SL new user retention, expectation and usability

[Coffee Pancake]

16 hours 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.

No, really, we had this.

We had this a lot.

Need L$ roll a new account.

Automate it. 

Roll a thousand new accounts a day.

Literal free money. At this point, why even bother playing SL.

15 hours ago, Randall Ahren said:

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

Realms is heavily gated. It offers a huge amount of effort for a very tiny reward.

A sign up bonus that offers money at the skill level required by absolute newbies is something very different.

[Onions4Knights]

The problem with SL is that it is very difficult for players to learn. Something like building an avatar has so many pitfalls along the way:

Explaining to someone how rigged mesh needs certain body types.
Learning that to edit a color on an item, you may have to click "Select Face"

Explaining that pressing "Save Outfit" twice doesn't save two copies of the outfit, it just saves the links.

Understanding that if you mess with a no copy item and break it, you don't get a new one.

[Aemeth Lysette]

I'm a user who transitioned out of Second Life to VR, although I still log in sometimes to reconnect with friends now. Here are what makes me log out of SL and into other games:

1. Lag. Lag in loading everything, rather than preloading a map and then teleporting in is a huge drawback for me. My FPS is something I care a lot now since I've moved into using VR with full-body, so everything that works abysmally is going to get the stinkeye from me. This is even when I have render limits of avatars at 20k--the lag simply doesn't stop and I get tired of it.

2. Lack of things to do. Things are a bit more dead around here than they used to be, but I still wander around. Stuff I enjoy are shopping events with original items. I also like going to art events. I thing the animesh horse/mount community is bigger and has more going for it than Second Life gives it credit for; I still feel the riding system for that is second only to Black Desert's horse system.

3. My friends aren't online and they're in VR instead. It tugs me back into VR and I'm like, "oh well, we'll hang out in SL later." Second Life has stuff that makes it fun; LL should lean into this when advertising.

So what's fun about here?

1. It's an easier version of Daz3D. It just is. I hate Daz. I like taking pictures here more if I want realistic avatar imagery.

2. Your avatar is a piloted sim and that can be exploited to be very fun. I always said LL should advertise the "Sims-ish" side of Second Life more. My god, if this game were ported to mobile, it would be formidable. It would get another ten years tacked on to its lifespan!

3. Vehicles and battle sims. Second Life really shines at this, barring sim-crossing hiccups and loading everything on the road as you drive on Mainland.

4. Exploring digital spaces and getting lost. Mainland is a jewel for virtual world exploration. I seriously think this game should at least always stay online or accessible in read-only version so people can pan around and find all kinds of cool stuff, but that's just my opinion.

That's my feedback! I hope the devs are listening in.

[Jennifer Boyle]

On 8/20/2022 at 5:32 PM, Arielle Popstar said:

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.

My personal experience is that when men cannot use CCs to buy lindens, it's because they don't want their wives to know they are in SL.

[Lindal Kidd]

6 hours ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

My personal experience is that when men cannot use CCs to buy lindens, it's because they don't want their wives to know they are in SL.

They probably don't need to worry. The charge is shown as "Linden Research, Inc." If Honey asks "dear, what's this charge?" they can just say it was for some new fuel injectors for the truck.

[Luna Bliss]

17 hours ago, Aemeth Lysette said:

I've moved into using VR with full-body

omg what's going on over there??  😁  

[cunomar]

Seems fair to assume the covid lockdown's must have been beneficial to SL , people were skint and trapped so many returned to this other world because it beats talking to 4 walls .

We are heading into a global recession and many who have never heard of SL will be trapped with no escape . Cater to them and human nature will do the rest . Supermarkets make far more money than any jewellery store just because it has more customers .

[Coffee Pancake]

8 minutes ago, cunomar said:

Seems fair to assume the covid lockdown's must have been beneficial to SL , people were skint and trapped so many returned to this other world because it beats talking to 4 walls .

Marginally.

[Ceka Cianci]

47 minutes ago, cunomar said:

Seems fair to assume the covid lockdown's must have been beneficial to SL , people were skint and trapped so many returned to this other world because it beats talking to 4 walls .

We are heading into a global recession and many who have never heard of SL will be trapped with no escape . Cater to them and human nature will do the rest . Supermarkets make far more money than any jewellery store just because it has more customers .

Well SL did boom during the housing market crash.. But  even during that, it was way less expensive to use SL during that period, than it will be during what's coming..

SL is High dollar even in good times nowadays.  I could buy everything in a triple a creators store, for what it costs for a few outfits nowadays.

I'm sure a good reason for that probably has a lot to do with the work that goes into mesh vs just creating outfits in photoshop..

Still there are a lot out there that just buy someone else's mesh and slap a color on it and sell it for even more.. lol

Edited August 22, 2022 by Ceka Cianci

[Mr Amore]

After a periodic break, when I install SL again there's always a process of reacquainting myself with the avatar and inventory system. It climaxes in a moment of WTF?! when trying to understand it all. Why does dressing avatars need to be so complicated.

I have outfits saved, but somewhere along the line these broke. My avatar hasn't changed clothes in a couple of years because I'll have to remarke every outfits and that's a grueling process.

Female clothing is fitted tighter, consequently they are easier to dress. Male clothing is looser and generally runs into issues matching shirts with pants, and pants with shoes/boots.

Could LL solve these issues? It seriously seems like most Linden avatars are dressed in system clothing from 2005. When you aren't experiencing the same dressing issues as the general population, you won't understand the need for improvement.

And if this is a complication for me, it's going to be a struggle for new users.

 

The last time I created an avatar for testing furniture with, there was Help Island HUD that popped up which I couldn't close. Eventually I reached the end where it listed two methods for closing the HUD. One of those was broken, the second method was to open the toolbar menu, add a 'Help book' icon to the toolbar. Click that button to close the HUD, then remove the button from the toolbar.

Even if I were to imagine the absolute worst UI design conceivable by a demented mind, I couldn't reach these depths. If I really, really hated my audience and wanted to slap them in the face every time a new account was created, this is how I'd humiliate them. And the user experience beyond Help Island doesn't get any better.

Edited August 23, 2022 by Mr Amore

[Rolig Loon]

16 minutes ago, Mr Amore said:

The last time I created an avatar for testing furniture with, there was Help Island HUD that popped up which I couldn't close. Eventually I reached the end where it listed two methods for closing the HUD. One of those was broken, the second method was to open the toolbar menu, add a 'Help book' icon to the toolbar. Click that button to close the HUD, then remove the button from the toolbar.

Even if I were to imagine the absolute worst UI design conceivable by a demented mind, I couldn't reach these depths. If I really, really hated my audience and wanted to slap them in the face every time a new account was created, this is how I'd humiliate them. And the user experience beyond Help Island doesn't get any better.

It sounds like you had a bad experience. From the sound of it, you visited Welcome Island (not Help Island) and were using the Firestorm viewer during the brief period last year before they added the F1 functionality for the Guidebook (which is a floater, not a HUD). You can certainly detach the Guidebook by adding the button to your task bar, as you discovered. Both the F1 option and the Guidebook taskbar button have been in the standard LL viewer since they opened Welcome Island and Welcome Back Island. Even easier, though, you can also remove the Guidebook the way you would remove almost any HUD or floater on your screen:  just click the X in its upper right corner.

[EnCore Mayne]

3 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

It sounds like you had a bad experience.

that, and that a thousand times over should tell you something.

instead, you offer advise and guidance and encouragement. unfortunately, i'm not sure if any of the other 999 poor souls who never exposed their horrifyingly debilitating experiences with SL could benefit from your motherly tsk tsk.

are you listening? (i don't mean to be demeaning, Rolig. it's a far too common response from the forum members to correct the technical off in the weeds newbies. there there, pat them on the head, give them a cookie, and be on with your day. but really. can you not recognize the petty problems we oldbies have overcome are show stoppers to anyone who's not lived through the 20 years of SL's beta torture?)

no one's there when they come to a jarring full stop. the emotional damage can be considerable. enough so so that they may never rise again, or if they do, their attitude might be offensive.

if your kid keeps burning its hand on the stove do you buy a ream of bandages?

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, EnCore Mayne said:

that, and that a thousand times over should tell you something.

instead, you offer advise and guidance and encouragement. unfortunately, i'm not sure if any of the other 999 poor souls who never exposed their horrifyingly debilitating experiences with SL could benefit from your motherly tsk tsk.

are you listening? (i don't mean to be demeaning, Rolig. it's a far too common response from the forum members to correct the technical off in the weeds newbies. there there, pat them on the head, give them a cookie, and be on with your day. but really. can you not recognize the petty problems we oldbies have overcome are show stoppers to anyone who's not lived through the 20 years of SL's beta torture?)

no one's there when they come to a jarring full stop. the emotional damage can be considerable. enough so so that they may never rise again, or if they do, their attitude might be offensive.

if your kid keeps burning its hand on the stove do you buy a ream of bandages?

Putting to one side the (I think) unwarranted accusation leveled against Rolig of condescension, or complacency, or whatever.

I think that there is a tendency for some, and most especially coders of various sorts, to rather assume that what seems "duh, obvious" to them is not so for most of the rest of us.

I've been in SL for 14 years. I've built things here, and even done a teeeeeeeeeeeeny bit of scripting in LSL (mostly by futzing around with open source scripts). But Mr Amore's description of the problems he had with the HUD left my brain hurting a bit. He seems to have been almost as perplexed -- and he's not only experienced here, but is (I take it) a creator.

I have similar issues with the RLV and Experiences. "Don't worry!" people say! "Just [utterly baffling technobabble relating to the viewer] and you'll be fine if anything goes wrong!"

I don't think I'm a stupid person and, as I say, I've mastered a fair amount of SL over the years. But I can experience something akin to an anxiety attack (something to which I'm not especially prone) when I get thrown a series of instructions much more complicated than "Click on stop all animations."

I've also written "articles" for SL photographers on how to do some of the more complicated things with in-viewer photography tools (such as fine-tuning depth of field to make it "realistic"), and I have a reasonably good sense, both from writing them, and from fielding questions afterwards, at how complicated some of this stuff is -- especially across multiple viewers.

I think people nowadays are used to "intuitive" when it comes to digital experiences of most kinds. SL is anything but, and it would be really good to keep that to the forefront of our minds whenever we talk or think about this kind of thing.

[Marigold Devin]

On 8/21/2022 at 5:37 PM, Onions4Knights said:

The problem with SL is that it is very difficult for players to learn. Something like building an avatar has so many pitfalls along the way:

Explaining to someone how rigged mesh needs certain body types.
Learning that to edit a color on an item, you may have to click "Select Face"

Explaining that pressing "Save Outfit" twice doesn't save two copies of the outfit, it just saves the links.

Understanding that if you mess with a no copy item and break it, you don't get a new one.

Replying to your post specifically because it really touched a chord with me, but the rest of the post will be a general observation/opinion.

Too much focus is put on building an avatar, whereas when I was a newbie in 2007 it was all system avatars that were relatively easy (and logical) to edit, even if they were tremendously ugly by todays standards. We were quickly out of the orientation area and finding mates to hang with and swapping notes about how to edit, where to go to explore, meet like-minded people, all of that.

Then some of us got stuck around 2011. So I wouldn't be able to explain to someone about rigged mesh anything, and as for saving outfits ... Ohhh my head hurts. 

The basic problem with Second Life is what are people looking for and expecting when they create their starter avatar and enter for that very first time? What are their hopes and expectations?  

If other, more established residents, seem to be putting the pressure onto newbies somehow by restricting them from entering regions for example because they don't meet the current standards of acceptability, then Second Life has gone the way of the old Butlins holiday camps in my real world. It's become more of a rat race than a simple leisure pursuit open to all with something for everyone.

It was hard enough to learn in 2007. If I was a new starter now I really don't think I would bother. 

And before anyone decides to kick me or yawn because I just won't move with the times, I've just perhaps reached my own personal brick wall. I was always - am always - willing and wanting to learn something new, but only if it has some kind of meaning, validity, and playing dress up dolly in such a complicated way will just never be something I will be willing to invest my spare time in. Trying to convince new people though that this isn't the core element of Second Life, that you MUST have a mesh avatar and all that goes with it and have an acceptable appearance to the majority is what will be causing the main stumbling block nowadays that is limiting new user retention. 

The new Linden Homes are, in my opinion, the best idea Linden Lab ever had. These have really caught on. Again though, it just makes it seem like a massive rat race. buy BUY BUY

And times are getting harder for some of us financially, so that's another reason why we don't need our leisure activities to be costing more. Plus VAT (what the heck is that all about - I pay VAT to the UK government for accessing and spending in an American game?!?!)

 

Edited August 23, 2022 by Marigold Devin

[Rolig Loon]

2 hours ago, EnCore Mayne said:

instead, you offer advise and guidance and encouragement. unfortunately, i'm not sure if any of the other 999 poor souls who never exposed their horrifyingly debilitating experiences with SL could benefit from your motherly tsk tsk.

are you listening? (i don't mean to be demeaning, Rolig. it's a far too common response from the forum members to correct the technical off in the weeds newbies. there there, pat them on the head, give them a cookie, and be on with your day. but really. can you not recognize the petty problems we oldbies have overcome are show stoppers to anyone who's not lived through the 20 years of SL's beta torture?)

no one's there when they come to a jarring full stop. the emotional damage can be considerable. enough so so that they may never rise again, or if they do, their attitude might be offensive.

if your kid keeps burning its hand on the stove do you buy a ream of bandages?

That was rather uncalled for.  I was not talking to a newbie.  I was responding to an experienced resident who posted about an experience that he had in Welcome Island over a year ago, leaving the impression that he was describing something quite recent. His post was full of misinformation because he had never gone back to verify that his year old impressions were still correct.

In fact, as I pointed out, they were not.  It only took the Firestorm crew a couple of weeks after Welcome Island opened before they updated their viewer to have a button on the task bar for the Guidebook and to make the F1 key active to detach the Guidebook. Firestorm users during that brief period did have trouble detaching the Guidebook. However, people using the standard viewer during that period, and TPV users ever since, had no trouble at all. If you decide that you'd rather not see the Guidebook, just click the X and make it go away.

There are many parts of the new user experience that need attention.  I recognize a lot of the same problems that other people have pointed out in this thread. After all, I have been helping newcomers to SL for fifteen years, both in world and in the Answers forum. Many things ought to be fixed, but that does not include posting misleading, out of date information about things that do work as designed and are actually helpful.

[Mr Amore]

7 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

It sounds like you had a bad experience. From the sound of it, you visited Welcome Island (not Help Island) and were using the Firestorm viewer during the brief period last year before they added the F1 functionality for the Guidebook (which is a floater, not a HUD). You can certainly detach the Guidebook by adding the button to your task bar, as you discovered. Both the F1 option and the Guidebook taskbar button have been in the standard LL viewer since they opened Welcome Island and Welcome Back Island. Even easier, though, you can also remove the Guidebook the way you would remove almost any HUD or floater on your screen:  just click the X in its upper right corner.

Thanks Rolig, it's good to hear the experience has improved since! Relatively few people use the official viewer, so I must've been trapped in a Twlight Zone moment whilst the TPVs were catching up.

 

1 hour ago, Marigold Devin said:

Too much focus is put on building an avatar, whereas when I was a newbie in 2007 it was all system avatars that were relatively easy (and logical) to edit, even if they were tremendously ugly by todays standards. We were quickly out of the orientation area and finding mates to hang with and swapping notes about how to edit, where to go to explore, meet like-minded people, all of that.

And significantly cheaper too, creating a pre-mesh avatar was in the region of 5k. Now it's easily 15k to just get started.

If SL could transition to a visual clothing interface, where all of your shirts are displayed as icons, and you click on one to wear it, then for the pants and so on. That would make SLife so much easier for newbies and myself too!

[Lindal Kidd]

@Mr Amore and @EnCore Mayne have a point, though I think EnCore was far too harsh with Rolig.

We old timers do have a tendency to sound like we are "pooh-poohing" SL's problems. The thing is, we cannot fix them; only LL can do that. In the meantime, it does little good to sit around moaning about the things that don't work, or that are harder to do than they might be.

The constructive thing we can do is to explain why things work a certain way, and how to go about getting things done.

So instead of moaning about how hard it is to tuck one's mesh shirt into one's mesh trousers, we post actual working solutions, like:

• Wear a system layer (BoM) shirt with mesh trousers, or
• Buy a complete shirt/pants outfit, where the creator has done the work of tucking in the shirt.

[Coffee Pancake]

6 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

@Mr Amore and @EnCore Mayne have a point, though I think EnCore was far too harsh with Rolig.

We old timers do have a tendency to sound like we are "pooh-poohing" SL's problems. The thing is, we cannot fix them; only LL can do that. In the meantime, it does little good to sit around moaning about the things that don't work, or that are harder to do than they might be.

We've been making excuses for janky systems, p-poor usability and zero attention paid to accessibility for almost 20 years.

I think it's more constructive to stop doing that and make it clear that we expect better from LL.

 

Lets start with screen reader support in the viewer, even if that's just for chat and IM.

 

[animats]

41 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

We've been making excuses for janky systems, p-poor usability and zero attention paid to accessibility for almost 20 years. I think it's more constructive to stop doing that and make it clear that we expect better from LL.

LL has been making excuses for their poor quality for years. But no one has figured out an effective way to apply enough pressure to them to get long-standing bugs fixed.

What the competing "metaverse" crowd is doing is worth some attention. The first generation, Horizon, Decentraland, and Cryptovoxels, looked awful. The NFT clown car has crashed. But that's not the end.

A new generation of systems is coming along, based on Unreal Engine 5, and those look a lot better in their demo videos. But they have to solve the big seamless dynamically downloaded user-alterable world problem, which is not something you get out of the box with UE5. So far, none of them are really open for business.

On the ease of use front, most of the newer systems are accessed through a web browser. No install needed. The easy onboarding makes it easier to get new users started. Some such systems render in the browser, and some render on a remote server and just send video. Anything that can run Netflix can access those systems. The problem with remote rendering is cost. Each user is using an rackmount version of a gamer PC in a data center somewhere. The whole server. So you need a lot of servers. This costs. So, those systems are either expensive for the user ($20-$30/month), have severe limits on connect time, or are running as loss leaders.

So far, there's nothing out there, except maybe VRChat, which is really better than SL. But dollar amounts in 9 figures are being spent in that space. Someone might get it right soon.

 

[Lindal Kidd]

Once again, with feeling:

I don't disagree with @Coffee Pancake. But we are not (I hope) "making excuses" for LL. And while "making it clear that we expect better from them" is certainly a Good Thing, it does not address the immediate problem of the user, e.g., how to tuck his shirt into his trousers.

It is not making excuses to explain how things are, and how to work with what we have.

[animats]

36 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

it does not address the immediate problem of the user, e.g., how to tuck his shirt into his trousers.

Literally solving that problem, getting clothing layering to Just Work, is really hard. Roblox has solved it, so it's not impossible. But they have a serious R&D operation.

[EnCore Mayne]

wake up.

SL has so many problems and difficulties, answering the narrow tip of the iceberg of pleadings on these forums can be a career in and of itself. i bristle at reading the same responses by the same people to the same problems.

maybe one day the Lab might venture to open their doors to the unwashed again. remember the momentous revolution surrounding viewer 2? before the upheaval to conform to a corporately managed pie in the sky adventure there were a chosen few who held LL's feet to the fire.

as it is, i love the nameless, faceless lab rats when they check off a JIRA report and i hate them for letting things pile up and go unnoticed.

i know everyone's doing what they can to improve the situation. asking for more is not viable. we're all terribly overwhelmed with the nonsense being what it is.

that being said, i wanted to ask Coffee (and any other lurking coders): can you craft a viewer from what skills and resources you presently have? if so, can you conceive of a BASIC type newbie viewer that prevents a new user from being overloaded with hypertechnical mumbo jumbo that seems to populate the menus as they are now?

[Scylla Rhiadra]

17 minutes ago, EnCore Mayne said:

i wanted to ask Coffee (and any other lurking coders): can you craft a viewer from what skills and resources you presently have? if so, can you conceive of a BASIC type newbie viewer that prevents a new user from being overloaded with hypertechnical mumbo jumbo that seems to populate the menus as they are now?

@Coffee Pancake is one the leads in the Catznip viewer team.

So I think the answer is "yes"?

Edited August 24, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Alwin Alcott]

29 minutes ago, EnCore Mayne said:

can you craft a viewer from what skills and resources you presently have? if so, can you conceive of a BASIC type newbie viewer that prevents a new user from being overloaded with hypertechnical mumbo jumbo that seems to populate the menus as they are now?

i think many "oldies" remember the basic LL viewer, and it's success (not)

[Coffee Pancake]

8 minutes ago, EnCore Mayne said:

that being said, i wanted to ask Coffee (and any other lurking coders): can you craft a viewer from what skills and resources you presently have? if so, can you conceive of a BASIC type newbie viewer that prevents a new user from being overloaded with hypertechnical mumbo jumbo that seems to populate the menus as they are now?

The problem we have with making a clean break SL viewer that presents things in completely new ways is three fold ... 

Linden Lab servers - LL run the servers, which are developed to run hand in hand with their viewer, the servers are engineered to only send the information the Linden viewer needs in that moment (and the viewer is dumb like a rock). The further we get from the Linden way of operating in the viewer, the more frequently we find we need data that we just don't have .. and then have to try and come up with hacky ways to trick the server into sending it. This gets complicated and becomes prone to random breakage.

Linden Lab code updates - LL publish a lot of updates to their viewer, the further we get from that base the more work is required on our part to 'merge' their changes into our code .. simply put, we have to take their changes to maintain compatibility with their grid, but not the parts that undo the work we have done, and potentially adjust our code to work with their new code. This is a huge amount of work, which leads neatly into ... 

Our time - There are only so many TPV developers with the skills and deep knowledge of how the Second Life platform operates (enough to count on your fingers) to do the work to build this whole new viewer experience, there is no pay or monetary reward and it can easily end up being a full time job (in some cases, a full time job on top of an actual full time job because people still have to eat).

 

A complete rework would be a huge undertaking and is well beyond the scope of what talented hobby developers can hope to accomplish, for free, in their free time, that they could be spending doing anything else.

Right now, we (Catznip) basically break even with donations covering hosting & bandwidth costs, and because we're a two person team, it's really easy for RL to happen and take away all the spare time we've intended to work on viewer stuff (Kitty is in the bad habit of using her holiday time from work to work on the viewer).

Even the mighty Firestorm is entirely volunteer run and probably breaks even on hosting and licensing costs.

 

If there was a way we could earn a living working on these projects then yes, absolutely it would be possible.