Should more game elements be added to Second Life?

[Qie Niangao]

To be more game-like requires deciding what to add and what not to add. Nobody in Second Life is going to spend the US$100 million needed to develop a AAA game, so there's no point in competing with the entire supporting feature set required for such a game to run in Second Life. 

Without even the hint of a game storyline, no hook that makes it an enjoyable pastime, it's pretty silly to bemoan a lack of the best and newest gaming engine features. If the Lindens build it, the developers will not come; practically nobody's using the game features that exist in the platform, let alone hitting their limits with an actual game. Yeah, it can't do Tony Soprano's Downhill Flight Simulator First-Person Combat Fantasy Eleventy, but how many have even tried to make a game it can do? 

[Silent Mistwalker]

3 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

Content no, technology and optimizations yes. 

The three aren't pairwise mutually exclusive. 😉

[Randall Ahren]

On 4/14/2023 at 10:30 PM, animats said:

how many have even tried to make a game it can do?

There have been many attempts, such as blood lines, sail boat races, zombie shooters, greedy greedy, and skippo. 

[Drayke Newall]

18 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

practically nobody's using the game features that exist in the platform, let alone hitting their limits with an actual game.

Lets look at those released gaming systems or gaming potential systems that are broken/unfinished and haven't been updated since they released:

• Pathfinding - so bad and not updated that LL actually removed it from their Linden Realms due to it not working properly and lagging
• Temp attachments - doesn't remove already worn items anymore or cant recognise not to replace mesh body etc i.e only recognises now 'add' and not 'wear' which they claimed as a 'fix' instead of creating new command LlAddAttachToAvatar they just made LlAttachToAvatar add instead of completely replace. Both are needed not just add like LL have implemented.
• Animesh -  very basic and lags the region when used, not to mention takes so much land impact if you want them to look realistic making them pointless as an npc for any game specific function.
• Animesh attachments - only allowed 1 and max 2 to wear despite needing more especially for non human avatar gameplay. i.e think of a dragon humanoid character. Tail, wings, ears. Thats three and the bare minimum still would need more. 
• Experience Tools... still waiting for those promised features
• Windlight - gimped with no clouds (flight games), dynamic weather (reduce lag by not having temp rez weather systems) or ability to block sunlight with objects (reduce lag/li from not having to have mesh/prim layers to make a cave or under a bridge dark)
• Physics...physics and pathfinding...and just physics
• Inbuilt viewer combat system

Take the above mentioned inbuilt combat system in the SL viewer. It hasn't been updated since before SL released yet, would reduce combat related lag exponentially if it was updated. Currently we have to rely on multiple scripts to perform - input > viewer > hud > Gun > viewer > hud > floating text > viewer and sometimes > region systems.

With an updated combat system enabled on a region however all you would have is  input > viewer > gun > viewer > viewer. By removing the combat hud it dramatically reduces the script lag. Yet, LL in their infinite wisdom dont bother to updated the viewer/region combat system so we are stuck with asking people to remove as many scripts (including ao sometimes) from the avatar just to do combat.

The sad reason why practically nobody uses those game features you mention is because they dont work or are so basic they may as well not work.

Edited April 17, 2023 by Drayke Newall

[Qie Niangao]

5 hours ago, Randall Ahren said:

There have been many attempts, such as blood lines, sail boat races, zombie shooters, greedy greedy, and skippo. 

(Somehow animats was cited but I think it was my quote to which this refers.) Yeah, I do think at least sail boat races and greedy greedy are examples of successful games in SL, which are still quite popular. There are more (working, functional) tools available now than there were when these were created, and @Drayke Newall's difficulties notwithstanding, I've used some of them in my own builds (although not games, about which more below).

To be honest, I'm not sure what skippo is, and Bloodlines certainly has competitive gaming aspects although I never understood the appeal (at all). 

But I have none of the gaming instinct. I've never been able to sustain interest in video games, and competition never adds interest to activities for me, so I don't think I'm wired for it. And I don't think I'm alone. People who make games can make games from pebbles and lines drawn in the sand. There are amateur game creators, sure, and not all such talent has yet been discovered, but I don't think it's common. And creating games is not at all the same as game playing skill. Successful gaming in SL depends on either helping people discover their latent game-creating talents or somehow luring game creators to the platform. Both seem pretty chancy to me.

Repeating my point from an earlier post, it's simply hopeless for SL to ever compete in genres populated big budget AAA games; there's just no way we'll have a combat game, for example, that will draw people to Second Life strictly to play that game. Simply can't happen. That doesn't mean some recognizably combat themed game can't give SL users many hours of fun with their friends. Similarly, the successful pastimes of boat racing and general vehicle use can't begin to compete directly with the standalone game in those genres which are and always have been much, much better, and yet they're very successful SL activities.

Improvements are surely welcome. Some "gaming" features were complete duds (pathfinding) or baseline examples at best (the damage system), so they're pretty much abandoned. Do they need system-level replacing? Beats me, but if I were a Linden program manager, I'd need a business case that if they build another gaming feature, there are real viable game designs depending on its availability. But meanwhile, despite limitations, there's huge opportunity to use Experiences, EEP, and Animesh in gaming that I've not seen.

Also, in passing, I've never seen server lag from Animesh—nor, frankly, viewer-side lag attributable to the animation, which I'd expected when the feature was designed. Pathfinding, in contrast, absolutely is a pig. (I've been playing with Animesh for moving non-avatar, non-NPC features such as vehicle components, but I'm so not a gamer that I'm completely squicked by the uncanny valley of NPCs, so maybe there are problems with those applications. The Land Impact does seem punitive, but if they do actually lag the region, maybe it's justified.)

[Flea Yatsenko]

SL doesn't have to compete with AAA games, there are gamers who only play indie games or at best AA Japanese games. I haven't touched a triple A game in years. And I don't plan on doing it anytime soon. I play a lot of games, that quite frankly, look terrible, and I have a lot of fun. I can't even remember the last time I played a pretty AAA game, I think it was when my 7970 was new.

Even if you're the type of gamer who doesn't care about graphics, SL's latency issues mean it's relegated to only playing turn based games like Greedy Greedy instead of anything remotely real time. They can start adding lag filters to their viewer to mitigate it like I mentioned earlier in another of my posts. And it's so easy to start making money in SL as compared to trying to launch a game on Steam that has low odds of ever being purchased. The framework of creating games in SL with microtransations (i.e. buy this gun in the shooting game for more power or a cool skin or whatever) is all there.

But the game play part of SL feels terrible because of the lag/latency. Sure graphics or whatever are a problem, but SL will always be held back because it takes so long for your avatar to respond to movement or for you to interact with the world.

SL needs a mode that makes the net code operate like a legitimate online shooting game. It should be part of an experience in which movement method it uses. Experience should also be able to change movement parameters, like speed, etc and it shouldn't have to rely on scripts. It needs to happen on screen as fast as possible.

And give scripts more keybinds. I think SL could be amazing for making small games like VRChat has. I played a game that was a cross between an FPS and Among Us in VRChat and it was a ton of fun and it wasn't horribly laggy. But the latency/lag in SL would make it worse. LL has better resources to make game levels and stuff than VRChat, people could make way better games. But they need the tools to do it. There are a lot of laid off game devs who are trying to free lance and SL could be a great place for them to do so.

Edited April 17, 2023 by Flea Yatsenko

[Ayashe Ninetails]

26 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Repeating my point from an earlier post, it's simply hopeless for SL to ever compete in genres populated big budget AAA games; there's just no way we'll have a combat game, for example, that will draw people to Second Life strictly to play that game. Simply can't happen. That doesn't mean some recognizably combat themed game can't give SL users many hours of fun with their friends. Similarly, the successful pastimes of boat racing and general vehicle use can't begin to compete directly with the standalone game in those genres which are and always have been much, much better, and yet they're very successful SL activities.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that SL might also have trouble competing even with the smaller Indie markets, too. Indie and AA games can still have dev budgets that reach into the millions. On the lower-budget side, though, there are games that are still massively popular and attract very high player numbers, but SL probably wouldn't be able to handle something similar. Undertale, Stardew Valley, Outlast, Terraria, Hollow Knight - all lower budget, all highly rated, but recreating similar experiences here - pretty difficult. Out of all of those, Stardew seems the most feasible, but would still require some work.

Overall, I do think the Life Sim genre could work well here. We've already got some life and farming systems, but we'd need to add and expand on things like interactive NPCs, quest systems, dungeon crawling, in-world crafting systems, in-world building, weather systems (nobody wants to water their farms eeeeevery day), some kind of action bar or something to bind tools and weapons to, a way to track collections and achievements, etc. It's a lot - and as someone else mentioned, this stuff requires maintaining quite a bit of land to host it all on. Life Sims could definitely operate in neighborhoods and regions players could move into, but it would rely quite a bit on people renting and purchasing land in the sim to make it all viable.

Another thing I just remembered, speaking of games within games - Guild Wars 2 has their Super Adventure Box experience, and that's something that could possibly work here, too. It's basically like if you took Linden Realms and increased its size by quite a bit, added usable items (weapons, keys to unlock chests, bombs to break through into secret areas, life potions, extra lives, etc.), merchants and shops, friendly NPCs to rescue, boss fights, hazards, and a wider range of biomes and enemies. The big draw of the SAB for the GW2 crowd is the entire experience is done in an 8-bit platformer Mario-like environment, which is very different from the standard art style we normally run around in. It started as an April Fool's Day joke that the community liked so much, it became an annual event.

Also borrowing from Guild Wars 2, their jumping puzzles are also pretty popular, though I personally can't stand them myself. 😄 They basically involve traveling to some location and finding a hidden puzzle somewhere - you platform jump, fight enemies, and run your way to a big prize chest at the end. They can get fairly complex in the builds and maneuvers required to get through them (launch pads, moving platforms, disappearing platforms, navigating narrow ledges high up in the air where a fall would kill you, etc.), but SL should be able to handle it - eventually. To be fair, though, I think the popularity of some of this stuff comes with the achievements obtained. Completionists and achievement hunters are always willing to put themselves through some torturous experience or another just to get them done. 😂

[Love Zhaoying]

I honestly think it is the responsibility of Creators to add more "game elements" to Second Life.

Many of the "games" within Second Life that have been listed were from years ago, when there were less features (LSL scripting or otherwise) making it possible to create games within Second Life.

Honestly? I don't consider "farming", "breeding animals", etc. to be an acceptable "game".  Creators can do better!

[EliseAnne85]

2 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Honestly? I don't consider "farming", "breeding animals", etc. to be an acceptable "game".  Creators can do better!

I don't believe those are games either.  

But, me speaking generally about games, not directed to Love:

First of all, people have had differing ideas of what a game or even gambling is in SL.  

Gambling in America is where there is a loser or gambling means where one can win or one can lose and end up with nothing.  That is really what gambling is.  You take a gamble - it's a 50/50 chance to win 'something' or lose it all.  

But, then, in many threads, according to certain posters from Europe on the forums that I read especially said gambling is defined as a game of chance.  To me, that is incorrect in correlation with gambling and Gacha because with Gacha you always got 'something', there is no chance to lose it all like in Las Vegas or other places with casinos in real life.  Or, even playing poker with friends where one can lose it all.  Gacha is like you get something and if you don't like it you could trade it or resell it.  It's no different than Pokémon trading cards that are packaged as a mystery or any arcade in America where you get a surprise out of an arcade machine.  And, in America these are perfectly legal, even ethical including raffles.  Gambling in Las Vegas or Lost Wages as most people in America call it is often viewed as an ethically incorrect decision to do with one's money; to take the chance of gambling it all away.

I brought the loss of Gacha up because I see it as no different than the fishing game that is prevalent in SL.  In fishing one gets surprise prizes (fish and other misc. items) and may end up with nothing monetarily.  Fishing in SL could be set up winner takes all and the rest get none, so it's more like gambling than Gacha is.  Or, it's very similar because one gets some fish they can collect or something like that, which I don't have the time for, nor do I want an aquarium with all those prims.  

I see this decision to do away with Gacha but not fishing lacking in consistency because the two are almost the same in premise.  Although with Gacha, one can resell the items they do not want or trade them.  

Gacha was huge for SL.  But, still it's unfair to chastise one but not the other.  

 

Edited April 17, 2023 by EliseAnne85

[Istelathis]

If we wanted SL to compete with some of the games available today, the best way I can think of doing so is through modules that can be downloaded.  It would give the designers the freedom they need to create games free from the restrictions of SL, the downside is that it would no longer be a seamless world such as the mainland. 

This brings in with it a variety of problems though, such as where these modules would be hosted for MMO games, how linden could be transferred if one wanted to do the such from within the module, what assets could be made available to the modules, and so on. 

As is now, let us say we wanted to make a racing game, there is no real way to change the physics of SL to accommodate every feature a creator may want for the world, things like building tunnels underground would be impossible, having restrictions to the size of their game would be a downside as well as the expense of maintaining that game if it were to span several regions.  

We can try to make SL more flexible to accommodate game creators, build in a bunch of tools, but realistically - is that ever really going to happen?  What would be easier, imho, is to allow people to create modules, where they have the flexibility to create games in almost any manner that they can otherwise do outside of the confines of SL.  It would allow people who already exist in SL to remain in contact with their friends, it would still be their avatars playing in those games, assets could be used both in and out of the games, so could their linden.

Edit:

I come from a time when doors were pretty common on BBSs, which is essentially what I am thinking of.  A BBS was a text based platform one could connect to, that existed before the Internet, the games were referred to doors as they would be separate from the BBS, they would use some of the data from the BBS, such as the account of the person using the door.  Otherwise, they were essentially untethered from one another, one could write their doors in almost any language available at the time, have an entirely different gui and so on.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_(bulletin_board_system)

Edit 2:
Further, SL would not need to be changed or broken, to accommodate all of the features people want.  It would free up our devs to make changes to SL, which would be more appealing to the majority, while allowing independent creators the ability to put in their own games the features that they want on the fly.  It would make SL central to these games, and hopefully draw in more people.

Edited April 17, 2023 by Istelathis

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Honestly? I don't consider "farming", "breeding animals", etc. to be an acceptable "game".  Creators can do better!

Maybe not - probably not, but they sure are popular (30-45kish concurrent players per day on Steam, plus they're on Game Pass and consoles and other platforms/launchers, so who knows the full number). I'm not sure if people really want those experiences inside SL (I wouldn't - I'd rather just play the real deal), but as standalone games, they still draw a huge crowd after all these years. And Stardew is a game created by one person, so that's a bit crazy.

Of course, that's nothing compared to CS-GO's daily numbers (over a million logged in via Steam right now, added to the console and other platform numbers), so maybe something like that might do even better in here - if someone wanted to create all of the systems for it (I sure wouldn't...I'd just go play the real game).

I don't really see SL as a gaming platform - overhaul everything and make it accessible on consoles - maybe.

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, Ayashe Ninetails said:

2 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Honestly? I don't consider "farming", "breeding animals", etc. to be an acceptable "game".  Creators can do better!

Maybe not - probably not, but they sure are popular (30-45kish concurrent players per day on Steam, plus they're on Game Pass and consoles and other platforms/launchers, so who knows the full number). I'm not sure if people really want those experiences inside SL (I wouldn't - I'd rather just play the real deal), but as standalone games, they still draw a huge crowd after all these years. And Stardew is a game created by one person, so that's a bit crazy.

Of course, that's nothing compared to CS-GO's daily numbers (over a million logged in via Steam right now, added to the console and other platform numbers), so maybe something like that might do even better in here - if someone wanted to create all of the systems for it (I sure wouldn't...I'd just go play the real game).

I don't really see SL as a gaming platform - overhaul everything and make it accessible on consoles - maybe.

I admit, "farming" has been popular ever since it was on Facebook! (I was more into Farkle. RIP Flash Games.)

I just mean, "farming" is not the "pinnacle" of the Gaming possibilities. 

Neither is "breeding animals", "having prim babies", "mining things", "finding crystals", "fishing", etc.

Nothing personal to those who really get into farming and such.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

19 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

I come from a time when doors were pretty common on BBSs, which is essentially what I am thinking of.  A BBS was a text based platform one could connect to, that existed before the Internet, the games were referred to doors as they would be separate from the BBS, they would use some of the data from the BBS, such as the account of the person using the door.  Otherwise, they were essentially untethered from one another, one could write their doors in almost any language available at the time, have an entirely different gui and so on.

I remember BBS's, and "rings" (later called "web rings"), but I didn't do games on BBS's so don't remember "doors".

Heck, I barely even checked out BBS's. I guess I missed out!

My interests were elsewhere. (Chatting, messages boards like on BITNet, and later on AOL, etc.)

[EliseAnne85]

9 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Maybe not - probably not, but they sure are popular (30-45kish concurrent players per day on Steam, plus they're on Game Pass and consoles 

Wow, that's a lot. 

I see the breedables as an amusement no different than Gacha really or even fishing because in all of those 'you get something'. 

I don't think any of them are gambling.   

Maybe with Gacha, just get rid of the rare idea.  Make them all commons like a real life arcade machine filled with prizes.

Edited April 17, 2023 by EliseAnne85

[Ayashe Ninetails]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I admit, "farming" has been popular ever since it was on Facebook! (I was more into Farkle. RIP Flash Games.)

I just mean, "farming" is not the "pinnacle" of the Gaming possibilities. 

Neither is "breeding animals", "having prim babies", "mining things", "finding crystals", "fishing", etc.

Nothing personal to those who really get into farming and such.

I agree with you, though it's an insanely popular genre in general. Just look at The Sims entire catalog, Animal Crossing, Minecraft (many popular Minecraft mods focus solely on farming and cooking and recipes and harvesting), etc. etc. etc. 

We're also dealing with some severe limitations here that a farming game would struggle a bit less with than trying to create a functional multiplayer FPS or looter shooter or tower defense or RPG or BR or *insert any multiplayer genre here* that can support dozens of players (or more) at once.

[EliseAnne85]

4 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

multiplayer FPS or looter shooter or tower defense or RPG or BR or *insert any multiplayer genre here* that can support dozens of players (or more) at once.

Dinkies and Tinies can.  I've been in shooter games with dozens of Dinkies and Tinies as they are not lag-intense avatars nor is the scene either.  Many scenes for the games were made with the original SL build tools, circa 2005 or thereabouts (no actual real date) but really old. Plus the area is kept sparse for games.  

[Cali Souther]

16 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

 And Stardew is a game created by one person, so that's a bit crazy.

 

I love Stardew Valley ♥   but,  unless you have friends to play with - it can get lonely talking to NPC's...     

I have to give many kudos to Eric Barone/ConcernedApe -- he has provided excellent support over the years and genuinely seems to care about the customer satisfaction of his user base.    LL could learn from that.  (wink)

I wish I could find more ways to be creative in SL ...   but my lack of skills hinders me in that area.   I've said before,  I wish it was easier to build/create in SL ...  but most do not agree (and I can understand how it would impact the "economy" of SL )....  

I wasn't going to respond to this thread - so many like it and I've said all I have to say,  but I had to give props to Stardew 🙂

[Istelathis]

15 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Heck, I barely even checked out BBS's. I guess I missed out!

I spent entirely too much time on them in the 90s😆 The doors were the place I would often go to, most of them were like MUDs back in the day.  I think the closest I have seen to doors as of late, is windows mixed reality, or steam VR, although neither of these have a social aspect to them.  

In such a system, SL would remain central to everything. It would remain unchanged, with the exception of the regular updates we routinely see.  The "doors" would lead us off to different applications, and be reliant upon SL to be operational.  

[Silent Mistwalker]

12 hours ago, Randall Ahren said:

There have been many attempts, such as blood lines, sail boat races, zombie shooters, greedy greedy, and skippo. 

And in the early days, Tringo, Slingo and another one I have forgotten the name of.

 

From 2010:

 

[Ayashe Ninetails]

17 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Wow, that's a lot. 

I see the breedables as an amusement no different than Gacha really or even fishing because in all of those 'you get something'. 

I don't think any of them are gambling.   

Maybe with Gacha, just get rid of the rare idea.  Make them all commons like a real life arcade machine filled with prizes.

Currently, for both Stardew Valley and The Sims 4, there are about 32,000 people in-game on Steam. That does not include the other platforms they're both available on. Both are on Steam/PC, macOS, Xbox, Game Pass for PC, Nintendo Switch and Playstation. Stardew is also on iOS and Android. Add that all up and it's a pretty good number of people for an early Monday afternoon.

I can't speak for breedables. I never bothered with them. I was mostly talking about the life/farming sims that exist in SL like MyStory and beYou. I think games like that could potentially be fleshed out and expanded into something more, but I have no idea what that would take. A lot of time and money, either way.

 

3 minutes ago, Cali Souther said:

I love Stardew Valley ♥   but,  unless you have friends to play with - it can get lonely talking to NPC's...     

I have to give many kudos to Eric Barone/ConcernedApe -- he has provided excellent support over the years and genuinely seems to care about the customer satisfaction of his user base.    LL could learn from that.  (wink)

I wish I could find more ways to be creative in SL ...   but my lack of skills hinders me in that area.   I've said before,  I wish it was easier to build/create in SL ...  but most do not agree (and I can understand how it would impact the "economy" of SL )....  

I wasn't going to respond to this thread - so many like it and I've said all I have to say,  but I had to give props to Stardew 🙂

Stardew's an absolute joy, but you know - I never tried it in multiplayer! The whole cozy vibe, even in singleplayer, is so nice and relaxing sometimes. It always amazes me how popular it still is (and if you've checked out the modding scene recently on Nexus - oh my goodness). I'm currently working my way through Stardew Valley Expanded and Ridgeside Valley. Not to mention all the zillion recipes, trees, fruit, vegetables, seeds, and cooking/brewing/baking recipes I added, LOL.  

Do I want that here in SL? I dunno...I might tinker around with it. But things in that game just work so well (even with dozens of mods installed I'm just saying, lol), so I'm not really interested in porting the experience over here to a platform not 100% designed for it.

 

2 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

And in the early days, Tringo, Slingo and another one I have forgotten the name of.

OMG Tringo. That brings me back lol.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

So here are my two cents:

All virtual worlds combined, SL effectively has the best capabilities out there, regardless of how poor response time typically is due to SL being a thin client, there is simply nothing like it in terms of capabilities.

There really are two places where it is sorely lacking:

• The inability to run code and effects purely client-side.
• The inability to have a fully controlled environment.

The first point is what tend to make SL sluggish and laggy when doing just about anything, a normal multiplayer game does most of the heavy lifting locally on the client and then broadcast to other peers (through a server or vial p2p) the information they need to know. On highly dynamic games this means a steady stream of highly optimized "game state" updates is all that is being exchanged. In SL, the server does everything and broadcast to our clients every minute changes from object positions to texture changes. That's a lot of data that sometimes arrives out of order, and more often than not, late.

The second point is that Linden Lab hasn't made much concessions in how avatars share resources in a region, we will more than likely never be given the amount of control on visitors to a region that is required for a tightly controlled game experience. As a result, most popular games in SL tend to be individual in nature and scope limited, delivery games, finishing minigames, puzzles, things that do not require much "control" outside the game pieces themselves.

Habits & behaviors

Warning, this is a very subjective take.

The SL population is aging, if not old. The platform hasn't died the way people expected it to more 10 years ago, but the mindset is still there, in the unconscious of residents and creators alike. That there is not much point to start anything ambitious or get into something time-consuming because our days are numbered.

• For residents, it means focusing on the friends they have and the places they know, rather than the friends they could have and the places they have yet to discover.
• For merchants, creators, and other content peddlers, it means milking the golden goose before it dries out, quick overpriced projects that will never be updated that can be immediately cashed out.
• I grew up on computers that could only handle a single task at a time, for a lot of people, SL is a background process that we AFK in, waiting for something to happen. Hell, I myself am tabbed out as I'm writing this wall of text. But the result is that a large chunk of the SL population is trying to avoid activities that require too much focus or attention.

The Libertarian nightmare

SecondLife is a wonderful platform for me, it is where I've spent my entire adult life at this point, but it is by no means perfect and bears the scars of someone's idea of a libertarian utopia.

Money is everything, government involvement in the resident's well-being is skeletal at best.

We are pretty much expected, creators and residents alike to make the product worth using and if it fails to attract it is effectively our fault because we did not care enough to invest hundreds of dollar and thousands of man-hours crafting the captivating experiences the platform is capable of. We are expected to shoulder all the risks, while the lion's share of the reward isn't for us.

Edited April 17, 2023 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Phil Deakins]

1 hour ago, Istelathis said:

A BBS was a text based platform one could connect to, that existed before the Internet

Er... no. They existed before the web, but they were on the internet

 

[Love Zhaoying]

15 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Er... no. They existed before the web, but they were on the internet

 

I assume you don't mean the "plain old telephone system ("POTS")" dial-up network, when you write "internet" above?

Conversely, I would not classify anything I used on BITNET (mainframe network, universities, etc. as an outgrowth of ARPANET) as BBS's.

[Caeruleiae]

2 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I see this decision to do away with Gacha but not fishing lacking in consistency because the two are almost the same in premise.  Although with Gacha, one can resell the items they do not want or trade them.  

The two are absolutely nothing at all the same. Depending on which fishing game you're talking about- you can even earn money without spending a dime.  For some you must buy the pole and/or bait unless it's optional-but otherwise you aren't spending anything to get something else. Most of the fishing games you're just doing to boost the traffic of the places you go to earn lindens not items. For one fishing game 7seas you can fish up items and can even trade those items you get if you want to-I think that used to be a bigger thing in the past though.

I don't know a simpler way to explain it but they really aren't even similar-except that some might call them both games. That's pretty much where their similarities end though. 

[Istelathis]

36 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Er... no. They existed before the web, but they were on the internet

 

Well, if you really want to get technical you are correct in that some of them were on the Internet and I believe arpanet predates the first BBS.  My only experience that I possibly recall of BBS being on the internet was brief connections for messages through I think fidonet, but I'm not entirely sure if fidonet required the internet or if BBSs just exchanged the messages by dialing into one another, it has been so long now that I barely remember it though.  Most people in my area were just dialing into BBSs back in the day and it was localized. 

I hosted one myself for a few months, using renegade which was pretty fun.  I barely had any callers though, it was mostly just a fun and easy project.  Once I had access to the Internet though, the scene in my area mostly dissipated as did my BBS as I was more interested in being connected to the Internet which tied up my phoneline.