Remedies to declining SL?

[greek Wingtips]

Its bewilders me when I give some suggests how to refresh SL and some folk here just brush it off, they seem to forget that SL is on the decline and if nothing is done it would probably die by the wayside,  maybe some of the commenters here should wake up and stop being negative and come with some ideas of thier own instead of slating anything anyone suggests

[chibiusa Ling]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Well, the Sinespace people bolted in-world editing onto their system last summer.

Sinespace has this working. Linden Labs needs to catch up.

Move over second life. They are even using the same slogan on their website "Your world your imagination". They even have scripting.....LL just got a serious competitor. @Oz Linden @Ebbe Linden See, this is why people kept saying "Make SL 2.0". Now you guys have a actual serious competitor that isn't some lagging behind open sim grid and your going with Sansar?

 

7 minutes ago, greek Wingtips said:

Its bewilders me when I give some suggests how to refresh SL and some folk here just brush it off, they seem to forget that SL is on the decline and if nothing is done it would probably die by the wayside,  maybe some of the commenters here should wake up and stop being negative and come with some ideas of thier own instead of slating anything anyone suggests

The thing is....it isn't declining as much as you think. Compared to its heyday and 2012 sure there are a few less people in world but in terms of the amount of people in world at any one time......its been holding stead for years during peak times around the 40-50k mark and around 20k out of peak. And a lot of the ideas you and others suggest have already been suggested a thousand times over.  You also have to take into account the current way in which SL is designed and whether or not a lot of the features people suggest would ACTUALLY work in practicality. Theres a huge difference between thinking "OMGAWWW thats a cool idea lets do that" and the reality of actually implementing it. Look at whats up and coming as features in SL at the minute. We have the wind light project, last names, grid wide experiences and bakes on mesh to name a few and its taking them longer to implement them effectively into the grid due to one issue or another surrounding Second Life's current setup and design. Last names is particularly tricky as it involves a whole entire re work of how names are implemented with multiple multiple places that need to be updated and tested and updated again before they can even think of releasing anything. One small bug in the new name system would cause issues you couldn't even conceive of grid wide. But rather than get so angry and upset that people are not listening to every single new idea put forward take a step back and chill and be happy at the ACTUAL features they are trying to implement to improve the grid user experiences. We just got Animesh...something I have been advocating for for years. We got bento which gave us hind leg bones, wing bones, much needed finger bones and face bones, experiences etc etc. Plus the above mentioned up and coming features. LL are only a small team compared to other "game" (I know I know but its the only comparison I can give) development studios. You can fuss all day about new features but if they are struggling to get the current set of features out on time that WILL actually give us some new features then you gotta be a bit more patient on the ones you THINK will give us new better features. 

[chibiusa Ling]

they have cloth physics....

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

9 hours ago, Oct Oyen said:

 Blender on the other hand is intimidating as hell due to its Swiss army knife nature.

Blender is overwhelming that way. Task-specific starter builds (focusing on creating static objects OR animating an avatar OR etc, rather than all of it in one package) could be really useful as learning tools for beginners. Would it be difficult for a coder to set up that sort of thing?

 

[Janet Voxel]

Demystifying Blender would probably go a long way.

 

[Selene Gregoire]

7 hours ago, greek Wingtips said:

Its bewilders me when I give some suggests how to refresh SL and some folk here just brush it off, they seem to forget that SL is on the decline and if nothing is done it would probably die by the wayside,  maybe some of the commenters here should wake up and stop being negative and come with some ideas of thier own instead of slating anything anyone suggests

Go ahead, implement the ideas that costs residents more money than they are already paying. Tax everything in SL like you want to do. Let's see how long it takes for the average users to quit because they can no longer afford to log in. 

[SteffiiSugabum]

On 12/23/2018 at 2:42 AM, Candice LittleBoots said:

You are all losers! .. Who wants to be a loser like you?  << Is that what SL outsiders are thinking?

I spend an inordinate number of hours per week logged into Second Life, but nobody I know in the real world knows that I do that. Perhaps a few here and there to whom I've mentioned it to in the past, but I could count them on my thumbs. I never talk about SL in RL. It's as if it's my dirty little secret, almost embarrassing to mention. 

Second Life, in my opinion, outside of itself and its associated peripheral existences on fora, blogs, Flickr, Pinterest, Facebook etc.  is considered naff and untrendy by the outsiders. At least that's how I've begun to feel for a number of years. A game to which only lonely people with no real life gravitate and sexual perverts lurk in order to get their thrills and fulfil abnormal desires.

Because the attraction of Second Life is not easily explained to outsiders makes it an easy target for mocking, for the reasons mentioned above. This often makes me wonder if I am alone in keeping my dirty little secret to myself out there in the real world, in order not to be labelled a loser.

Lol yes I don't talk about SL in RL either hahaha. It's where I go to when I'm on my own, want some time to chill and hang out with my friends online. I'm a bit of an introvert so I do just like my space, SLs a good opportunity for that lol. Yeah there are things that give SL a bad rep sadly. Bloggers for example though do help give SL a better rep though. Some people are even getting into vlogging in SL too. I think if people shared their positive experiences more it would help a lot. 

Edited December 27, 2018 by SteffiiSugabum
typo lol

[KanryDrago]

8 hours ago, greek Wingtips said:

Its bewilders me when I give some suggests how to refresh SL and some folk here just brush it off, they seem to forget that SL is on the decline and if nothing is done it would probably die by the wayside,  maybe some of the commenters here should wake up and stop being negative and come with some ideas of thier own instead of slating anything anyone suggests

Maybe its because we think your suggestions are just a bit crap? just a thought

[animats]

8 hours ago, chibiusa Ling said:

Move over second life. They are even using the same slogan on their website "Your world your imagination". They even have scripting.....LL just got a serious competitor. @Oz Linden @Ebbe Linden See, this is why people kept saying "Make SL 2.0". Now you guys have a actual serious competitor that isn't some lagging behind open sim grid and you're going with Sansar?

Sinespace is technically interesting, but it only has about 30 concurrent users. They have about 25 areas you can visit, none very exciting. Building is not entirely in-world. What they really have is a prim system, one where you can create new prims with out of world tools. Like a resizable wall with windows - make the wall bigger and you get more windows, not oversize ones. Sinespace is also not a big-world system. Like Sansar, it's really a game loader which loads game levels. Long loading delay, then fast response.

There are more other players coming up behind SL. These are the modern big-world systems.

• Dual Universe - "The Entire Universe is your Sandbox. Explore. Build. Trade. Conquer." This is a very well funded Kickstarter, with 30K users and €10,075,878 in funding so far. It's in alpha test now, you have to pay $120 to get into the alpha test, and people are doing that. It's a really big world system. Full-sized planets, more than one of them. The spaceships look great, the avatars currently are very basic.
• Spatial OS worlds. Several big worlds are being developed using Spatial OS, a back end system for MMOs. It is way overfunded, having raised over $500 million. The first games just came out this quarter. So far, the big game companies haven't used Spatial OS. The terms are very restrictive; it has to run on their Google Cloud servers, and that gets expensive. NetEase, the big China game company, has bought into Spatial OS. They're starting by building Nostos, a big virtual world game with the visual style of anime.

From all these projects, we can see what's possible with current technology. For a long time, SL could rest on its laurels and not worry about competition. Nobody else had a good big world. That seems to be about to change.

[Oct Oyen]

The purpose of this post is to throw some ideas to LL and hopefully some would stick. There are no good or bad ideas, they are just ideas. Honestly what we think of each other's ideas really don't matter unless you're a Linden. That being said, it's great to bounce ideas of each others and provide insights to virtual world related information. For the drama seekers, please get your fix elsewhere.

[KanryDrago]

3 minutes ago, Oct Oyen said:

The purpose of this post is to throw some ideas to LL and hopefully some would stick. There are no good or bad ideas, they are just ideas. Honestly what we think of each other's ideas really don't matter unless you're a Linden. That being said, it's great to bounce ideas of each others and provide insights to virtual world related information. For the drama seekers, please get your fix elsewhere.

Sorry I disagree, what other people think of the various ideas is very much pertinent information for the Lindens to digest else how will they know how some will receive any idea's acted upon. As to drama seekers look in a mirror. You came up with the thread claiming that the sky is falling and sl must change. A lot of us actually think the problem isnt sl so much as the lack of a decent way of helping newcomers get over the learning curve.

[Love Zhaoying]

8 minutes ago, Oct Oyen said:

There are no good or bad ideas, they are just ideas.

@Phil Deakins! 

[chibiusa Ling]

30 minutes ago, animats said:

Sinespace is technically interesting, but it only has about 30 concurrent users. They have about 25 areas you can visit, none very exciting. Building is not entirely in-world. What they really have is a prim system, one where you can create new prims with out of world tools. Like a resizable wall with windows - make the wall bigger and you get more windows, not oversize ones. Sinespace is also not a big-world system. Like Sansar, it's really a game loader which loads game levels. Long loading delay, then fast response.

There are more other players coming up behind SL. These are the modern big-world systems.

• Dual Universe - "The Entire Universe is your Sandbox. Explore. Build. Trade. Conquer." This is a very well funded Kickstarter, with 30K users and €10,075,878 in funding so far. It's in alpha test now, you have to pay $120 to get into the alpha test, and people are doing that. It's a really big world system. Full-sized planets, more than one of them. The spaceships look great, the avatars currently are very basic.
• Spatial OS worlds. Several big worlds are being developed using Spatial OS, a back end system for MMOs. It is way overfunded, having raised over $500 million. The first games just came out this quarter. So far, the big game companies haven't used Spatial OS. The terms are very restrictive; it has to run on their Google Cloud servers, and that gets expensive. NetEase, the big China game company, has bought into Spatial OS. They're starting by building Nostos, a big virtual world game with the visual style of anime.

From all these projects, we can see what's possible with current technology. For a long time, SL could rest on its laurels and not worry about competition. Nobody else had a good big world. That seems to be about to change.

I was on there earlier. You can create models in say Maya and Blender and import them in much the same way you can in SL. They have semi automated rigging when you import clothing for skin tight items. They have scripting. They are built on the unity engine so the graphics are pretty on point. I haven't tried out too much more but each person who wants to create gets their own free piece of sizeable land.There was definitely more than 30 users when I logged in earlier. I love SL and I will not be leaving but from what I saw earlier....SL has a pretty serious competitor. Its definitely one i'm going to keep an eye on lets put it that way.

[Oct Oyen]

24 minutes ago, animats said:

For a long time, SL could rest on its laurels and not worry about competition. Nobody else had a good big world. That seems to be about to change.

Every SL competition big or small have came and went since 2004, naturally LL is pretty comfortable taking its time to improve SL while developing other projects. Sad to say that all LL's side projects have failed without exception, hopefully Sansar will be an exception.

It's great LL is adding modern game features to SL while pushing the limits of its 2004 game engine. The aging game engine is the elephant in the room. I think LL tries to address it with Sansar, but kind of left SL residents behind. It's a tough situation for LL, how do you modernize an aging engine without breaking SL...

[Janet Voxel]

I think LL does listen to its users. That’s where project bento, BoM, Animesh, etc, etc came from. I’m certain the expansion of premium land from 512 to 1024 came from this forum.

Since it’s so common to dookie on everything these days and not really offer any kind of solutions...just dookie. Well you end up with what you get, a lot of dookie and not much original thought.

Can they still improve things? Sure. Can most people offer constructive feedback.... jury’s out on that. I know one thing since Animesh....SL is running faster for meeeeee!

[animats]

2 hours ago, Oct Oyen said:

Sad to say that all LL's side projects have failed without exception,

Yes. See their acquisition history.

• Blocksworld (like Minecraft) - about 10 concurrent users on Steam. More on mobile, though.
• Desura - (like Steam) - sold off, now bankrupt.
• Sansar - about 25 users on Steam.
• Enemy Unknown (like Facebook, but for avatars) - disappeared sometime around 2011.

Linden Labs is Second Life, whether they like it or not. They need to accept that and put resources into their one product with customers.

[Amina Sopwith]

How are we defining "decline"? If it's based solely on user numbers then yes, it's gone down since its heyday and will never recover to that level. But what about money invested in the game, creation levels and so on? I would imagine LL will continue running SL for as long as it's turning a worthwhile profit. My impression of it now, after several years out, is that while you could once get a worthwhile experience without investing any real money (plenty of good quality freebies and camping chairs for the dollarbies), that's not so much of a possibility any more, especially with the advent of mesh...

[Callum Meriman]

3 hours ago, Oct Oyen said:

The purpose of this post is to throw some ideas to LL and hopefully some would stick.

Doesn't work that way. Sorry.

LL have said many times, many times, they rarely pay attention to the forums. They have requested time and time again that people throw ideas at the via Jira. In fact they have said point blank they will only listen to suggestions via Jira.

So, by this very fact alone, the thread is not useful for throwing ideas at the Lindens, but it is useful for throwing them at other residents, seeing which ones stick and which ones sink like a rock, then placing those that pass muster into a Jira for the Lab to read.

[Maryanne Solo]

Witness the very recent rise and extremely hard fall of Altlas - https://www.pcgamer.com/atlas-off-to-a-disappointing-start-in-early-access/

What an absolute debacle. (My sister bought for me for a xmas giggle, which I soon refunded). They had one shot at this and blew it. 

SL is MILES ahead of any alternative so I think all LL have to do is sit tight and the tables will turn as they always do.

[HarrisonMcKenzie]

At the end of the day, the biggest problem I see is land cost. The change to premium tier does help in that it's actually possible to have a small amount of land, but anything more than that is prohibitively expensive. Seeing more affordable land to build roleplay areas, stores, and art pieces would go a long way to keep things going. If I could get a sim for $30, that would go a long way in me wanting to consider that.

Edited December 28, 2018 by HarrisonMcKenzie

[KanryDrago]

42 minutes ago, HarrisonMcKenzie said:

At the end of the day, the biggest problem I see is land cost. The change to premium tier does help in that it's actually possible to have a small amount of land, but anything more than that is prohibitively expensive. Seeing more affordable land to build roleplay areas, stores, and art pieces would go a long way to keep things going. If I could get a sim for $30, that would go a long way in me wanting to consider that.

hmmm Linden labs are estimated to make 3.7 million dollars a month off of tier currently taking the grandfathered tier rate of 195 an dropping it to the 30 you propose would therefore drop their revenue to around 570k

now assuming that most of that 3.7 million is for paying for bandwidth, server maintenance and salaries with say 20% left over for profit (I suspect the profit is less than this but lets be generous) that leaves them with a short fall of 2.4 million a month just to keep things going with no profit. Which users do you propose to charge more so you can have cheap land? and how many of those users do you think might quit?

 

figures for profit from here http://www.gridsurvey.com/

Edited December 28, 2018 by KanryDrago

[Oct Oyen]

1 hour ago, Callum Meriman said:

LL have said many times, many times, they rarely pay attention to the forums. They have requested time and time again that people throw ideas at the via Jira. In fact they have said point blank they will only listen to suggestions via Jira.

So, by this very fact alone, the thread is not useful for throwing ideas at the Lindens, but it is useful for throwing them at other residents, seeing which ones stick and which ones sink like a rock, then placing those that pass muster into a Jira for the Lab to read.

Sounds like a good plan, any volunteers?

[Callum Meriman]

21 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

Which users do you propose to charge more so you can have cheap land? and how many of those users do you think might quit?

This is true, someone has to pay.

The change from 512 to 1024 came at the cost of making the Lindex more expensive. The drop in Private Region teir was due to the same adjustment.

Ebbe has said that he wants to shift the cost of SL away from land far more, but he stated that it was a very slow process, the ramifications in change are huge.

I don't think we will see $30 regions, for one thing the cost of electricity/data/cooling for a server for a month is more then this. But I think we might see a little more change to costs, with more shifting from land to lindex/marketplace

[Parhelion Palou]

6 hours ago, chibiusa Ling said:

I was on there earlier. You can create models in say Maya and Blender and import them in much the same way you can in SL. They have semi automated rigging when you import clothing for skin tight items. They have scripting. They are built on the unity engine so the graphics are pretty on point. I haven't tried out too much more but each person who wants to create gets their own free piece of sizeable land.There was definitely more than 30 users when I logged in earlier. I love SL and I will not be leaving but from what I saw earlier....SL has a pretty serious competitor. Its definitely one i'm going to keep an eye on lets put it that way.

Sinespace is a Sansar competitor rather than a SL competitor. One thing that the new worlds don't have that SL does have is the ability for everyone to build. Sinespace and Sansar are for individuals to create their own little worlds for others to look at.

[chibiusa Ling]

1 hour ago, Parhelion Palou said:

Sinespace is a Sansar competitor rather than a SL competitor. One thing that the new worlds don't have that SL does have is the ability for everyone to build. Sinespace and Sansar are for individuals to create their own little worlds for others to look at.

Iv been on it for the last day or so. It's definitely also an SL competitor. It beats Sansar hands down already and besides some missing functionality is on track to be over taking SL and leaving it behind. Idk how you can say it's not a SL competitor. Five minutes into the world and I could tell exactly what it was and what they were doing and how good it will actually be if they keep it up