Good ol days of SL?

[Maitimo]

• Being able to make things out of just prims, and people would actually buy them.
• Hanging out in a place where there was no event and no DJ, and just chatting, in local text. For hours.

...I can't think of anything else.  There are more things I can think of that I don't miss.

• Re-start Wednesdays, when they re-started every region at once and the entire grid would be closed to log-ins for several hours, sometimes all day. And often, things went wrong and Thursday would be full of problems and Friday would be closed again whilst they tried to fix whatever went wrong. Likewise, any griefer attack could bring down the entire grid with self-replicating physical prims.
• Those ugly shopping malls. 
• You buy a house, a couch, a bed and a tree, and that's your entire parcel filled to its prim limit. It wasn't that unusual for a single piece of furniture to be 40 prims.
• Every club used the same crappy freebie dances, and the only way to do couples dances was the poseballs on the floor. 

 

 

 

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

I miss the variety you got with people using system avatars and clothes, they were more willing to fiddle with the sliders and vary the appearance. Now, I see clones everywhere I go.

[Rowan Amore]

3 hours ago, Rat Luv said:

Is that place.still there?  I may have to have a look.

[Silent Mistwalker]

8 hours ago, Eddy Vortex said:

I just remembered another one: when group chats were stable and everyone's texts went through smoothly.

That must have been a dream Eddy. Group chats have never been stable or smooth. They did get worse as more and more people started hanging out on the grid though.

[Silent Mistwalker]

8 hours ago, Eddy Vortex said:

*stares into the distance*

Yep, those were the days. I remember it wasn't that bad in 2010.  There was an occasional chat lag, but it wasn't nowhere as bad as every day since 2019.

 

You should have been hanging out in EM/PH/FS support all these years. That group chat has always had issues with posts being dropped or out of order, etc. Any large group even back in 2005/6 has those issues. It's always been the same. It just shows up more in the larger groups.

[Love Zhaoying]

10 hours ago, Rat Luv said:

..

 

Me too, Rat. Me too.

[Sassy Kenin]

 

I miss the big sandbox's and brave new world feel as if everyday was something new and super exciting to discover traveling around. I miss the build tools when they were up to date allowing anyone to express themselves, learn and make money with.

 

Second Life often mirrors how many people now feel in real life.

"Grandpa
Tell me 'bout the good old days
Sometimes it feels like
This world's gone crazy
Grandpa, take me back to yesterday
Where the line between right and wrong
Didn't seem so hazy

Did lovers really fall in love to stay
Stand beside each other come what may
Was a promise really something people kept
Not just something they would say
Did families really bow their heads to pray
Did daddies really never go away
Whoa oh Grandpa
Tell me 'bout the good old days

Grandpa
Everything is changing fast
We call it progress
But I just don't know
And Grandpa, let's wander back into the past
And paint me a picture of long ago

Did lovers really fall in love to stay
Stand beside each other come what may
Was a promise really something people kept
Not just something they would say and then forget
Did families really bow their heads to pray
Did daddies really never go away
Whoa oh Grandpa
Tell me 'bout the good old days"

[Rat Luv]

1 hour ago, RowanMinx said:

Is that place.still there?  I may have to have a look.

Haven't been in ages but last time I went, it was still like walking on the moon with all the lag 

I mostly went for Sea Hunt and Mad Monkey Money on the top floor, until LL banned gambling machines.

[CaerolleClaudel]

14 hours ago, Benson Gravois said:

What are some things you miss from the:good old days" of SL?

Pretty much everything, but my frame of reference for the 'good old days' is approximately 2007 - 2010, not the absolute beginning of SL.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

[Penny Patton]

There's only two things I miss.

1. No-mod being so much less prevalent than it is today. Seriously, people claim to want freedom to customize their avatars and use that to justify no limits on av complexity, but at the same time they've happily given up mod rights to paranoid, control-freak content creators who've made it so much more difficult to truly customize an avatar. And for what? Nobody gains anything from the no-mod plague. It does nothing for the content creators except feed their need to control content even after it's been sold to others, and it does absolutely nothing good for the consumer. It's lose/lose.

2. Active communities. Sure, there's some active communities out there still, but it's not like it used to be. There used to be so many more people around engaging with each other in-world. There used to be a whole bunch of role-play sims all packed to the gills with people. These days SL can't seem to support more than a handful at any given time.

That said, I'm under no illusion that the "good old days" were perfect. There's a lot of ways modern SL is better. Features like animesh and experiences were long overdue. A lot of ways it's worse, too (the no-mod plague being the big one), but that's life.

[Candide LeMay]

I miss Starax's wand and a grid that can support such creativity (it was a sad day when LL broke it, thanks Andrew "Throttle" Linden!).

[Fritigern Gothly]

1 hour ago, Candide LeMay said:

I miss Starax's wand and a grid that can support such creativity (it was a sad day when LL broke it, thanks Andrew "Throttle" Linden!).

For those not familiar with that wand, here is an article about what it did:
https://aeneaideas.wordpress.com/2007/02/16/staraxs-wand/

[Adec Alexandria]

I rummy Starax's wand ... umm what do I miss ... I miss playing with Debbie Trilling .... not sure who was around when 'The Wall' was 'constructed' .. oh .. lol .. I just see C.A.R.P The Wall was a production in 2008! 

 

[Adec Alexandria]

I just found this ... remember it was back in 2008! 

 

[Eddy Vortex]

9 hours ago, Rat Luv said:

I'm old enough to remember the "Michael Photorealistic skin".  They were the only low budget option for penniless male noobs.

[BelindaN]

I wasn't here so I don't remember anything.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

I am a little wary of waxing nostalgic about "the good old days." There was a great deal about them that wasn't so "good."

There were, for instance, more griefers, and more of them were really vicious. Groups like Woodbury U and W-Hat were awful, and made some people's lives just absolutely miserable, spilling over in some cases even into RL. The forums here could be like that too: none of the nasty people here now hold a candle to a few of the regulars back then, particularly ca. 2010 or so, when this place oozed toxicity.

And there is absolutely no question that, visually, SL is vastly improved now, thanks to mesh, WL, EEP, and other innovations. I really can't imagine going back to the "old days" in terms of the rendering of the world and its avatars.

But I do miss a few things.

Penny is right: there were more communities in the old days. I have no shortage of friends in-world, and some of them are associated with loosely-knit communities, but the groups to which I belonged, and some of which I ran, were way more active and vibrant then than now. There were more places to simply sit and chat.

And I do miss the joy of in-world creation. I still do some of that, but the degree to which creativity (especially, most obviously, mesh) has become a specialized skill beyond the reach of most residents is a terrible loss. And that so little of it actually happens in-world is a shame as well: I used to love watching people build, or having people watch me build. One of the reasons why SL fashion is in the doldrums, and so many otherwise beautiful sims seem like clones of each other these days is because creation has been centralized in the hand of a few, mostly commercially-oriented people. Crazy stuff doesn't sell in the kind of volume that would make it worthwhile to most mesh creators, so we get a steady stream of the same old same old.

Oh, and I miss AM Radio, and the days when a really inspired and talented artist could be a celebrity. (Although, arguably, that celebrity might have been a reason he left.)

And Torley. I miss Torley.

[Gage Wirefly]

55 minutes ago, Eddy Vortex said:

I'm old enough to remember the "Michael Photorealistic skin".  They were the only low budget option for penniless male noobs.

THIS guy? Oh the memories...lol

[Rolig Loon]

7 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

.... the degree to which creativity (especially, most obviously, mesh) has become a specialized skill beyond the reach of most residents is a terrible loss.

Yes, I agree, not that there was any way to prevent it.  The quality of creations in SL took a quantum leap upwards when mesh was introduced, as everyone knew it would, but those higher-quality items take more skill and specialized tools than the average resident can handle.  It was inevitable that the cadre of real builders and designers in SL would shrink dramatically.  Most of us would become consumers rather than creators. That's the way it works in RL too, so that's not much of a surprise.  The thing that most people didn't expect is that increasing quality would necessarily mean a narrower range of choices, but that too was inevitable, if you think about it. There's a world of difference between filling the grid with amateur builds and clothing created at almost no cost (except for the creators' time) and filling it with professional products that are created and uploaded at substantial cost.

As soon as mesh arrived, I closed my in-world shop and decided not to try to compete with most of the new things coming on the market.  I am a middling-fair mesh creator at best.  I have no idea how to rig mesh clothing, and I can't hope to create normal and specular textures on other objects as smoothly as true professionals can.  My real creative skills are in scripting, so I shifted gears and moved on.  Many of the old-style creators did the same, so the world looks more efficient and clean ... and has less creative diversity.  No Yin without a Yang.  

The bottom line is that I do miss some aspects of SL that were here when I joined in 2007, sometimes wistfully, but I wouldn't go back.  I can say the same thing about RL.

[Tari Landar]

Like many others, I truly miss prim builds, even sculpt+ prim builds. I still build with both, but most others get absolutely no enjoyment from that, and I find it sad, really sad actually. It was a simpler time when mesh wasn't the be all end all of everything, and anything less than mesh is considered to be supbar.

I also miss many people who have long since gone, or simply parted ways, even some people with whom the ways were not parted on the most happy of terms, oddly. 

The original Africa sims. I LOVED that place, more than any other sims I have ever seen in sl. There has been at least a couple replacements, but they have never come anywhere near as good, nor as fun, nor as inviting...sigh.

I miss being able to enjoy sl a bit more. This has nothing to do with the evolution of sl, though, but rather the tremendous deterioration of my own vision (literal vision, not proverbial). It really sucks going blind, even if I've been at least halfway there most of my life, it just...sucks.

Class field trips to Xcite. Yes, really, we (me and a group of friends) used to take new folks there, mostly folks that came over from TSO with us, or after us, people we spent years with over there, to get their first bits. Not only was it a teaching/learning experience, but it was sooooooooo entertaining. "Can you fix my nipples?", "Are these your nipples on the ground", "Oh *****, I lost my ass"... (no longer possible to help others with their bits since the products are no longer transfer lol, but way back when, they were, so, we had fun with them, a LOT of fun)

Exploring sl on a wider scale with friends, sitting on pretty much anything that would let us sit on it, wandering here and there, to and fro, frolicking through the meadows without a care in the world...and then trying to figure out how the hell we ended up there. 

I still miss prim building more than anything, though, I always will. I HATE the approach so many people have to prim building these days, absolutely hate it. I hate it as much as I hate the approach many take towards those who choose not to use a mesh av. I think a huge part of my hatred for others' dislike of prim building is because prim building is one of the things I CAN still do, despite being over 85% blind at this point and I hate that people think so little of one of the only skills I still possess worth a lick in sl, as if I am a lesser creator because I can't do mesh (no depth perception has a huge effect on this)...ugh. I shall shush on that subject though, it makes me very angry (and sometimes skews my opinion of people), perhaps unreasonably so, but angry and opinionated all the same. 

 

 

[Lyssa Greymoon]

The Quiet and The Far Away. Refuge and Expansion.

Voice in Ahern/Morris/Dore/Bonifacio.

Edited December 6, 2020 by Lyssa Greymoon

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

My innocence and wonder.

[ChinRey]

On 12/5/2020 at 5:06 AM, RowanMinx said:

IKR!  What woman doesn't love to twirl in one of those gowns?  There was just something so realistic about a dress/gown that moved as you danced.  

You can still use them if you want to. I do every now and then.

[ChinRey]

7 hours ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

The Quiet and The Far Away. Refuge and Expansion.

Is the Far Away gone????? 😮