A Positive Brainstorming / Suggestion Box Thread - Ideas for Improving Second Life Sociability, Usability and Retention

[Ceka Cianci]

5 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Clearly you've never teleported to a Telehub with a sim-sized multi-tier mall built around it!

This notion that SL was once a silky smooth virtual utopia free from lag of any kind is very far from the truth.  Go take a look at the old SL forum archives and see how many threads complaining about the various types of lag there were.

As one early resident put it in a 2008 thread about region avatar limits...

Anyone that's experienced telehub malls will know that slow loading times, "treacle physics" and slideshow-style frame rates are nothing new to SL, there were days where your chances of getting timed out before the teleport even finished were around 50/50.

Ya, I remember having to fly high into the sky just to rez myself to myself.. I know it was going to be awhile before others had rezzed me if they ever could. That was after picking everything out of my  rear end that decided to make my butt a travel capsule.

We still have those malls nowadays though.. Only we call them Events now.. They just have better exposure nowadays. where in the older days most were pretty dead.

 

But ya, I'm not going back to this again.. and this was shortly after HAVOK came to the grid.

I do appreciate getting to experience all the little steps that I have personally, since I came to the grid in 2006 that has us where we are today in performance and bugs  being taken care of and  how we can make our lands and places we live and our avatars and our stuff, So much more improved.

I like this way better..But I got to feel each step from then to now to appreciate this more, where newer users haven't had that luxury and pretty much what they don't know, they can't really appreciate.

Oh ya, before I forget.. GO VOLS!!\o/

hehehe

 

Edited Thursday at 03:06 PM by Ceka Cianci

[Ceka Cianci]

1 hour ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Maaan, those were the days.

SL's been an endless sea of empty stores and brutal lag for me forever. I joined in 2005, and it took me what, all of an hour to find myself lost in these insanely huge mega-malls that took up entire sims. Multi-floor, a zillion merchants, lag like whoa. And every time I'd see one of those rental cubes, I'd get tempted to learn to build because suuuuurellllyyy THIS was the best way to make some money for shopping! 😂

That's not counting those monster builds filled to the ceiling with freebie boxes and entire sims dedicated to yard sales, either. And big brands like Nomine, Curious Kitties, Gurl6, BareRose, etc. And every single club or event venue surrounded by it's own huge mall. Forget your costume for the Halloween contest? Walk three steps towards the venue and grab one on the way in.

Me: Gee, I wonder what this Second Life thing is all about, I heard there's shopping...

Second Life:

 

🤣 It's been a shopping and lagging paradise for as long as I can remember. My PCs were never top of the line, so I struggled since Day 1, but it was always manageable (even in those locations).

I miss Maxwell street in Chicago!! \o/

You could get anything at Maxwell street.. hehehe

Even fake I.D's and other things.. hehehe

Maxwell Street Polish were the best polish sausage sandwiches ever.

Edited Thursday at 03:18 PM by Ceka Cianci

[Starberry Passion]

Sorry, cannot agree with it not being economically driven, I've read some of the  posts, but it if wasn't for the economy of second life, it would not still be alive. The economy of second life, from which the community builds and creates, have kept second life a float and help it to be able to upgrade.

If Second life didn't have economy as apart of it, then you'd still be using Linden avatars and no one will want to join at all. Now you have Mesh Bodies, like the oldest one: Maitreya and newer ones like Legacy and Reborn and they're helping second life live.

If you want second life to continue to live, you don't ride it of its economy. In fact, should make it even more easier for the economy to thrive and be successful, instead of trying to hinder it.

There should be more incentive to create sims, more room for communities to grow, more incentive to create things, more places for people to meet, especially communities with commonality, that others push out. If people are able to be around like minded people, and find places where they can and feel like they fit in, they will continue to come.

Economy is the least of our concerns, the biggest concerns is the willingness to push people away and overly gatekeep.

Gatekeeping is not always bad, but it can become bad when you overly gatekeep something to the point where it cannot grow and I think that many sims and sim owners do that. Linden Lab gave them that power, yes, so if they give an incentive and an easier way to create more land then I can see more growth.

Obviously making sims are too expensive, they don't want to change the price. Okay, then adapt it to make it easier to the economy, where it will alleviate concerns and put it to where it won't break peoples banks, do something to help people want to start growing second life more and more, because the Community is the life of second life, prohibiting them in any way means death, if it affects too much.

[Theresa Tennyson]

On 6/27/2024 at 5:27 AM, DevlinMcDermott said:

Exactly!

The whole world of SL is built on the previous architecture. Textured and designed to look good and functional on the previous architecture.

Think they’re coming back and rebuilding in updated look? LOL Start from scratch and rebuild? Fat chance.

What’s going to happen when SL/LL even goes further and introduces even more upgrades.

You're going to have a entire grid of white walls and floors and geometric shapes to look at. Everywhere! Or if SL gets rid of the structures entirely,. . Endless and Endless and Endless of empty land.

And they’ll have you paying premium prices for an empty grid. Just as they are already raising their prices for you to upload the new textures,.

It will then take you decades just to build something decent to look at. And of course they are going to raise their prices and move features you now enjoy freely behind a pay wall.  Because they'll need somebody to recoup their costs. When the grid is predominately empty of those that were once there, 

If you used a pre-mesh viewer after mesh was introduced, meshes looked like weird trippy prims.

But people "came back and rebuilt in the updated look."

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

7 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

If you used a pre-mesh viewer after mesh was introduced, meshes looked like weird trippy prims.

I remember hanging out at infohubs when rigged mesh was first released and getting inundated with snapshots from people trying to tell me I looked stupid and was "wearing boxes".  It happened with such regularity that I started taking a snapshot of my outfit when I first arrived so I could pass it out in response. 

Plenty of people I spoke to at the time initially claimed that they would never upgrade because they heard it was "laggy", but sure enough within a few weeks they were all prancing around in their new mesh outfits like little show ponies.

[Theresa Tennyson]

Okay friends, it's time for another:

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

If you make posts on multiple boards that say essentially the same rather specific personally-linked thing under different names, it's pretty easy for a reader to connect those names. And, if those names are fairly distinctive and tied to other information, it's easy for them to do a few more searches and eventually you'll have your whole life laid out like a patient etherized upon a table.

Thank you!

[Thecla]

Anyone who says the economy is not responsible for the continued viability of SL doesn't know much about economics.

LL makes collects approx $3.3 mm in region fees each months, against total revenue of approx $6.6 mm in memberships and transaction fees. In 2021, the creator community cashed out $86 mm, roughly equal to or more than LL annual gross revenue. That number will have gone down due to land owners having the option of paying region rent in Lindens beginning in 2023, but it points to how much economic activity there is in SL. That activity gives people places to go, stuff to buy, things to do, etc. It's the difference between nothing but a barren mainland and a vibrant, extensive, diverse grid.

Yes there will always be a large number of free-to-play users who run around in default avatars and don't give a fig about how anything around them looks. But economic activity in SL rises year by year despite the concurrent user numbers staying relatively steady (and yes it's down post-pandemic, whatever).

As for what to do to improve SL? Beats me lol. But I have one thought...

If you search for a user in-world under "people", you will get a HUGE list of accounts. As you click through them you will find that approximately +95% of them are blank profiles. That's abandonment. Yes some are alts, and this and that, but the fact remains that the vast VAST majority of people who create an account visit once or twice and never return. It's not like LL is unaware of this problem and has wrestled with it in various ways over the years, but it's still the #1 barrier to growth. Simply converting an additional 5% of first time users would likely lead to significant growth. EDIT: I just visited the Welcome Hub, and a good percentage of the people there were shills for adult entertainment sims. Dear lord, keep those people out! If I was a new user and was immediately approached by some sleaze bag hawking something I would not return either.

What would I do? Immediately after teaching someone how to simply walk in SL, I would take them on a guided tour of amazing sims. Show them right away what SL can be and THEN bring them back to a NOT overwhelming and confused new user center that does not look like something out of the Jetsons where you're not immediately trying to upsell them on land and premium membership. And I would have an employee dedicated to curating that tour experience, adding new sims, taking out ones that close, You can argue that the Destinations tab provides that, and that might be a good place to start with the effort, pulling out the best from that for inclusion. But in my opinion it's usually populated with a good number of sh!tholes.

Edited Friday at 12:07 PM by Thecla

[Thecla]

I took a closer look at the "Quick Start" circle at the Welcome Hub. 12 out of 14 avatars there were advertisements for a particular sex sim. Some of them were standing directly in front of and intentionally obscuring the panel on how to move your avatar.

The sim description? "BDSM babygirl daddy sex hentai cuck xxx paypig breed lesbian stripper ***** mistress horny bbc porn femdom findom hooker edge joi milf ***** slave sub sissy simp freelance adboard lovense cam voice text fintopia domme ***** kink fetish strip money goon"

How does LL let this happen? Why is there not someone there to moderate this? If this is your first experience when trying to figure out SL...well, I don't think I need to say more.

 

Edited Friday at 12:17 PM by Thecla

[Love Zhaoying]

8 minutes ago, Thecla said:

The sim description? "BDSM babygirl daddy sex hentai cuck xxx paypig breed lesbian stripper ***** mistress horny bbc porn femdom findom hooker edge joi milf ***** slave sub sissy simp freelance adboard lovense cam voice text fintopia domme ***** kink fetish strip money goon"

Goodness! You know that's an old sim, because they left out "goon"! 

Oh wait, it's the last word.  Never mind.