Problems with Linden Lab's plans to attract new users.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

38 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I teach literature to Gen Z students.

 

[Ayashe Ninetails]

17 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

I'll just leave this here

Gen Alpha, is even worse from my understanding..  

No offense, but I'm not watching anything by a content creator like that.

*glances at video titles*

[Istelathis]

1 minute ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

No offense, but I'm not watching anything by a content creator like that.

*glances at video titles*

I didn't even look at his other videos 😳

Yeah, he goes a bit deep down the rabbit hole.. sorry about linking that video.

[Janet Voxel]

20 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

I'll just leave this here

Gen Alpha, is even worse from my understanding..  

Couldn't possibly have to do with poor pay or lack of respect from society in general right? It's skibbitytoiletrizz?

[Ayashe Ninetails]

Just now, Istelathis said:

I didn't even look at his other videos 😳

Yeah, he goes a bit deep down the rabbit hole.. sorry about linking that video.

It's always the first thing I check. I'm rather wary of YouTube's "dark web," so to speak.

No worries. Not holding it against you. YET. That's only strike one. 😂

[WeFlossDaily]

16 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Nej, "kan'te" är bara en förkortning för "kan inte", så det är OK.  😉

Jo, folk förstår inte iband. Men det makes bra eller rolig sense to most anybody who kan prata på engleska och* svenska. Och really my Swedish is very, very dålig. lol

Edited July 24 by WeFlossDaily
*typo

[Istelathis]

1 minute ago, Janet Voxel said:

Couldn't possibly have to do with poor pay or lack of respect from society in general right? It's skibbitytoiletrizz?

I mean, we could add that to the list of problems, but personally knowing teachers and what they have to go through on a daily basis, it is much, much worse than that.  

[Scylla Rhiadra]

21 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

No offense, but I'm not watching anything by a content creator like that.

*glances at video titles*

Oh dear. Yeah.

[Janet Voxel]

See, here's the thing folks. Because we've gone so far off topic its ridiculous: If you want to do a thing, you have to understand a thing.

If you want to attract younger residents, you have to understand younger people in general. You also have to accept that they are not the same as you or have the same interests. You can't want them here and make fun of them at the same time. If you can't do that, then this really isn't a discussion that is meaningful in any way.

You want to keep them here?

*whispers* Stop making fun of them.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

Before this thread veers too far off topic (and I start ranting about the seemingly systematic dismantling of the education system and the impact it's had on society) perhaps we should try and steer it back towards education in SL.

I think one really useful educational experience which a huge majority of SL would benefit from is a lesson on responsible building and content usage.  Teaching residents to recognize optimized content vs content which can negatively impact performance would be useful, as would teaching residents how better to utilize content to improve performance and how much certain settings, activities and building practices can impact their experience and that of other residents.

The recent release of PBR would be a good opportunity to educate residents and creators on how best to optimize their SL while making the most of the new features.

[Istelathis]

10 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:

If you want to attract younger residents, you have to understand younger people in general.

Second Life is not going to appease a lot of younger people,  the ones that it does interest will be a minority, just like it was for the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and now Gen Z.  I agree with streamlining the interface for mobile, adding features you see on other mobile virtual worlds, but realistically, virtual platforms like SL, IMVU, Avakin Life, and even VRChat are not in high demand.

 

What Linden Lab needs to do, if they want more consumers is build a new game that caters to a larger demographic.  They had done that earlier with Blocks World, which according to Wikipedia had 38 million worlds hosted.  

[WeFlossDaily]

NoobyNoob: Wow this game sure is laggy. *exits SL*

And we can't even completely blame creators for the lag, since every poorly optimized avatar contributes to it. Never mind, I had better just shut the mouth. This topic has probably been beaten to death over and over again since the introduction of mesh.

A 2k world is coming.

A 4k world will follow.

At some point in nature, everything reaches critical mass. Probably the same will happen here.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

12 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

What Linden Lab needs to do, if they want more consumers is build a new game that caters to a larger demographic.

That's hardly going to help SLs population grow and, as has been pointed out already, it can only drop so low before SL becomes unsustainable.

 

3 minutes ago, WeFlossDaily said:

And we can't even completely blame creators for the lag, since every poorly optimized avatar contributes to it.

Oh it's not just avatars.  There are plenty of things that creators do when making content (and residents do when decorating their lands) which would horrify devs and level designers.

6 minutes ago, WeFlossDaily said:

A 2k world is coming.

A 4k world will follow.

It's taken LL about two decades to go from 1k to 2k textures.  Assuming a constant rate of increase of pixels over time we can expect to see 4k textures in around 80 years!  

[Zalificent Corvinus]

34 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

The recent release of PBR would be a good opportunity to educate residents and creators on how best to optimize their SL while making the most of the new features.

Your suggestion ha been shot down in flames by PBR quad texture uploads, 2K textures, and the forthcoming "gltf scene upload" evasion of SL content limits.

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

42 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:

You want to keep them here?

Do I want to "keep" over-entitled teens with 2 digit IQ scores comparable to an EU shoe size, who only speak a language google translate can't convert to understandable English?

 

No.

 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

3 hours ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

I think the reason some don't do that is because the in-world chat/instant message/group message system is so primitive. I personally cannot stand to use it. I'd much rather drag people over to Discord where conversations are a lot easier to follow. For those who voice chat, I've heard Discord does it better, too, but I'm not sure. I used in-SL voice only a handful of times and wanted to yeet my avatar off my sky platform. Discord does seem to be a LOT more feature-rich on that front, too. And sounds better, at least to me, but I'm not a regular user.

 

Yep, pretty much! I'm one of those users. I took, what, a decade off or something crazy like that, only logging in a few times here and there to look around. I figured I'd peek back in in 2020 to see if it was still alive (I figured there'd be an SL 2.0 by then) and found a friend online who I'd originally met in 2006. She filled me in on mesh and I decided to stay since everything was so massively different. Wound up staying around for about 4 years, but I'm back in my "meh" on/off period again.

 

I'll be honest - I have noooooooo idea about mobile! I'm the sort of person who barely remembers to keep my phone activated. I have a new number every year because it keeps getting recycled due to non-use and I have to re-activate it all over again if I want to dust it off for some odd reason. Nothing in the world would make me use SL or game on a mobile phone. I'm super clueless about that market.

 

It's not just Gen-Z. Flexi is one of the better ways to make some very curly (corkscrews, waves, etc.) hairstyles. 

 

 Mesh + flexi is also really nice:

 

gee flexi prim hair is still a thing? Who woulda thought it 😂

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Your suggestion ha been shot down in flames by PBR quad texture uploads, 2K textures, and the forthcoming "gltf scene upload" evasion of SL content limits.

 

On the contrary, I'd suggest that the addition of those things strengthens the case for the need for better education sooner (when residents first begin using them) rather than later (once creators and residents have worked out the best way to misuse them in order to cram as much random content into as small a space as possible and filled SL with even more content bombs).

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

On the contrary, I'd suggest that the addition of those things strengthens the case for the need for better education sooner (when residents first begin using them) rather than later (once creators and residents have worked out the best way to misuse them in order to cram as much random content into as small a space as possible and filled SL with even more content bombs).

 

"Duh, dat R stoopid! Wi LL make it so I can haz 20 2k texturs on a fing if I R not suposd 2 use dem? I ainty listning 2 dat ruibish. Mi wurld Mi Imagnatin! Dat sum boomer cap!"

 

[WeFlossDaily]

5 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

"Duh, dat R stoopid! Wi LL make it so I can haz 20 2k texturs on a fing if I R not suposd 2 use dem? I ainty listning 2 dat ruibish. Mi wurld Mi Imagnatin! Dat sum boomer cap!"

/ me derenders DoS attack style avatar. =]

[Ayashe Ninetails]

16 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

gee flexi prim hair is still a thing? Who woulda thought it 😂

Yep. There are a bunch of creators still making it.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

 

"Duh, dat R stoopid! Wi LL make it so I can haz 20 2k texturs on a fing if I R not suposd 2 use dem? I ainty listning 2 dat ruibish. Mi wurld Mi Imagnatin! Dat sum boomer cap!"

 

Of course people are going to react that way, that's been the attitude of most SL residents since the platforms inception.

If people want to completely ignore advice on how to avoid "creating lag" then of course that's entirely their right but, since we're throwing out ideas for educational experiences in SL, why not walk them through a series of examples/tutorials that show them the ways in which content impacts performance.  Of course, they're free to ignore it but at least they'll have some understanding of how their performance issues are their own doing.

[WeFlossDaily]

Nah, they'll just complain that they don't have enough attachment slots.

[Rowan Amore]

3 hours ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

I think the reason some don't do that is because the in-world chat/instant message/group message system is so primitive. I personally cannot stand to use it. I'd much rather drag people over to Discord where conversations are a lot easier to follow. For those who voice chat, I've heard Discord does it better, too, but I'm not sure. I used in-SL voice only a handful of times and wanted to yeet my avatar off my sky platform. Discord does seem to be a LOT more feature-rich on that front, too. And sounds better, at least to me, but I'm not a regular user.

 

Yep, pretty much! I'm one of those users. I took, what, a decade off or something crazy like that, only logging in a few times here and there to look around. I figured I'd peek back in in 2020 to see if it was still alive (I figured there'd be an SL 2.0 by then) and found a friend online who I'd originally met in 2006. She filled me in on mesh and I decided to stay since everything was so massively different. Wound up staying around for about 4 years, but I'm back in my "meh" on/off period again.

 

I'll be honest - I have noooooooo idea about mobile! I'm the sort of person who barely remembers to keep my phone activated. I have a new number every year because it keeps getting recycled due to non-use and I have to re-activate it all over again if I want to dust it off for some odd reason. Nothing in the world would make me use SL or game on a mobile phone. I'm super clueless about that market.

 

It's not just Gen-Z. Flexi is one of the better ways to make some very curly (corkscrews, waves, etc.) hairstyles. 

 

 Mesh + flexi is also really nice:

 

The do not look that good in person unfortunately.  The new flexi is not as well done as the old flexi.  It's like 2 completely different things, IMO.  

New...

https://gyazo.com/5675107261793acdd0a8017a2c52b4cc

https://gyazo.com/9358d7f867405bafd9177cacc867ac46

Old...

https://gyazo.com/48b28134b295c42eb739c52623b87991

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 minute ago, WeFlossDaily said:

Nah, they'll just complain that they don't have enough attachment slots.

Honestly, avatars aren't really a huge issue because we have the Avatar Complexity slider and other tools with which to reduce the cost of rendering avatars.  Poorly optimized/utilized static content, on the other hand, is a lot harder to manage.

[WeFlossDaily]

1 minute ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Honestly, avatars aren't really a huge issue because we have the Avatar Complexity slider and other tools with which to reduce the cost of rendering avatars.  Poorly optimized/utilized static content, on the other hand, is a lot harder to manage.

Like:

No-mod items with no-kill scripts are annoying. Maitreya v5 can be deleted, though.

No mod items with unnecessary root-prims are annoying also.

Or:

Or the entirety of Sirens Isle . . . and all those high LI boats.

Stuff like that?