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Bring back Ratings!! - A Proposal


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3 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

SL has been spinning it's wheels for almost 20 years and it has failed to show sustainable growth. We get people in the door just fine, but we can't keep them engaged. Retention is a systemic problem that can only be addressed with systemic solutions.

I fail to see how this will solve SL's ills for retention.  Not even PBR with it's reflections will keep people for long because reflections are not important to most people.  Reflections are meaningless.   

My idea of having real life popular artist's concerts is a good idea.  The concert could be streamed from YouTube all over the grid and you sell tickets.  My idea could very well bring people in and keep them.  

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New people trying SL for the first time likely won't be premium, so this won't appeal to them at all.

I'm also not convinced SL is suffering from a lack of social activity. I'm the type who uses SL primarily as a creative outlet, and yet I'm still constantly being notified of social gatherings and events. Not just clubs - but story/book readings, live music performances, roleplay events, gaming sessions, etc.

Chat has moved on from standing around yapping in local (in some instances - though there are some places that existed up until very recently where that was quite common, too) and some communities now gather in alternate places like Discord or voice, but they still exist and still gather in-world.

 

8 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

My idea of having real life popular artist's concerts is a good idea.  The concert could be streamed from YouTube all over the grid and you sell tickets.  My idea could very well bring people in and keep them.  

Who is going to be able to pay them? It's not like your average resident has that Fortnite money. 😂

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7 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Who is going to be able to pay them? It's not like your average resident has that Fortnite money. 😂

There are people of all incomes here, even millionaires are on SL.  As far as a price for tickets, I don't have any price in mind at this time as it's not a worked plan.  However, just think of the price of real concert tickets.  Also, any live artist's who do a concert for SL that goes thru YouTube or whatever (Live Wire maybe which is much cheaper), that SL exclusive concert could play many, many times...it wouldn't have to be just once...so that dilutes the price of what a ticket might hypothetically cost.  But, I think @Coffee Pancake should take the idea to the devs and see if they can do anything with the idea rather continue to go off topic.  So, I'm giving my counter proposal to @Coffee Pancake only as she'd have to bring it to the devs.  People could also hear the concert on their phone.

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6 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Would this work to bring back more jobs and get rid of bots?  

@Coffee Pancake, you had written on the forum that you hang with the devs.  We don't need the devs to create this idiotic status symbol thing that generates 100 linden per month.  We need the devs to make the lighting better and get rid of bump and shiny together...things like that.  

7 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

My idea of having real life popular artist's concerts is a good idea.  The concert could be streamed from YouTube all over the grid and you sell tickets.  My idea could very well bring people in and keep them.  

These are both myths .. and sadly a pervasive ones.

  • SL would be great if only they fix the bugs or add this new feature.
  • SL would be great if only we did this cool event or built this thing.

Demonstrably not true at all.

We can rearrange the contents of the engine room all day long and it doesn't move the needle. Build and they will come is a sad lie. Sansar pinned it's entire future on cool events, no one went.

People don't stick around because there aren't enough bear traps disguised as shiny deckchairs. MMOs get this right, they litter the place with bear traps shiny deck chairs and the players hate them .. but they still participate and everyone wins.

 

Bellisseria is a shiny deckchair. A set of rules motivated by something everyone could get cheaply anywhere else, a house. You think you're picking out a home & community to live in, you're not, you're accepting a limited rule set in exchange for perceived social outcomes tied to a subscription that invokes the very worst dark patterns.

Bellisseria works because it ties hope and emotional invested to a subscription.

But we don't think about it like that because we enjoy the emotional investment and social outcomes. Even though only a tiny fraction of Belli home owners are part of the Belli community. Even people who didn't get a Belli home benefit from the huge uptick around Belli homes.

 

This proposal is also shiny deck chair. Broader outcomes are what matters.

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12 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

In general, I'm leery of this kind of "code as social engineering." And I don't really see much benefit in introducing a new activity that is essentially worthless in its own right. It's "busy work," intended to force people to socialize, but I don't see that it adds any value to that socialization. It may "bring us together," but it's not going to create stronger communities.

Why are MMO's king of the hill. Why do lots of games work on a subscription or season basis.

They present a broad world, limited episodic story, and a literal mountain of busy work for trivial & cosmetic reward.Mission tables, daily activities, reputation grinds, repeatable content with varying difficulty, collection activities and a staggering number of time sinks that only exist to eat literal weeks of your life.

They are all objectively bad and manipulative from the perspective of players. 

BUTT ... 

They create opportunity for socialization, that has value all on it's own but needs a spark to get going. There has to be a shared excuse. A little nudge.

Lets go do this <menial poorly disguised contrivance> together

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1 minute ago, EliseAnne85 said:

There are people of all incomes here, even millionaires are on SL.  As far as a price for tickets, I don't have any price in mind at this time as it's not a worked plan.  However, just think of the price of real concert tickets.  Also, any live artist's who do a concert for SL that goes thru YouTube or whatever (Live Wire maybe which is much cheaper), that SL exclusive concert could play many, many times...it wouldn't have to be just once...so that dilutes the price of what a ticket might hypothetically cost.  But, I think @Coffee Pancake should take the idea to the devs and see if they can do anything with the idea rather continue to go off topic.  So, I'm giving my counter proposal to @Coffee Pancake only as she'd have to bring it to the devs.

Low millions might not even cover it. Depending on the popularity of said artist, of course. 

But either way, I can't see people paying real life Ticketmaster-esque prices for what's bound to be a rather choppy, muffled, slideshow performance in Second Life. Especially not when Fortnite was able to score Ariana Grande, Deadmau5, and Travis Scott - complete with interactive gameplay experiences, and charge players nothing to attend.

 

But back on topic, live performances are absolutely a thing in SL, and sometimes attract more people than your average nightclub event. So if anything, SL needs a better in-world "blast" system for announcements, perhaps? A structured calendar of events, a page people can list events on (not like the Classifieds - that's a mess), etc. Something a bit more organized than what we currently have. That will at least inform people of what's happening when and where, making it a lot easier to find stuff to do. Groups do work for this, but you have to know said club or group even exists and is active in the first place.

Currently, a lot of this organizational stuff takes place in Discord - and unless you're in there, you might not know about it. I found my community via a store's Flickr page About section (follow us on Discord!). That's pretty clunky IMO. We're currently kicking around some community building ideas, like adding a social calendar and list of participating community/social sims to the store itself, but yeah. Again, who would know - unless they visit the shop. Clunky!

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47 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Creating social activity though mechanics works and are demonstrated to work. [...]

Odd. They've never worked on me. The more someone or something tries to force me to be more sociable than what I can deal with, the more I dig my heels in. I am far more stubborn about what affects me than you can possibly imagine.

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17 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

These are both myths .. and sadly a pervasive ones.

  • SL would be great if only they fix the bugs or add this new feature.
  • SL would be great if only we did this cool event or built this thing.

I never said SL would be great if they got rid of bump and shiny together.  I said it needs to be done.  

Cool events, I said real popular recording artist concerts.  The music can get stale in SL very fast and SL needs to up it's game badly where music is concerned.   It's a new generation one needs to attract to SL and keep them.  I think my idea could work.  I think your idea will just be another bore after awhile and another dead end people will tire of.  What I am proposing is something with constant new juices.   And, that's what SL needs.  

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8 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

But either way, I can't see people paying real life Ticketmaster-esque prices for what's bound to be a rather choppy, muffled, slideshow performance in Second Life. Especially not when Fortnite was able to score Ariana Grande, Deadmau5, and Travis Scott - complete with interactive gameplay experiences, and charge players nothing to attend.

I never said Ticketmaster-esque prices.  I said think of how much tickets cost in real life.  So, what I meant was the tickets for an SL exclusive concert would be much less than what it costs in real life.  

I like live performances in SL; they are one of top three best things about SL in my own personal opinion.

I liked your idea of the Calendars though and was thinking that myself.  

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29 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

These are both myths .. and sadly a pervasive ones.

  • SL would be great if only they fix the bugs or add this new feature.
  • SL would be great if only we did this cool event or built this thing.

Demonstrably not true at all.

 

How is your proposal any different? How is your "shiny deck chair" not just another "if we built this thing"?

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1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There is a lot of intentionally missing the point here.

Creating social activity though mechanics works and are demonstrated to work. We even had several of the very early examples in SL. Things are far more refined now and its understood systems needs to be engineered with abuse and exploitation in mind.

If we want SL to grow, then it's going to need such systems to help that happen. They work even if you don't like them. They work even if you opt not to participate.

These systems are a small price to pay and far better than the alternatives.

SL has been spinning it's wheels for almost 20 years and it has failed to show sustainable growth. We get people in the door just fine, but we can't keep them engaged. Retention is a systemic problem that can only be addressed with systemic solutions.

So, your proposal to keep people in SL is to give Premium members who get enough votes the equivalent of $0.40 USD a month? Woah, that's gonna get me ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! $100L a month for a popularity contest... riiiiight. 

How would this create events? "Hey all you premium people, it's time to gather and upvote each other so we can get those pennies from god."

Please. 

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Just now, EliseAnne85 said:

I never said Ticketmaster-esque prices.  I said think of how much tickets cost in real life.  So, what I meant was the tickets for an SL exclusive concert would be much less than what it costs in real life.  

I like live performances in SL; they are one of top three best things about SL in my own personal opinion.

I liked your idea of the Calendars though and was thinking that myself.  

Oh yeah...but I don't think celebrity performances would ever happen here. Fortnite paid like 20 mil to those artists, each - for shows that were what, 15-30 mins? Omg wait...Travis' was 10 minutes, so there's that. 😳

SL doesn't exactly have the best rep, either, so...food for thought there.

But yeah, live performances are really nice in general and a good way to get people crammed into the same space for a few hours. Again, SL just needs a way to let the grid know stuff is happening. Something non-intrusive - toss it in a tab somewhere or stick it in the Destination Guide.

Having us rate each other to force engagement...well...nah. If anything, that'd make me LESS interested in getting involved socially, as it would all seem rather shallow at that point. 

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8 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Cool events, I said real popular recording artist concerts.  The music can get stale in SL very fast and SL needs to up it's game badly where music is concerned.   It's a new generation one needs to attract to SL and keep them.  I think my idea could work.  I think your idea will just be another bore after awhile and another dead end people will tire of.  What I am proposing is something with constant new juices.   And, that's what SL needs.  

Seriously, go and take a long hard look at Sansar, what they pivoted to, how they have been pitching themselves the last year and how that's going. Artists only go where the audience is. Using them as bait to lure people in only works for the duration of the event and once the event is over, they all leave and never return.

My  proposal ins't a panacea.

It will only be of value to parts of the population at a certain place in their own SL journey, there will be a drop off in participation and lots of people wont actively choose to participate at all. 

It doesn't need everyone to do it to be of value and have positive outcome. In fact, it only needs a very small percentage of people to be actively involved.

1 minute ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

How is your proposal any different? How is your "shiny deck chair" not just another "if we built this thing"?

because it includes an effective motivator and requires the motivated to pull others in to function

You might not care about the stipend bonus .. but your close friend does, and they're asking you to come do a social thing with them, they want the ratings, but they also want your company at the social thing.

Are you going to say no?

Are you going to write off the social thing just because of the contrivance that brought everyone together? 

 

I used to do progression raiding in Warcraft. It was a laborious grind against monsters with mechanics so pedantic that if the entire team didn't do the dance perfectly, everyone died and was bombed back to the start. The rewards were small and typically offered tiny percentage improvements. Totally not required to enjoy the game.

Raid night was the highlight of our week, it was a miserable excuse to all hang out, but we needed the excuse and the shared task.

 

2 minutes ago, Drake1 Nightfire said:

So, your proposal to keep people in SL is to give Premium members who get enough votes the equivalent of $0.40 USD a month? Woah, that's gonna get me ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! $100L a month for a popularity contest... riiiiight. 

The size of the reward does not matter, it that it exists at all.

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This is right up there with someone's proposal to make everyone log in at some specific spot so we can 'be more social'.  When I feel like being social, I have no problem doing so.  It's the new BASIC accounts that are always here looking for recommendations as to where the people go.  As @Drake1 Nightfiresaid, less than a $1 a month isn't going to be incentive to anyone already PREMIUM.  

 

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34 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

These are both myths .. and sadly a pervasive ones.

  • SL would be great if only they fix the bugs or add this new feature.
  • SL would be great if only we did this cool event or built this thing.

Demonstrably not true at all.

Your idea is a new feature, so it's a myth too 

Yes, these kinds of activities generate more social involvement. They have to be done right to succeed, though. Take out the financial aspect, and even the playing field for participation, and you have a much better idea from the ground up. It's not perfect, but no idea is perfect. If you really want to increase social engagement, you have to do it evenly, not skewed. Skewed, it just can't work. 

36 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

MMOs get this right, they litter the place with bear traps shiny deck chairs and the players hate them .. but they still participate and everyone wins.

I bolded the important part. This is where other places get it right, though I'm not sure if you meant it how I read it. MMOs, even youtube with their monetization based on views and likes, use ideas similar to this and they work because it's an even playing field. They don't devalue all others to benefit one small group of people. Opportunity exists for all. Even a small time youtuber, for example, can monetize their subscribers, likes and views. Individuals can help those they want to by subscribing, liking, viewing and sharing too. Those activities are  often reciprocated. They don't have to be some kind of premium account or the equivalent to do so. Work harder, develop more subscribers, likes and views and you can do better, but everyone starts out the same. People advance based on their own participation, or not. The same thing happens in most MMOs. 

If broader outcomes are what you desire, you need to remove the financial incentive, because it kills the broader potential dead in the water before it even gets a chance to breathe. Broader would mean you want to reach a bigger target audience, not a smaller one. 

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3 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

This is right up there with someone's proposal to make everyone log in at some specific spot so we can 'be more social'. 

Now there's an idea, make everyone login to an Infohub area and wait a few minutes before going to their destination.

Every. Time.

 

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1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Now there's an idea, make everyone login to an Infohub area and wait a few minutes before going to their destination.

Every. Time.

 

It actually is a very good method of  promoting some socialization. I have seen the results of that in other Grids where a default landing region would result in people staying and chatting to others they had not met before on a variety of topics.

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