fear of commerce by customers, and enable more retention.

Four, do not return helpers, guides, special residents in with the Lindens, etc. That's the temptation, but it never really helps, creates favoured ranks of people that build resentment, aids in corruption, and so on (I remember such helpers used to sling newbies folders full of their friends' store landmarks). Put in boards with ads, let people click and teleport to them, the end. This shouldn't be so hard; it's purely ideological on the part of the Lindens and the hard-core user base.

Five, you could say "fix lag" or "fix grey squares" or whatever -- and we know how that ends when someone even as old as me in SL tries to raise this with the forums "regulars". But people will endure a lot of lag if they find something else first: something to do, a friend, a place to shop, or get freebies.

Lindens will say, oh, but we A/B tested teleport boards and they didn't aid retention. I marvel how certain one-time or even six-time experiences in corporate history and culture lead to learned helplessness. I could mention that when you filled the boards with your own favourites that you felt were educational, or when you experimented with only two-week intervals, of course it didn't work. You need to LET THE MARKET in ads decide. The people who can absorb influxes of newbies, whether RP sims, clubs, malls, whatever, will put up the ads. And that's ok. People don't have your highbrow tastes but what are we here for, encouraging a niche boutique space or having more widespread use and appeal?

[Love Zhaoying]

8 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

the top level UI is actually good.

Does the small white cursor-Dot go away in goggles mode?

[Solar Legion]

Sansar is being designed for a wholly different user base. 

That user base is the sort that was weeded out back when they had a decent Orientation system. 

Edited November 26, 2018 by Solar Legion

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

hree, end the fear and shunning of commerce and have teleport boards to where people can instantly shop. Enable merchants to put up ad boards for money on Linden sims to accomplish this purpose. BTW, there used to be such ad boards in the early days of SL at the now-replaced telehubs! 

My spawning region had actual shopping, with shops rented by LL lottery.

[Solar Legion]

And right on cue... We have the Raven Maven popping in with her ulterior motives and brandishing the nuclear chip on her shoulder concerning volunteer helpers. 

[Prokofy Neva]

So I recently joined Free Sims Online (FSO) which is a re-implementation of The Sims Online, from which a number of us came in 2004-2005 to Second Life. I actually was a founder on FSO but I didn't go on it much until recently when I found SL working so poorly I couldn't enjoy it.

FSO is small, and there aren't more than say 300-500 on it, and possibly only 70-100 concurrent. But on every single lot, nearly every single person you meet tells you they were once in SL, but they hated it and never went back. And some still have an avatar in SL but don't come here often -- they dislike it.

If you ever wanted to go to a place and find the other 9 who left when there was only one who retained in SL-- who are NOT the war gamers like the kid in the video -- it's FSO. These are the SL demographics -- older women, married men who aren't interested in war gaming or hooking up, young people from countries like Poland or Russia or Singapore or even Syria, somewhat new to Internet socializing. 

The first thing you realize -- or remember -- about FSO is that the people are a lot nicer than they are in SL. Everyone uniformly says that. They describe awful experiences they have had in SL of griefing, of sexual harassment, of idiocy, and they flee. Flee to a place where for various reasons, various social norms of politeness and cooperation seemed to have been engineered into the world from the get-go by the socially-conscious Will Wright. Of course, it's a very different set-up where the "something to do" is solved instantly by the need to fill needs and so on. 

But it's enough similar to SL that you have to wonder -- why are people polite, helpful, sociable, not as AFK here as distinct from SL? Could it be due to the dirt-simple interface? There is a lack of choice of avatars, of course but there's enough variety that it's ok, and there are no mesh-like problems. Then you can buy more outfits later as you earn money. 

FSO is even in 3-D, and some have built lots specifically for 3D, and are re-meshing the objects to make them look better.

Yes, FSO doesn't have all the richness of SL. But you can be drawn there because you can still be creative there AND the people are SO MUCH NICER. There's a live Discord where the devs and oldbies help instead of scorning everyone who asks for help and ridiculing them. And so on. A different culture, perhaps induced by a different UI (this needs further reflection), and hence a nicer place.

Edited November 26, 2018 by Prokofy Neva

[ChinRey]

10 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Sansar is being designed for a wholly different user base. 

Woops, now I'm in danger of agreeing with Solar.

Yes, Sansar is supposed to be designed for people who are not SL users and that puts it all into a different perspective.

Creating a generally user friendly interface for an SL viewer would require some drastic rethinking and redesign, drastic enough it will cause serious problems for and protests from the established userbase who are already familiar with all the viewers' quirks. From that point of view, yes, I do agree it's impossible.

Edited November 26, 2018 by ChinRey

[Prokofy Neva]

8 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

My spawning region had actual shopping, with shops rented by LL lottery.

It has to be done by the free market, not by lottery. And it has to be a separate place, not the same spawning sim. People find shame in remaining on a spawning sim, especially with bots who won't talk, or with newbies who are rude or clueless. They immediately want to separate themselves from that feeling and that crowd. So they need to have the sensation of "going elsewhere". That's why there need to be teleport boards.

[Prokofy Neva]

8 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Another autistic "gamer" with autistic mannerisms, autistic mindset, autistic video editing catering to an autistic fanbase and autistic culture.

This is just one out of a quarter million other autistic "gamer" pewdiepie wannabe's that didn't have a father to raise them and instead suckled off of 4chan teet most of their lives.

Idiocracy culture can die in a fire. To think these are the people that are going to be wiping our asses someday, if other environmental factors prevent us from making it to old age, makes me want to end it now.

I tend to agree that a lot of gaming culture has been shaped by the autistic culture -- which isn't always enabled and spread by actual autistics.

But in general, I think even if you are a doctor, you shouldn't diagnose over the Internet, it's not ethical. 

And in this guy's case, he actually didn't exhibit what you might expect from someone actually autistic. He tried to socialize with everyone he came across. Since he had been automatically given (or perhaps chosen from a limited set) an avatar that seems like he was from the Middle Ages he talked in a sort of fake an funny simulation of what he imagined that language was -- i.e. he tried to speak what he imagined was the language of the locals. That's a kind of reasoning and empathy you would not necessarily find in an autistic person.

Furthermore, while he was persistent and obsessive in the way an autistic person might be, and also easily bored, he did still keep to a goal in ways that didn't really track. So I would say that his problem is more the snide pewdie-pie culture and lack of a father than actual autism. But that the problems I and others have outlined with SL are real and he experienced them for that reason.

BTW, regarding RL old age, they are going to have all robots replace caretakers, so I don't think you have to worry.

Edited November 26, 2018 by Prokofy Neva

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

People find shame in remaining on a spawning sim, 

My spot was a wonderful place where people formed very long relationships. One or two regions over was a spawning nightmare.

[Klytyna]

27 minutes ago, animats said:

Yes. So let's look at what went wrong here technically that could be fixed.

Arrogant, ignorant, spewtube channel quasi-illiterate type-with-their-thumbs iSpend dumbfone using leet gamerz console peasant trash...

The fix is pretty simple actually...

9mm Round, fired slightly upwards from behind one ear aiming at the outer corner of the opposite eyebrow...

Justifiable Homicide.

31 minutes ago, animats said:

First, the new user went through the entire video with a damaged avatar. He picked the newbie avatar "Thomas", which comes with a horse attachment. Thomas, which I've used, works fine both with and without the horse. But somehow he broke his avatar, probably by trying to get off the horse using "detach".

That's the usual way to detach an attachment, detach... Not exactly "avatar breaking" unless one os a complete idiot.

31 minutes ago, animats said:

SL avatars are easy to damage and hard to fix.

Wrong, 

33 minutes ago, animats said:

Yes, SL's system is hugely flexible. But nothing in the system automatically notices that something has gone badly wrong and tries to help the user fix it.

Good trick... Come back when you've written it and want testers to tell you that your code doesn't work.

34 minutes ago, animats said:

There are "Avatar Health" menu options. Those should be be unnecessary. The user should not have to worry about this.

You whine that avatars are easy to break and hard to fix, then whine that there are easy to use tools to fix the more serious problems...

36 minutes ago, animats said:

Second, encountering partially rezzed avatars. This is a combination of bugs. There's inherent delay, yes, but sometimes it just breaks.

And you STILL don't get the difference between "30 gb of professional content preinstalled on the local hard disk" and "over a petabyte of amateur content constantly live streamed via the internet". Hell sone it's only been about a year of us constantly pointing this out to you. 

38 minutes ago, animats said:

The overall impression to new users is "this thing sucks". They're right. By modern game or VR standards, it does. It continues to suck because LL is not fixing their legacy bugs.

Some of these "bugs" are so legacy, that the only way to "fix" them would be to close SL, delete 95% of the content, and rewrite the WHOLE SYSTEM in UE4, over the space of say 12 months, then reopen and wonder if any of your userbase will ever come back.

This will NEVER happen, get over it, your plan to convert SL into a Thumb-typer friendly UE4 based MMOFPS is doomed...

 

 

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

6 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Caledon Oxbridge University.  COU's campus is a self-paced tutorial that consists of six buildings, each chock full of signs that explain SL, one logical step at a time.

I loved Caledon Oxbridge. Bitsy was originally Edwardian, so Victorian had to do  It was a fortuitous choice. Someone there gave me a library card with my name on it, which seemed rather like magic  

And I found a pretty peach gown whose skirt poofed out rather wonderfully whilst falling through the air. Which began the start of my career of making experiential art out of my clumsiness with the arrow keys.

Thank you Caledon x

[Love Zhaoying]

44 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

The fix is pretty simple actually...

9mm Round, fired slightly upwards from behind one ear aiming at the outer corner of the opposite eyebrow...

 Justifiable Homicide.

A bullet in the noggin’ doesn’t solve all problems, it just brings closer the inevitable end.

[Parhelion Palou]

6 hours ago, Ethan Paslong said:

i think one thing is LL should stop with the mesh starter avatars. Nothing else on the market is made for those, and even the very first new pants will look like they ...well lets say, have to change diapers.

The mesh starter avatars are almost completely gone. There's one (perhaps more) left in the vampires section, but all the others are standard avatars with mesh clothing.

[Lucia Nightfire]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

And in this guy's case, he actually didn't exhibit what you might expect from someone actually autistic.

See my next comment for an explanation of the use of the term and my apology.

Also, I think he was not genuine in showcasing the problems and instead was just making a video to satisfy his fanbase.

[Gabriele Graves]

12 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Apparently every month more than 250,000 people try Second Life for the first time, hardly any of them ever come back again.

I wonder how many of them are griefer/begging/scammer/traffic-bot alts though.  There is one avatar account set called <firstname>NNN Resident who must create a new account every couple of days to beg L$ from shoppers in popular places and the shops own groups until they get banned and then they create another with just the number incremented and repeat the whole process.  The last time I looked their name "count" was in the three digits.  This kind of thing could account for a lot of "people".

Edited November 27, 2018 by Gabriele Graves
Remove an extra 'N'

[Tari Landar]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

So I recently joined Free Sims Online (FSO) which is a re-implementation of The Sims Online, from which a number of us came in 2004-2005 to Second Life. I actually was a founder on FSO but I didn't go on it much until recently when I found SL working so poorly I couldn't enjoy it.

FSO is small, and there aren't more than say 300-500 on it, and possibly only 70-100 concurrent. But on every single lot, nearly every single person you meet tells you they were once in SL, but they hated it and never went back. And some still have an avatar in SL but don't come here often -- they dislike it.

If you ever wanted to go to a place and find the other 9 who left when there was only one who retained in SL-- who are NOT the war gamers like the kid in the video -- it's FSO. These are the SL demographics -- older women, married men who aren't interested in war gaming or hooking up, young people from countries like Poland or Russia or Singapore or even Syria, somewhat new to Internet socializing. 

The first thing you realize -- or remember -- about FSO is that the people are a lot nicer than they are in SL. Everyone uniformly says that. They describe awful experiences they have had in SL of griefing, of sexual harassment, of idiocy, and they flee. Flee to a place where for various reasons, various social norms of politeness and cooperation seemed to have been engineered into the world from the get-go by the socially-conscious Will Wright. Of course, it's a very different set-up where the "something to do" is solved instantly by the need to fill needs and so on. 

But it's enough similar to SL that you have to wonder -- why are people polite, helpful, sociable, not as AFK here as distinct from SL? Could it be due to the dirt-simple interface? There is a lack of choice of avatars, of course but there's enough variety that it's ok, and there are no mesh-like problems. Then you can buy more outfits later as you earn money. 

FSO is even in 3-D, and some have built lots specifically for 3D, and are re-meshing the objects to make them look better.

Yes, FSO doesn't have all the richness of SL. But you can be drawn there because you can still be creative there AND the people are SO MUCH NICER. There's a live Discord where the devs and oldbies help instead of scorning everyone who asks for help and ridiculing them. And so on. A different culture, perhaps induced by a different UI (this needs further reflection), and hence a nicer place.

A-*Everyone in FreeSo, is a founder, bit of a novelty really, there's a good reason for that.   

B-No, not every lot, not every person, but yes, a lot of folks will tell you they have been in sl. If folks, even just one person, in the lot are/is speaking negatively of sl, the rest will follow, you won't find opposing views. The same is true of lots where the conversation about sl is positive. I have seen, and participated, in both, it's pretty common when people start talking about online games, especially when skilling or working money objects (not so much group ones, they're busy chatting about the game they're playing, pizza, code, etc.)

C-You haven't been there long enough to understand the pitfalls it has also had, the issues, the piss poor communication, or, anything, lol. You REALLY haven't seen when it happens in the discord channels, clearly, lol. All platforms, environments, hell games if that's what someone wants to call it, has issues, none are all sunshine and rainbows...none. 

D-I'm not knocking FreeSo, I actually love it, for all the same reasons I loved TSO, some of which you've described. It is amazing to have it back (it;s been out a bit now) after so many years without. Many, many people are grateful we have it, as most players used to play TSO.  But..come on, the two are NOT comparable, they have too many differences. Also, your concurrency numbers are way the hell off, lol. In fact, that's one of it's biggest appeals to those of us that use it...it's not jam packed, we can get into lots, it's fun.  

[Fionalein]

The spawn places are long gone. You now start on social island - that "go elsewhere" option is there, just walk through one of the portals,...

Edited November 27, 2018 by Fionalein

[Gabriele Graves]

54 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

The spawn places are long gone. You now start on social island - that "go elsewhere" option is there, just walk through one of the portals,...

A few weeks ago someone I knew joined and started at London City's new user experience after signing up through secondlife.com so I think there is still some randomness to this.

[Selene Gregoire]

5 hours ago, steeljane42 said:

Eh, there are always exceptions! I am very much a hardcore gamer with 25+years of gaming experience (started with NES, sadly missed original Atari times by a couple of years) and I did play a few games on a semi-competitive level (original CS and Broodwar to name a couple) and despite not having as much time for games anymore these days I still keep up with some of my favorite genres/series. And yet I still very much enjoy SL ever since I decided to give it a chance. It is very different kind of entertainment and gives my mind a rest whenever I mess around my sim, shopping for new stuff or do some roleplaying.

You are not what I would call the typical elitist or hardcore gamer. The ones I'm talking about are the arrogant "get gud" guys.  Those types really are not suited to SL. They usually turn out to be nothing more than griefers.

[Robin Kiyori]

12 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Another autistic "gamer" with autistic mannerisms, autistic mindset, autistic video editing catering to an autistic fanbase and autistic culture.

This is just one out of a quarter million other autistic "gamer" pewdiepie wannabe's that didn't have a father to raise them and instead suckled off of 4chan teet most of their lives.

Idiocracy culture can die in a fire. To think these are the people that are going to be wiping our asses someday, if other environmental factors prevent us from making it to old age, makes me want to end it now.

Hey, 

Stop using autistic as an insult. You're not really displaying any supposed higher intellect when your erroneously use the term for a non-neurotypical brain development type as an insult, that doesn't even actually fit what autism is. But you certainly are showing alot of ignorance and abelism.

Perhaps you should fact check before bemoaning "idiocy culture".

 

- Your friendly neighbourhood learning disabled person.

 

Onto retention.

I do think the Lab could do more to try and simplify the learning curve. Which people do have to admit, is getting steeper and steeper with the "demand" for mesh-everything. When I came back, I found myself pretty confused over mesh. with very few willing to teach.  But eventually I got it and started to rebuild my inventory..though landmarks and  places to converse with people is a different story. -cough-

Of course there will always be those that want to rush past. But even for the patient,  the  SL of Today is pretty tricky.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, Gabriele Graves said:

A few weeks ago someone I knew joined and started at London City's new user experience after signing up through secondlife.com so I think there is still some randomness to this.

Possibly. As a slight side-note, I created a new account just now (the story of the legendary Bonkable Resident has begun) to see the new user experience.. and it's quite nicely done. After the "you can never come back" part of the tutorial, you enter another similarly built sim called Social Island 1 with little tasks and fake-L$ tutorial. Then here are the portals:

Personally I wish I had something like this back when I started. But.. I'm not sure if this sets up a realistic (or widely appealing) tone for Second Life as a whole. I couldn't find a tutorial for using the web search (or any search) to find places or groups either. Only portals and strong encouragement to landmark the portal area. (I was given the LM and a tutorial video told me to do it.)

Edit: Hilariously, walking into the "Adult Only" portal ended the adventures of Bonkable Resident very quickly.

"Now what? :("

Edited November 27, 2018 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Klytyna]

16 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Edit: Hilariously, walking into the "Adult Only" portal ended the adventures of Bonkable Resident very quickly.

Pretty typical LL implementation, I bet the portals to "empty experimental conceptual art sims nobody ever visits" work just fine though...