What happened to SL

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

21 hours ago, belindacarson said:

OMG really??????????

 

We get called names on the forums?? 🤔

 

That's why you have a mute button, make use of it 😇

You'll soon see the regular spammers and whiners. My block list is 3 pages now.

Then you'll see lovely lines saying "you have chosen to ignore content by so and so", makes reading the forums much more pleasurable.  

I cant recall seeing a post from you before.. ? 86 posts and you already have a long list of blocked? impressive.

Edited February 8, 2020 by Tarina Sewell
might as well add me to

[Adam Spark]

On 2/5/2020 at 1:08 PM, Tarin Babenco said:

I have been a away for a few years and recently came back. What happened to SL it’s dead

Its not dead. Its been on a snails pace towards death for about a decade, and without change, it will probably be dead in another decade or two, but its far from dead today.

What happened? A couple things. Well, a bunch really - but much of it boils down to two things, in my humble opinion:

1) 2007: Simplicity is king. With an imagination and a mouse and keyboard, you can build whatever your heart desires and run a business of any kind, and collaborate in real-time with friends to get things done faster.

2020: Building anything now requires the expertise/man-hours of 3D building in Blender, and maybe lots of money if you prefer something like Maya. Sure you can still build the old way, but if you are building for something beyond whats enough for you and instead for public consumption, you'll want to learn mesh. Certainly the increase in quality has been critically important. I get that. Maybe one day they'll figure out how to pull it off in real-time without going outside of the grid to another program.

2) 2007: SL had a voice of hope and optimism for the future, even if it was decades away. It was supposed to be a game-changer. The future of the internet. It was an exciting thing to build, even if the completion of it wasn't in the cards for our lifetime. It was cool.

2020: Its just another game next to World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and all the rest of them. Well, its not a game... But if 98% of the residents are now calling it that (due to Linden Lab's inability to show its potential customers exactly what they are signing up for, and creating a ton of confusion in turn), I'll digress right now and take that fight up another day.

Don't get this twisted. I love SL (If I didn't I wouldn't even bother trying to guess what happened, much less post and be passionate in my belief). I love it for what it can be and for the many things I do enjoy about it (the relationships and music, mostly). It just no longer is headed in the direction it once was, and it disappoints me to this day.

[Mahala Roviana]

18 hours ago, Adam Spark said:

2020: Building anything now requires the expertise/man-hours of 3D building in Blender, and maybe lots of money if you prefer something like Maya. Sure you can still build the old way, but if you are building for something beyond whats enough for you and instead for public consumption, you'll want to learn mesh. Certainly the increase in quality has been critically important. I get that. Maybe one day they'll figure out how to pull it off in real-time without going outside of the grid to another program.

You can build in-world with mesh without using Blender. I spent a substantial stash of L$ on those pre-made kits before I realized I could convert standard prims to mesh within the Firestorm viewer. This was one of those changes that took place during those years when I was away. I only had to upload one or two basic forms that I then resized to form walls and floors. I just completed my first house. I did buy a few pieces from MP, the roof and railings mainly, but overall I'm pleased with the result.  I recommend trying it, especially if, like me, you learned to build with prims way back when. (It's a little sparse, I'm still decorating.) 

[Amina Sopwith]

19 hours ago, Adam Spark said:

 I love it for what it can be and for the many things I do enjoy about it (the relationships and music, mostly). It just no longer is headed in the direction it once was, and it disappoints me to this day.

It's user-driven...that's the entire point. So would it be a collective user responsibility to channel it in the direction we want? Or is it the advent of mesh and all the complexity it entails, and the ongoing issue of premium accounts that are driving it? Though I guess without mesh it would lose appeal for looking dated? Although to be honest, the best system avatars still look fine to me. 

I don't have any well-formed opinions on any of this, just throwing some questions into the air.

[Ashlyn Voir]

It deeead.

[Garnet Psaltery]

4 minutes ago, Ashlyn Voir said:

It deeead.

So you like playing with zombies?

[Syo Emerald]

21 hours ago, Adam Spark said:

2) 2007: SL had a voice of hope and optimism for the future, even if it was decades away. It was supposed to be a game-changer. The future of the internet. It was an exciting thing to build, even if the completion of it wasn't in the cards for our lifetime. It was cool.

It was hype. A whole pile of unjustified hype. SL never could be that game-changer or the future of the internet. It was destined to not live up to those far fetched ideas.

21 hours ago, Adam Spark said:

2020: Its just another game next to World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and all the rest of them. Well, its not a game... But if 98% of the residents are now calling it that (due to Linden Lab's inability to show its potential customers exactly what they are signing up for, and creating a ton of confusion in turn), I'll digress right now and take that fight up another day.

Not picking my dog in the game vs. no game debatte, but no matter on what side you stand on, SL never stood next to World of Warcraft or Guild Wars. Those are MMORPGs and SL is not that category. They only have in common, that it requires an internet connection and everything happens in real time and you can meet a bunch of people from all over the world (or at least your portion of the world).

[Adam Spark]

On 2/9/2020 at 2:41 PM, Amina Sopwith said:

It's user-driven...that's the entire point. So would it be a collective user responsibility to channel it in the direction we want? Or is it the advent of mesh and all the complexity it entails, and the ongoing issue of premium accounts that are driving it? Though I guess without mesh it would lose appeal for looking dated? Although to be honest, the best system avatars still look fine to me. 

I don't have any well-formed opinions on any of this, just throwing some questions into the air.

You make a great point. It is definitely user-driven, to an extent. I feel like that is partly on Linden Lab, too, however. Take Facebook. Everyone knows it is a social media platform. It won't be user-driven to become anything else, unless the owners of the company open up those floodgates, likely by announcing they are coming up with new ideas outside of the social media space.

Linden Lab has failed, in my humble opinion, to explain its platform. I hear too many examples of "how do you play this game?" for a platform that isn't even a game to begin with. That's on you, Linden Lab.

Second Life used to have a voice (Its founder, Phillip). Now it has a support system.

[Adam Spark]

On 2/9/2020 at 4:48 PM, Syo Emerald said:

It was hype. A whole pile of unjustified hype. SL never could be that game-changer or the future of the internet. It was destined to not live up to those far fetched ideas.

Not picking my dog in the game vs. no game debatte, but no matter on what side you stand on, SL never stood next to World of Warcraft or Guild Wars. Those are MMORPGs and SL is not that category. They only have in common, that it requires an internet connection and everything happens in real time and you can meet a bunch of people from all over the world (or at least your portion of the world).

I respect that opinion. One hill I will die on, however, is that it should have been, still could be and should be that game-changer. It was destined to become that until they stopped trying (likely listening to doubters or electing a shorter term strategy because hey, thats easier). It stopped trying to be the future of the internet and its number of concurrent users has been declining ever since.

Not a coincidence in my book.

As for not standing next to WoW or GW, I fully agree and that was my point. The tech is its only link to those. My point is that it is largely considered by many of its users to be in that category, and LL does nothing to show that SL is entirely different from those (or any other) games.

[Jace2112]

    Actually Mark Twain just informed me that SL is very much alive yay!

[Syo Emerald]

11 hours ago, Adam Spark said:

I respect that opinion. One hill I will die on, however, is that it should have been, still could be and should be that game-changer. It was destined to become that until they stopped trying (likely listening to doubters or electing a shorter term strategy because hey, thats easier). It stopped trying to be the future of the internet and its number of concurrent users has been declining ever since.

What did they try in the beginning and stopped trying later on? 

[Amina Sopwith]

Was SL really ever going to be that game changer after social media took over and we could all "brand" ourselves online much more easily? And the distinction between online and offline blurred more and more? 

SL never had the easiest learning curve. Even back in the day it took a while to learn how to operate it (I still laugh when I think about how I discovered you could adjust the prims you were wearing. I thought I'd lost a skirt, turned out I'd just moved it about 100 yards to the right.). Social media was always much more user friendly and more "portable" on phones.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

On 2/5/2020 at 5:38 PM, Tarin Babenco said:

What happened to SL it’s dead

Don't worry, I got this.

Edited February 11, 2020 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Jace2112]

2 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Don't worry, I got this

Oh my gosh this is how i created my first classic avatar Arduenn!

    (I had a little trouble with the edit shape sliders)

SL is very much alive because now I have a mesh avatar that looks like George Clooney

 

2 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

 

 

[Adam Spark]

10 hours ago, Syo Emerald said:

What did they try in the beginning and stopped trying later on? 

Trying to be the future of the internet. They envisioned a 3D web. They even experimented briefly with a hypergrid project several years ago. Unfortunately it was ahead of its time and discontinued. There is still work being done to create a 3D internet by quite a few companies, but somewhere along the way Linden Lab got out of the space and SL became just another "game".

[Syo Emerald]

12 hours ago, Adam Spark said:

Trying to be the future of the internet. They envisioned a 3D web. They even experimented briefly with a hypergrid project several years ago. Unfortunately it was ahead of its time and discontinued. There is still work being done to create a 3D internet by quite a few companies, but somewhere along the way Linden Lab got out of the space and SL became just another "game".

I see. 

But wouldn't SL always end up in the state its currently in, even if they didn't drop the general ambition to participate in the developement and research on how to make a 3D web? SL itself is a niche product. Too steap of a learning curve, very few people can handle the task of entertaining themselves, performance issues etc. You would need to get rid of what SL is, to make it part of a 3D web and then it would just be a piece of software, but not SL anymore.

[rasterscan]

This is just a rumour, right ?

LL is being put up for sale, EA is in negations to buy LL. but from discussions they want to buy the intellectual property to add as expansion packs to Sims 5 & 6 but do not want to operate secondlife/sansar as games they currently operate as just the branding.

Ebbe contact was renewed 1 year to find a buyer and one of the first steps is balancing the books by reducing internal costs.

Posted on the internet  Friday Feb 14th 2020

 

[Cindy Evanier]

5 minutes ago, rasterscan said:

This is just a rumour, right ?

LL is being put up for sale, EA is in negations to buy LL. but from discussions they want to buy the intellectual property to add as expansion packs to Sims 5 & 6 but do not want to operate secondlife/sansar as games they currently operate as just the branding.

Ebbe contact was renewed 1 year to find a buyer and one of the first steps is balancing the books by reducing internal costs.

Posted on the internet  Friday Feb 14th 2020

 

What is the source?

[Scott Coleman]

Part of what changed is the residents. The imagination of when SL started is long gone. Most of what you see is copies of the real world and not so much original stuff that you've never seen before.
I believe throughout the years there has been tons of changes that has hurt sl other than just the imagination has died, but could be a part of why it died.

A lot of the freedom has been taken away, it was the wild west in the beginning, you could do pretty much anything as long as it didn't violate the small amount of rules that existed at the time. 

They got rid of stipends for all accounts (Even free accounts got 50 a week), reducing the premium from 500 down to 100. The concern was that there wasn't enough sinks built in to remove Linden from the economy flooding the market with Linden and ruining the value.

They mass produced land destroying the value. Some of this was making the adult continent, some of it I think was because of the guy that figured out how to cheat the auction system and was in bidding on sims that weren't up for sell yet, allowing him to buy them for the minimum bid. When they attempted to stop it and take the sims from him, he sued them and won.

They got rid of camping. Like it or not, people would make money in game that they were turning around and buying things in SL. The reason they put a stop to it was because of all the complaints that places were cheating the traffic system to boost numbers. I believe there were other avenues that could have been taken that would have had the same effect, yet still allowed people to make money.

The developers incentive award was gotten rid of. This was another influx of linden into the market, but it was how places funded money trees and camping that again, had people in world reinvesting into sl. Was it being gamed by some? Yes, but again, it's something that could have been fixed in other ways without making it more difficult on people that in rl might be living on a fixed income or just didn't make enough to justify spending in a game. It was fun watching the noobs running from place to place trying to get Lindens off of money trees. (The problem is when there is an issue everyone wants to just get rid of it because it's the easiest thing to do)

The Lindens don't really come out into the world and explore anymore the way they used to. I had seen them shopping in malls to dress up their avs, now they only seem to show up if there is some sort of issue with sim performance or prepping them for auction. (I have heard they are more active in the new premium homes area, but there is a hell of a lot more of sl thats been neglected for a long time.

There was the adult fiasco. They could have upset a lot less people if they had moved the general sims to their own continent and replaced the general with mature, but instead they upended almost everything by forcing the most popular things to a new adult continent. (Thanks to rl politicians sticking their noses into a 3d world looking for problems)

At some point, it seems like the Lindens just didn't want to be as much a part of their world as they used to be. They don't seem to police griefers, the corn field last I saw seemed like a tourist trap, with increased prim limits people naturally started using every prim they could with no understanding of sim performance, scripts, textures, or graphics. So naturally it's the games fault, it's the sims fault, it's the parcels fault, it's the land owners fault....and don't try to tell them otherwise because they can log into WoW where they don't realize the optimization is different.

Stores around the hubs all died since the noobs don't all have money to buy things and if they did, there is no incentive to explore the world to find things because they can just go on MP and buy it there, or it's just handed to them as freebies. (I have no issue with freebies, but giving everything at the starting point doesn't encourage exploration)

As was stated in a post earlier, it's not as easy to build in world, what you can build just isn't the same thing as you can create in 3rd party software. Between that, and the mp, creators (Not all) aren't in world much, many don't have an inworld presence, they sell through mp, thus no stores or malls the way there used to be, and no reason for people to explore to find them, there is no real need for land, and so the world is much more empty and barren, as far as mainland. When a new avatar log in, and it looks like an abandoned wasteland, and the only people they see are attacking them, trying to have sex with them, or are spamming them with stuff to sell...yeah, why stay?

In the last year the numbers logging in, at least according to what firestorm shows has dropped around 10k during US peak hours. (Last year during US peak times it was 55 to 60k avatars online and the US night time numbers have dropped as well. 

The latest drop seems to line up with the push to get LL's income away from the land market and more from the premium accounts, along with increased fees to cash out, and screwing with island prices, so that the people that had to pay serious money to get them now feel like they were screwed over.

Eventually, it becomes the matter of "Death by 1000 cuts"

PS Look at the wonderful great things that were made with prim builds, the imagination it had to have taken, the insane amount of work shaping and texturing....and SL was crazy and fun. Now it's just kind of....stale. Even the ibfl responses, the omg another sl is dead response....it's not original any more. Fix that, make sl fun again, even if it takes bringing some of the old back and it will get back to what it was, what it could be, what it should have been.

[Mollymews]

hype can be a real and valuable thing

if it wasn't for the hype in the early days then I doubt that there would be a SL today

hype took the world to peak 26000+ regions in 2008.  Reality has since dragged this down to about 16000+ today. Approx. 40% decline from the peak.  Which even after this decline SL is still sustainable financially

had there been no hype then it would never have got to peak at 26000+.  Some lesser peak number and a 40% decline in revenue would have killed pretty much any business

[Solar Legion]

Unless there was an announcement that everyone missed, the current Stipend is 300 - not 100.

And yes raster - it's a rumor. One that has cropped up more than once in fact, in varied flavors.

[Mollymews]

3 hours ago, rasterscan said:

This is just a rumour, right ?

LL is being put up for sale

 

if it were ever true then I have $US1000 to buy one share in a partial public offering

might be lots of current SL people who have this and more, willing to buy into the company. 10,000 people at average $5,000 is 50 million dollars.  If Linden need a capital injection that is

not that I would get anything extra in terms of SL from this, like my Premium will still cost what it does.  I can just know that I am a owner and get a vote on who is on the Board

[Ashlyn Voir]

Lol why? What's there to save?

[Lindal Kidd]

On 2/10/2020 at 5:32 PM, Adam Spark said:

I respect that opinion. One hill I will die on, however, is that it should have been, still could be and should be that game-changer. It was destined to become that until they stopped trying (likely listening to doubters or electing a shorter term strategy because hey, thats easier). It stopped trying to be the future of the internet and its number of concurrent users has been declining ever since.

I think you'll have to die on that hill, Adam.  Conceptually, yes, a virtual world could be a game changer and a "Web 2.0".  But SL could never be that, because of underlying technical limitations.  Put simply, there's just too much overhead.  Sansar was an attempt to get around those fundamental limits, as well as to jump on the bandwagon of VR, which some saw as the "future of the internet" too.  Virtual worlds and VR may still be the future of us all, and I think that would be Very Very Cool...but right now I think they are both in a niche market.

That is not necessarily a bad thing.  In 1975, personal computers were in a niche market too.  Look at where we've come from that!

[Selene Gregoire]

6 hours ago, rasterscan said:

This is just a rumour, right ?

LL is being put up for sale, EA is in negations to buy LL. but from discussions they want to buy the intellectual property to add as expansion packs to Sims 5 & 6 but do not want to operate secondlife/sansar as games they currently operate as just the branding.

Ebbe contact was renewed 1 year to find a buyer and one of the first steps is balancing the books by reducing internal costs.

Posted on the internet  Friday Feb 14th 2020

 

Is that rumor still circulating 10 years later? Sheesh!

While LL does tend to hire people who have left EA (aka EA/Maxis) EA has no interested in buying SL. Never has and likely never will. 

This is the sort of thing EA would be interested in purchasing, not SL, which is NOT a game:

https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/20/electronic-arts-biggest-acquisitions-the-good-the-so-so-and-the-duds/

NOw if you want to see SL shut down in the next 5 years then by all means get EA to buy it.

https://kotaku.com/an-updated-list-of-studios-ea-has-bought-and-then-shut-1689498614

 

Btw, Maxis still exists and produces the Sims games but it's known as EA/Maxis and has been for probably 10 years.