Avination vs Secondlife Is there a Difference

[Wolfbane Baxton]

I've been wandering around the web here and there, but I keep coming across all these secondlife look alikes. Then there is Avination, is there any real difference between Avination and Secondlife? Aside from what they call their currency? SL = L$/ AN = C$?

[Kolby Nissondorf]

They are all based off of Second Life's engine, just a different grid and different companies behind them

[Yoki Enoch]

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Wolfbane Baxton wrote:

I've been wandering around the web here and there, but I keep coming across all these secondlife look alikes. Then there is Avination, is there any real difference between Avination and Secondlife? Aside from what they call their currency? SL = L$/ AN = C$?

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Yes there is one big difference. There is hardly anyone on Avination.

[Wolfbane Baxton]

Yes I don't see the point of all these companies making all of these secondlife look alikes, their bound to fail because everyone is already attached to and use to regular secondlife.

[Cinnamon Lohner]

Actually the engines are a bit different now.  They come from the same open source code, but LL has a ton of other stuff in their server code these days.  Inworldz, Avination and others don't have many of the newer innovations in their server engines.

--Cinn

[WADE1 Jya]

Yes very small populations indeed.... depth of content is another big difference between the two environments.

Many content creators & developers are a little wary to enter third-party grids since, aside from the teeny/nonexistent customer base, you are handing the third party running the grid the keys to your business & all content you import there... not much recourse if bad things happen. SL is much more secure & increasingly more so now with Rodvik at the wheel so most creators are happy to be exclusively in Second Life :matte-motes-asleep-2:

[Kolby Nissondorf]

At least on my private grid, item are very similar to the current technologyfrom Second Life.

 

But of course, they are bound to fail, unless Second Life takes a nose dive and burns.

[Persephone Emerald]

As long as you don't have to pay for the service, I think checking out other non-Linden grids now & then is a good idea.  So far Second Life far surpasses all of them, IMHO.  But some day, if SL goes under because of bad management, most of us will want someplace else to go, and then one or more of the other grids will pick up where SL left off.

[Ahania]

Pardon a Newbie opinion, but if Second Life tanks, Avination would long before have preceded it. By the way, as a Newbie, I wonder what more experienced heads think about the longevity of Second Life. We all know it won't last forever; nothing does. I have been here less than a month, but am captivated. I face a steep learning curve, I can see that, and would hate to see it die anytime soon.

[Void Singer]

SL still has more life in it than most online games, so you can expect that it'll be around at least for as long most games, probably by double.... feel free to re-estimate that as time passes.

(note: that doesn't mean any specific user won't get fed up long before then, but the core of die hard users will exist for quite some time)

[Claireschen Hesten]

on the face of it SL and Avination are more or less the same aside from currency you can log in wander around tp chat all the basic SL stuff but i don't think there is any incentive for people that don't have a ton of L$ or RL money they can convert to C$ to be there. to give away freebies is pretty much forbidden not allowed at all you get a choice between one of two starter av's unless you put money in to avination you can't de-noobify in the shopping area on the welcome sim

[Lyra Blackthorne]

I would love to see one of these worlds actually grow to but they need support and as a merchant it is really a catch 22.  While I want to see an alternative to SL, it takes all my free time from RL just to support the business I already have. I keep wanting to open a 2nd in Avination but with RL and SL having a 3rd life just seems out of reach.

[Ahania]

This thread seems to have stalled, but my question about the longevity of Second Life remains. A merchant unable to commit to a Third Life, but who still continues to commit substantial time and energy to Second Life, suggests that many people are still pulling for this place, and makes me all the less inclined to look elsewhere. In Second Life, what I have seen so far is, among other things, an extraordinary work of collectively-created art that should be preserved for millennia. But does the bulk of humanity know, or care? How long will it be here? My question remains. Should a 'newbie' commit to this? Will it still be here in thirty or forty years?

[Phil Deakins]

Imo:-

Yes, a newbie should commit to this grid rather than others that are based on this grid, because the others simpy haven't taken off and will always lag behind SL because LL continues to create new features while others are reliant on merely copying LL's creations.

No, SL will not be around in 30 or 40 years time - at least not as we know it now. But 30 or 40 years is a very long time and the idea of SL folding in 5 or 10 years time shouldn't prevent anyone from committing to it now.

I wouldn't expect SL to grow though. It stopped growing a couple of years ago and, although "display names" was successful in getting many more sign-ups, those sign-ups didn't increase the "using" population. All it did was prevent the slow decline to some extent.

[Ahania]

Here is an answer, thank you!

A further question -- should a newbie commit to this, rather than some entirely different activity? And, if Second Life dies, will someone preserve the data, so that someone with greater interest and resources could decide to revive it, out of amusement if nothing else? Right now I am spending more time than I can afford just exploring landscapes, and it is clear that enormous creative energy has been expended here.

'It stopped growing a couple of years ago' is a chilling remark. Must it be so?

[Phil Deakins]

It depends on whether or not the newbie finds SL to be a desirable hobby/passtime. That's what SL is - a hobby/passtime. It doesn't include any gameplay so it can't be compared with systems like World of Warcraft. If an SL-like hobby or passtime is desireable, then SL is the best place to do it.

SL usership slowly declined over a lengthy period of time until the low end of the day was only getting 33k simultaneous users - it was previously much higher than that. Once in a while it would drop to 32k. These days (since the "display names" were introduced), that number always drops to 32k. I usually see it down to just over 32k so it may even drop to 31k occasionally but I haven't seen that. That's what I meant by "display names" stopping or slowing the rate of decline, which was already slow, even though they did attract a load of extra sign-ups when they were launched. The purpose of "display names", which most Lindens didn't want, has failed, or it has merely slowed/slopped the rate of decline. What it hasn't done is build usership up from Facebook users, which was it's purpose.

[Storm Clarence]

Phil, well written.  

Why would 'display names' increase registration?  Or why was it thought that it may increase registration?  

Or, for that matter, why did it slow the rate of decline?

Is it that I am not 'from' the gaming / FB world that I don't know the answers to the above?

[Dresden Ceriano]

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Ahania wrote:

And, if Second Life dies, will someone preserve the data, so that someone with greater interest and resources could decide to revive it, out of amusement if nothing else?

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Almost everything in SL has been created by it's residents, therefore it's the individual creators that hold the IP rights to most of the stuff here. Because of this, anyone wanting to revive it, as you say, would have to start from scratch as far as content is concerned. Just as any other world (commonly referred to as a grid) that exists now, such as Avination, has had to do. So if SL should die, every creator would then have to decide if they would wish to move to another grid, and if so, which one.

There may come a time when someone sets up a system that will allow you to transport between grids and take your inventory with you to which ever grid you visit. This could open up a whole new world of possibilities and possibly even lead to the death of SL as we know it... of course this is just speculation on my part.

...Dres

[Phil Deakins]

The reason why LL introduced display names, even though they didn't actually want them, was to attract people from Facebook. Facebook has a "real names" rule and Facebook accounts using SL names aren't allowed because they aren't real names. So people couldn't "link" their facebook accounts with their SL names. LL wanted people to be able to do that and, hopefully, attract people from Facebook, so they came up with display names, so that SL accounts would be SL names but people's real names can be displayed.

I don't know for sure that it slowed the rate of decline - which was already slow. What I do know is that display names did produce a load of sign-ups after it was launched, and it looked like the idea was working. It's now quite a while since the launch and I see concurrency at the trough end of the day only about 1k lower than it was before display names. The rate of decline was already slow but not slow enough that it would only have dropped ~1k in the display names period. So it follows (to me) that display names either stopped the decline or slowed it down even more. What display names haven't done is increase concurrency - so the idea failed.

[Storm Clarence]

Phil, thank you for taking the time to explain.  

Maybe if LL read this forum a little more often they would have realized display names were not such a hot idea.   Again, thanks for the explanation.  

[Dresden Ceriano]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

The reason why LL introduced display names, even though they didn't actually want them, was to attract people from Facebook. Facebook has a "real names" rule and Facebook accounts using SL names aren't allowed because they aren't real names. So people couldn't "link" their facebook accounts with their SL names. LL wanted people to be able to do that and, hopefully, attract people from Facebook, so they came up with display names, so that SL accounts would be SL names but people's real names can be displayed.

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Is this a theory of yours or do you know this for fact? I know LL can sometimes be strategically incompetent, but this seems a bit extreme even for them. That being said, it wouldn't totally shock me if this was indeed the case.

One thing about new sign-ups after display names were launched... how much of that increase can be attributed to current residents rushing in to create new accounts, trying to snatch up names before someone else did? I would think that had a lot to do with it.

...Dres

[Jaylin Wytchwood]

I tried another clone lastly, Inworldz.. a whoooooping 123 People online... whow.. great.

An still you hear from the next super-new mini network now and then, who has "That great Idea"....

As long as every developer does its own world, they are bound to fail. If all the Open Grid clones band together in 1 big alternate grid, then. maybe then they could even begin to nibble om SL`s heels in size.

 

 

[Dresden Ceriano]

I think display names were a great idea, especially for married couples that wanted to share the same name or people that didn't necessarily care for the name they picked in the first place. It was the implementation I had a problem with.

If they were going to go through the trouble of creating a new naming system, there's no reason they couldn't have made it so that you could pick both a first name and a last name. Though I suspect it might have something to do with other grids being able to do that then link to their SL name (for ATMs that transfer linden to other grids and such)... I can see them wanting to put a stop to that.

...Dres

[Storm Clarence]

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Dresden Ceriano wrote:

I think display names were a great idea, especially for married couples that wanted to share the same name...

 

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But, but you can only change the name once a week...most SL marriages last a day or two.  

[Ishtara Rothschild]

One major difference is that neither Linden Lab nor their customers feel the need to advertise Second Life in Avination forums.