SL new user retention, expectation and usability

[animats]

On 8/15/2022 at 4:20 PM, LittleMe Jewell said:

 We do get questions in the forums quite a bit about how to get a job.

[animats]

Some things I tell frustrated new users. Things the tutorials don't tell them:

• When you have an outfit you like, go to the T-shirt menu and save it with the "Save As" button. You can now go back to that avatar and clothing at any time, and recover from any clothing emergencies.
• Arriving in Second Life is like arriving in a huge suburb where you don't know anybody. Second Life is about the size of Los Angeles and has 30,000 to 50,000 people in it. It's not empty, but the people are spread out over a huge area.
• Second Life is indifferent to you. The system won't make you do anything. No one will give you a quest. No one will attack you. You can stand still forever if you want. There are suggestions of things to do at new user areas. There are destination guides. There is a search function in the toolbar. None of that is forced on you. You have to work to find stuff to do.
• You will meet jerks in new user areas. They're annoying, but can't really do much. If this is a problem for you, take the "Avatar Safety" class at Caledon Oxbridge.
• The company that runs Second Life, Linden Lab, doesn't interfere much with what people do. They're like City Hall. Most people problems are handled by landowners, who can throw people off their parcels of land. Club owners do that.

[Randall Ahren]

40 minutes ago, animats said:

Maybe they really want to know, is how to grind so that they don't have to put real money into the game.

[Rolig Loon]

Just now, Randall Ahren said:

Maybe they really want to know, is how to grind so that they don't have to put real money into the game.

Sometimes that's true, so you explain about looking in the InWorld Employment forum or other places for jobs that meet their skill set. The first line in that Caledon sign is up front about the low wages you can expect, but sometimes that's all a newbie wants or needs at first.  Giving a newbie information about the LindeX is a good idea, though.  Whether they use it immediately or not, it tells them what their options are.

[Arielle Popstar]

3 minutes ago, Randall Ahren said:

Maybe they really want to know, is how to grind so that they don't have to put real money into the game.

Or even able to put money into the game by virtue of not having or having access to credit services like CC's or Paypal because of having a spotty credit history. That became even more difficult when 3rd party exchanges were banned as at least some pre-pay credit cards were usable for them. Fortunately those problems are over for me today but back when I started in S/L (2009) that was a factor that led me to Opensimulator for most of my virtual living.

[simplemint]

I'm one of those people that SL couldn't retain, at least when it comes to the in-world experience. I still lurk on the forums because I'm interested in checking in on what's happening in-world. I still check the blogs and YouTube videos of the SL creators I enjoy. But I haven't logged into SL since late 2021 and I don't anticipate I will be doing it again anytime soon.

I think there's lots of great things about SL - which is why I still keep up with it - but it's not a place where I get a great deal of enjoyment anymore. 

What about the time beyond the first 10 minutes, when a newbie decides they like SL enough to check it out but they're not fully invested? That was the case with me. I was in and out of SL for about two years. Clearly I'm still invested enough to be typing out this post, but I wasn't invested enough to keep on going for long periods of time.

The only expectations I had of SL was what I'd seen in YouTube videos from people like Meela Vanderbuilt and Carmen King. They made (and still make) SL look like a really cool place to be. I also expected that it'd be a fun hobby that I could enjoy and relax in.

I soon realized that I couldn't have that cool experience I'd seen, and it wasn't a fun hobby, for a number of reasons. Maybe this is very personal to me, but maybe others who have disconnected from SL feel similarly. 

TL;DR: The question shouldn't be about what a new user needs to do differently to be interested in SL (like being less about instant gratification, or working harder). The question should be about what SL can do to reach out to the user. 

My issues were:

There was too much lag and I didn't want to have to invest in a new device just to play SL. 

I think expectations about device suitability can be made more clear from the beginning. Their newbie experience won't be as nice-looking as Meela Vanderbuilt's, or any other screenshot or video of SL they've seen. And it might never be. If a device isn't suitable, working on improving lag as much as is possible in-world so that someone's experience isn't crappy would be nice.

To have fun, I had to spend more money than I would have preferred. I overall found SL to be quite expensive and didn't care for the micro-transaction model.

Again, making it clear that SL is a free-to-play virtual world/game/whatever you want to call it, and that all the cool things you see in SL pictures are not free may help to address expectations. Everything costs.

For people who have experience with games, many free-to-play games offer the possibility for someone to have fun without having to make a big effort to seek out every single freebie out there. These people don't expect to have to learn how to navigate a marketplace, find a place like the Free Dove, or scour the grid just to have fun for peanuts. Making it easier to find freebie/cheap items, or at least teaching them how to get there, can help. The opaqueness of SL in this (and many areas) really threw me off as a newbie. 

Similarly, pointing newbies to ways where they can make money in-world can help them find something to do, and at least feel like spending money on cool stuff in SL isn't completely unattainable. Is fishing, dancing, or any other SL job the most efficient way of making Linden, no, but at least it's something. 

Not feeling a sense of community in SL and therefore, not feeling particularly connected to the in-world experience

One way to retain people is to make them feel connected to your thing. You want to give them a reason to keep on checking your thing out. I do still feel connected to my favourite SL creators and I guess I'm just nosy which is why I'm here, but I don't feel any strong connection to the in-world SL. There wasn't any one activity that really gripped me, no social groups I enjoyed hanging out with, and so forth. 

Helping to guide newbies towards groups that can match their interest, or giving them tools needed to find those people, may be able to help. I never was able to figure out where anyone under the age of 25 and with my interests was hanging out, for example. But I didn't have to go very far to find that same demographic in other hobby communities.

For more introverted people who don't really care about the socializing aspect, "groups" can be replaced with "activities". Something as simple as driving in SL can be tough to figure out for someone who's new. It took me so long to even figure out how to get to mainland and what 'the grid' was. I had to do a lot of Googling outside of SL to figure it out, and I don't think a newbie should have to do that. 

It will require effort on a person's part to find people or find activities, but it shouldn't be an overwhelming and strenuous one. And I do think that it feels that way for newbies, or even people who spent longer in-world like I did. I'm crocheting a cardigan right now and that felt easier than figuring out how to drive in-world!

More generally, helping newbies figure out how to deal with griefers and other mean people could also help. It's not the most encouraging thing to be relatively new to something, then not know what tools are available in SL to deal with these things. I ran into more 'nasties' in SL than I typically do in other hobbies, even in other online spaces. In-world SL just... wasn't a friendly place for me. 

Edited August 20, 2022 by simplemint

[Randall Ahren]

40 minutes ago, simplemint said:

There was too much lag and I didn't want to have to invest in a new device just to play SL. 

SL is one of the more expensive free games. Not everyone has a couple thousand USD to drop on a new PC with a powerful graphics card. Even that won't get rid of all the lag; just some of it.

 

47 minutes ago, simplemint said:

Not feeling a sense of community in SL and therefore, not feeling particularly connected to the in-world experience

The Lindens could address this at the beginning by paying noobs L$ to teach other, even new noobs. So the noobs build community by helping each other.

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, Randall Ahren said:

SL is one of the more expensive free games. Not everyone has a couple thousand USD to drop on a new PC with a powerful graphics card. Even that won't get rid of all the lag; just some of it.

Strangely, sometimes a better PC makes the lag worse.  I probably just don't know how to fix my settings.  Not a techie here.

[Ceka Cianci]

15 minutes ago, Randall Ahren said:

SL is one of the more expensive free games. Not everyone has a couple thousand USD to drop on a new PC with a powerful graphics card. Even that won't get rid of all the lag; just some of it.

 

The Lindens could address this at the beginning by paying noobs L$ to teach other, even new noobs. So the noobs build community by helping each other.

They can't give free accounts money when they enter though..There won't be any names left to get, after that would get gamed to death.. hehehe

[Coffee Pancake]

7 minutes ago, Randall Ahren said:

SL is one of the more expensive free games. Not everyone has a couple thousand USD to drop on a new PC with a powerful graphics card. Even that won't get rid of all the lag; just some of it.

If you're going to play games on a PC, you're going to need a PC that can do it .. that's not really the fault of SL, even if SL does deliver a lower graphical fidelity compared to other similarly hardware taxing titles.

Before SL my hobby was 3d rendering with a free raytracer .. that sent me out shopping for a new computer more than once to try and shave hours (or in some cases days) off the render time. These days, free blender has me wishing I could afford a new GPU every few days.

 

7 minutes ago, Randall Ahren said:

The Lindens could address this at the beginning by paying noobs L$ to teach other, even new noobs. So the noobs build community by helping each other.

They can't give newbies actual L$, people will just roll hundreds and hundreds of accounts. Even for just 50L a time. Even if they add hoops and make it a pain in the butt.

[LittleMe Jewell]

2 hours ago, animats said:

While this is true, some folks don't want to put payment info in right away, and some just don't have a credit card or even a bank account (yes, shocking as that is).  

While hosting at a club doesn't pay crap, some people really do enjoy the socializing of it and getting a few L$ on the side.

 

[Randall Ahren]

11 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

They can't give free accounts money when they enter though..There won't be any names left to get, after that would get gamed to death.. hehehe

They can afford a few L$ for new accounts teaching other noobs, something on the order of what residents earn by fishing or camping. How much is a new account worth to Linden Labs? Every resident has a dollar value over their lifetime.

[Ceka Cianci]

2 minutes ago, Randall Ahren said:

They can afford a few L$ for new accounts teaching other noobs, something on the order of what residents earn by fishing or camping. How much is a new account worth to Linden Labs? Every resident has a dollar value over their lifetime.

New accounts do get paid with tier, but they have to be premium to get that..

Free accounts, they can't do it or it will kill registration because of the gaming that would happen..

There would be a flood of registrations just trying to get that money. it would be in their best interest to find another way because that would kill us off on new blood coming in.

[Arielle Popstar]

6 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

New accounts do get paid with tier, but they have to be premium to get that..

Free accounts, they can't do it or it will kill registration because of the gaming that would happen..

There would be a flood of registrations just trying to get that money. it would be in their best interest to find another way because that would kill us off on new blood coming in.

I was under the impression that LL knew who our alts were from the viewer information given in the in the connection to the server. At the very least they know from the IP address though of course that could be a family member but still, there has to be way of limiting the gaming of it. Imvu has managed to do it for years so maybe a Linden needs to go over there and see how it works without getting bankrupted.

Edited August 21, 2022 by Arielle Popstar

[simplemint]

42 minutes ago, Randall Ahren said:

SL is one of the more expensive free games. Not everyone has a couple thousand USD to drop on a new PC with a powerful graphics card. Even that won't get rid of all the lag; just some of it

Perhaps LL doesn't want SL to be known as "one of the more expensive free games" (even though it is), and that's why they don't communicate it.

I mean, fair enough if SL can only be run with a more powerful computer and a computer like mine isn't going to cut it. That just means that SL won't have much of a chance of retaining users on computers like mine, who don't have the money to spend on new computers for gaming only. 

One problem is that a lot of people who already have PCs with powerful graphic cards may already be gamers - and that's why they have such a system - but I think there's a lot about SL which may turn off people who come from a strong gaming background. So retention for this group is difficult as well. They'd expect that their powerful PC would lead them to have no lag at all... which is a problem when, as you mention, even a powerful computer doesn't erase lag. 

42 minutes ago, Randall Ahren said:

The Lindens could address this at the beginning by paying noobs L$ to teach other, even new noobs. So the noobs build community by helping each other.

It's hard for me to express what community I was missing from SL, but I can tell you that just having people showing me around wouldn't have scratched that itch for community. 

It can be useful to get noobs to meet other noobs so they can learn and explore together, instead of having a noob with an oldbie who might not be able to explain clearly, or who might have so much knowledge/stuff to show off that the noob gets overwhelmed. One of the issues I found was that many oldbies weren't able to clearly explain things, or got frustrated when noobs expressed that they weren't satisfied with SL/couldn't understand. And maybe that wouldn't happen so much with noob teachers. 

But at the same time, the noobs would have to be compatible socially with some similar interests, similar tastes, and so forth for the relationship to stick beyond the noob phase.

What happens after the noob phase when the noobs think they've learnt all they can from one another, but the noob players still feel like they aren't attached to SL? Or if the noob feels that their noob teacher is rude, unpleasant, and perhaps a representation of the SL userbase? 

I understand there are concerns with people gaming the system but giving at least a little bit of Linden or directing noobs to places where they can earn it (like a fishing game) could be decent retention tactics.

Edited August 21, 2022 by simplemint

[Ceka Cianci]

3 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I was under the impression that LL knew who out alts were from the viewer information given in the in the connection to the server. At the very least they know from the IP address though of course that could be a family member but still, there has to be way of limiting the gaming of it. Imvu has managed to do it for years so maybe a Linden needs to go over there and see how it works without getting bankrupted.

it could be a coffee shop or a university too.. I mean that won't just be some SL user inside SL working a bunch of bots.. That will be the internet and everything that comes with it gaming at the front gate.  you can bet there will be a way they can game the hell out of it.

[Randall Ahren]

8 minutes ago, simplemint said:

But at the same time, the noobs would have to be compatible socially with some similar interests, similar tastes, and so forth for the relationship to stick beyond the noob phase.

That's never going to happen, ever. Maybe eharmony has achieved that (I doubt it), but certainly no other platform I know of.

[Arielle Popstar]

One thing I think should be considered is the ability for a land or parcel owner to have the ability to block in and outgoing IM's. I realize that will pee some off but in the interests of getting some local chatter going would help enormously to let people see some socialization going on in this supposedly Social world. As an example when I want to be involved with some local chatter with a group of nearby residents, I wind up going to another Grid to do so, where local chatter is much more likely then any region/club I know of in S/L.

[Randall Ahren]

3 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

it could be a coffee shop or a university too.. I mean that won't just be some SL user inside SL working a bunch of bots.. That will be the internet and everything that comes with it gaming at the front gate.  you can bet there will be a way they can game the hell out of it.

It wouldn't even be worth the cost of the electricity. How many people are gaming the fishing spots where you earn 10 L$ per hour or some absurdly low amount?

[Arielle Popstar]

6 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

it could be a coffee shop or a university too.. I mean that won't just be some SL user inside SL working a bunch of bots.. That will be the internet and everything that comes with it gaming at the front gate.  you can bet there will be a way they can game the hell out of it.

True. There is also mac addresses, but yes, i understand the potential for gaming but still as I mentioned before, there are other gaming platforms that have managed it without suffering as a consequence, so it has to be possible to do.

[Randall Ahren]

10 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

True. There is also mac addresses, but yes, i understand the potential for gaming but still as I mentioned before, there are other gaming platforms that have managed it without suffering as a consequence, so it has to be possible to do.

Linden Labs managed to provide the residents with Realms without bankrupting the organization.

[Rowan Amore]

38 minutes ago, Randall Ahren said:

Linden Labs managed to provide the residents with Realms without bankrupting the organization.

And they now require payment info on file and used because...gaming the system.

[Ceka Cianci]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

True. There is also mac addresses, but yes, i understand the potential for gaming but still as I mentioned before, there are other gaming platforms that have managed it without suffering as a consequence, so it has to be possible to do.

I don't think they'll do it. But if they do it's their world.. hehehe

[Ceka Cianci]

1 hour ago, Randall Ahren said:

Linden Labs managed to provide the residents with Realms without bankrupting the organization.

Ya but that's different than just handing them money at the door.. They can make money all kinds of ways in SL.. Camping used to be a huge attraction for new users.. They've always had ways for anyone to make money.. Still all those got gamed but they never put the risk at the gate like handing money at the door would.

[rasterscan]

On 8/15/2022 at 10:18 AM, Lola500 Ghost said:

I logged on and stayed because I happened to wonder into the Shelter and there were people who helped me to dance and just gave basic information. We were so many newbies there we all instantly bonded. I loved that I could dance and chat and listen to good music and then I discovered I could dress cute too. 

I was lucky enough to stumble upon 'the shelter' when I was new too. It was brilliant with the instant line dance poseballs. And very friendly too. I wonder if it's still going. Anyway it certainly kept me logging in for more