The End Of An Era and what was a wonderful, enlightened virtual world....

[SandorWren]

15 hours ago, Ksenia Elcano said:

Of the changes you listed, mesh probably did the most damage. The introduction of mesh dramatically reduced in-world building and the social aspects that went that. What makes SL tick is the social interaction.

The other change you don't list that caused significant damage, probably because it was before you joined, was the elimination of last names. Last names made the world feel like a community. Eliminating last names was unnecessary and caused a lot of harm.

I don't get it. Why would reduced inworld building reduce social interaction? I can't interact properly with anyone if I'm focussed on an inworld task.

And last names? I just very recently changed my name, and I was given a plethora of choices. I chose not to have one, because if it wasn't "Wren", it would be a slap in the face to my SL wife.

[Ksenia Elcano]

3 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

You forgot the part where you complain about "Viewer 2" as well.

On the viewer issue, LL got lucky because the Firestorm team provided the option to maintain the Phoenix interface. If that had not happened, SL would have lost a few more residents.

LL should really change their name from Linden Lab to Bad Decisions Lab.

Edited August 11 by Ksenia Elcano

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

I don't think anyone left because last names were dropped.

I am sure some people left when creating inworld was changed to creating out of SL. The skills are completely different. When the skills a person knows are replaced by skills they don't know it changes things. When you don't want to learn an entirely different building system outside of SL or spend the money on outside programs, then it really changes things.

Time matches on. There aren't as many hobbyist creators. A lot of clothing creators are really just mesh retexturers.

It changes the make up of the population over time. Each major change changes the population over time. Some people will flounce right out of SL immediately, but a larger number will just fade away quietly over a few months or a year as the changes are too big for them to keep up. The fun is lost in a cloud of frustration over changes, their hardware, or simply the changing population and interactions inworld.

SL definitely needs to attract new people.

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

21 minutes ago, SandorWren said:

I don't get it. Why would reduced inworld building reduce social interaction?

Because every myopic Captain Oldbie, peering into the "Glory Days" more than 15 years ago through rose tinted Arc Welder's safety visors, KNOWS that REAL people ONLY socialise while in sandboxes, playing a team sport called "flip the prim", which is every bit as exciting as it's name implies.

 

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

3 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Because every myopic Captain Oldbie, peering into the "Glory Days" more than 15 years ago through rose tinted Arc Welder's safety visors, KNOWS that REAL people ONLY socialise while in sandboxes, playing a team sport called "flip the prim", which is every bit as exciting as it's name implies.

 

The speed building contests that were held in sandboxes were really fun to watch.  It was a reason to gather, learn new skills, and a social thing.

There are many other things to enjoy in SL, though, so those disappearing wasn't the end of the world. People can miss them without being a myopic captain oldbie.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

13 minutes ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

There are many other things to enjoy in SL, though, so those disappearing wasn't the end of the world. People can miss them without being a myopic captain oldbie.

Very true, but...

We keep seeing posts that basically say "Mesh is of the DEEEEEEVIL! It killed 'flip the prim' and doomed SL! Everyone left because they banned casinos, allowed mesh, and treated avatars called Resident as if they were  REAL PEOPLE!"

 

THOSE are the Myopic Captain Oldbies.

 

[Orwar]

Just now, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

The speed building contests that were held in sandboxes were really fun to watch.  It was a reason to gather, learn new skills, and a social thing.

   There is absolutely nothing stopping people from holding speed building contests with prims these days, the tools are all still there. I doubt the reason people aren't doing it would be because the creations 'wouldn't sell'. 

   Might take a bit of work to scrape people together for it (not a fan of the event calendar in-world, but it could get people to show up I guess), but if someone held a regular thing then perhaps over time it might get some traction - there's no shortage of people who actually like playing with prims still.

8 minutes ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

There are many other things to enjoy in SL, though, so those disappearing wasn't the end of the world.

    One of the most common complaints about SL is how there's 'nothing to do', which is of course wrong, but the more variety the better. I do think that a fair few people who check out SL do so because of the creative side (they're not all here for SLex, or so people claim!), but the learning curve for building in SL is gargantuan compared to most video games about making stuff (Minecraft, Valheim, etc). 

   And there is a sandbox at the welcome hub, with newbs chasing green dots looking for people to chat with. Just saying. 

[Arielle Popstar]

13 hours ago, Ksenia Elcano said:

Of the changes you listed, mesh probably did the most damage. The introduction of mesh dramatically reduced in-world building and the social aspects that went that. What makes SL tick is the social interaction.

Mesh and the tendency to make everything No-Mod. They could have incorporated a type of mesh that would have been fine for inworld creations (voxels) in addition to a mesh that would need an external program for rigging to the avatar but I guess that would have been too much work for them.

Losing the inworld building did make inworld SL increasingly boring so that it has predominantly become only a dress up Barbie world where the only excitement is for shoppers and those wanting slex with them.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

41 minutes ago, SandorWren said:

I don't get it. Why would reduced inworld building reduce social interaction? I can't interact properly with anyone if I'm focussed on an inworld task.

I can't speak for everyone, but one of my closest friends and I used to build together wayyyyyy back in like 2006 or whatever it was. Yes, granted, she did spend a lot of time tabbed out in Photoshop and I was constantly zoomed in trying to add textures to a tiny little piercing, but we did these things together for absolute hours and chatted in-between. 

Once the writing was on the wall that building would be going entirely off-platform (and we quit doing it as neither of us were interested in that), I quit SL for a long time and found out she eventually did, too. We reconnected a few years ago and we'd get together on occasion to decorate either my home or hers, but neither of us continued to build from scratch and it didn't quite feel the same since we were no longer creating and sharing our own items. We definitely LOVE mesh, but decorating is not really the same process and didn't keep us together for the same length of time (we'd decorate for 30 mins to an hour as opposed to building together for an entire afternoon). We lost our old hobby and yeah, we found other stuff to do, buuuut, SL just hasn't felt the same for me at least.

Group building is something a lot of games are pushing for these days and players are constantly demanding co-op/multiplayer for things like that. Making original stuff together (homes, towns, bases, castles, etc.) is a lot of fun.

[Porky Gorky]

35 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Losing the inworld building did make inworld SL increasingly boring so that it has predominantly become only a dress up Barbie world where the only excitement is for shoppers and those wanting slex with them.

I think people have still had the opportunity to build in SL with the introduction of mesh, but just not from scratch. People buy unfurnished houses and customize them by changing surface textures if it’s modifiable. They buy furniture, they buy landscaping elements and over time they end up with a large library of assets with which they can mix and match to build unique environments and worlds. 

In the games industry this role is called a Level Designer. In larger studios, a level designer won’t model, texture or script anything. They just take the pre existing assets and build new levels and worlds with them.

If anything, PBR will cause a decline in this type of world building. As there is no set pipeline for creators to author PBR materials, they are being created for varying SL environments. So when our level designers go out and collect their preferred PBR assets from accross the grid and bring them home, there is no guarantee they will work together in their chosen environment.

[Ksenia Elcano]

2 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

I don't think anyone left because last names were dropped.

Yes, but new residents didn't stay as long because they didn't have a last name. Who can remember a name like Am3liaoxxx3389? By next week they have forgotten their login and the game wasn't that interesting, so they don't bother to login again.

In RL, people have last names. It's a better simulation of the real world with residents having last names. It was a unique feature that other games don't have. It's an appealing enough feature that residents are willing to pay for it.

[WeFlossDaily]

29 minutes ago, Ksenia Elcano said:

In RL, people have last names. It's a better simulation of the real world with residents having last names. It was a unique feature that other games don't have. It's an appealing enough feature that residents are willing to pay for it.

This is very true. Last names are classy. Right now in SL we have an endless supply of stunning names like:

A$$Master69
LoverBoi_4_U
ღPrincessBeefstickღ
DaddyDom13
KittySomthing
ღSömthingMöönÖrLunåღ
щшьготрнв6н78н9пмзпцуіепуцфкепуйфкп
NoobyNewb1234

 

------edit-------

I do like Am3liaoxxx3389. It's completely unpronounceable, could also be the some sort of mundane or exotic research chemical, and yet it still manages to sound sggy with a stylistic triple-X. It even gets bonus points for not wrapping it's self in ghanis (ღ) like  a certain princess did.

Edited August 11 by WeFlossDaily
couldn't help myself

[CaerolleClaudel]

3 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

Each major change changes the population over time. Some people will flounce right out of SL immediately, but a larger number will just fade away quietly over a few months or a year as the changes are too big for them to keep up. The fun is lost in a cloud of frustration over changes, their hardware, or simply the changing population and interactions inworld.

And some people (me) are stupid enough to keep coming back and trying again, over and over, for more than a dozen years after the thrill was gone.

🤷🏻‍♀️

[Rolig Loon]

As Yogi Berra (or maybe Nils Bohr) said, "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future." The flip side of that is that it's really easy to look at decisions in the past and see what a mess they made of things later. Hindsight makes us nostalgic for things that we thought were great until some idiot changed them. It also lets us criticize the idiots safely from a distance, as if WE would have done any better.

One of the benefits of getting older is that I've gotten used to the fact that people make bad choices all the time. There can be quarrels at the time about the choices, but most of the time we don't know the big ones were bad decisions until lots later.  Plastics seemed like a godsend after WWII, but environmental pollution wasn't really on our radar at the time.  Thalidomide showed great promise as a sedative and medication for morning sickness until it turned out that it caused ghastly birth deformities. And I wouldn't get into bonehead decisions in politics even if they were allowed here in the forums.   As one of my former colleagues was fond of saying, "There's no yin without a yang, and you can't always see the yang coming until it's too late."

I can get nostalgic about some of the Good Old Days in SL and can criticize decisions like CHUI and removing last names.  I criticized some of those things at the time too, but I also criticized other things -- like discontinuing the Teen Grid and launching Zindra -- that turned out to be more or less good ideas in retrospect. Some bumps get smoothed out and look like silly worries in hindsight; others develop into brick walls or dead ends.  I'm not much better at predicting the future than anybody else, so I've become careful about making Chicken Little guesses about what's going to be the end of SL.  The future will come; prepare to be appalled and amazed.

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Ksenia Elcano said:

Am3liaoxxx3389

They wouldn't have remembered that WITH a last name.  That just shows me lack of imagination which one does need in SL.

[CaerolleClaudel]

3 hours ago, Orwar said:

One of the most common complaints about SL is how there's 'nothing to do', which is of course wrong,

Perhaps what they mean is ‘there is nothing to do that I like doing/that interests me,’ which seems fair. As many others have said here and other places many, many times, SL is self-selecting.

I am not saying you are doing this, but I disagree with people who blame the ones who are not engaged by what is on offer either when they join (new people, though perhaps they should give it a bit more time) or longer-term residents whose interests have changed or the things that interest them have passed their day.

I have no idea what the answer is, but then again it’s not really my place to figure that out or address it. I’m not sure it can even be done.

[Arielle Popstar]

2 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

They wouldn't have remembered that WITH a last name.  That just shows me lack of imagination which one does need in SL.

Not really. I've always relied on my partners imagination as she is much better at naming things but that didn't affect my SL With a limited run of a last name, at least one has a better chance of finding an acceptable first name without having to cook up some crazy combination.

[Ksenia Elcano]

12 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

1 hour ago, Ksenia Elcano said:

Am3liaoxxx3389

They wouldn't have remembered that WITH a last name.  That just shows me lack of imagination which one does need in SL.

If last names were available, she wouldn't have had to choose such a complex first name to avoid duplicates. With last names, her user name would been something like Amelia Amore, a memorable name with alliteration.

Edited August 11 by Ksenia Elcano

[Rolig Loon]

1 minute ago, Ksenia Elcano said:

If last names were available, she wouldn't have had to such a complex first name to avoid duplicates. With last names, her user name would been something like Amelia Amore, a memorable name with alliteration.

Nah.  Am3liaoxxx3389 probably had that name in another platform where that's the rule. She would have kept it here and become Am3liaoxxx3389 Amore, either because she lacked imagination -- I doubt that -- or because it's a pain to have to remember a new name when you move from one place to another on the Internet. 

[WeFlossDaily]

Am3liaoxxx3389: Why do they hate my name so much?

WeFlossDaily: Because you don't exist.

Am3liaoxxx3389: What!

WeFlossDaily: Nvm. Forget I said anything. Here's a taco.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, Rolig Loon said:

Nah.  Am3liaoxxx3389 probably had that name in another platform where that's the rule. She would have kept it here and become Am3liaoxxx3389 Amore, either because she lacked imagination -- I doubt that -- or because it's a pain to have to remember a new name when you move from one place to another on the Internet. 

Personally I doubt that. It is the sort of letter/number combinations I've had to use in past to name one word accounts on other sites so that I could have the core Amelia and having to add letters and numbers that were somewhat memorable to myself. Arielle007 for example was one I used in past when I signed up quickly to a new service that would still be avaialble even if something popular but the Arielle would already be spoken for.

[Theresa Tennyson]

3 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Very true, but...

We keep seeing posts that basically say "Mesh is of the DEEEEEEVIL! It killed 'flip the prim' and doomed SL! Everyone left because they banned casinos, allowed mesh, and treated avatars called Resident as if they were  REAL PEOPLE!"

 

THOSE are the Myopic Captain Oldbies.

 

Remember to keep current on your optometrist visits, friends...

[Theresa Tennyson]

1 hour ago, WeFlossDaily said:

This is very true. Last names are classy. Right now in SL we have an endless supply of stunning names like:

A$$Master69
LoverBoi_4_U
ღPrincessBeefstickღ
DaddyDom13
KittySomthing
ღSömthingMöönÖrLunåღ
щшьготрнв6н78н9пмзпцуіепуцфкепуйфкп
NoobyNewb1234

 

------edit-------

I do like Am3liaoxxx3389. It's completely unpronounceable, could also be the some sort of mundane or exotic research chemical, and yet it still manages to sound sggy with a stylistic triple-X. It even gets bonus points for not wrapping it's self in ghanis (ღ) like  a certain princess did.

As opposed to icantfindanameformyavatar.queenstown, who joined in March, 2010 when there were (wait for it...) last names.

[WeFlossDaily]

Ah crap. I was reading the 3 like a alphabetical letter as a Z, like za, instead of an E. lol.

-----edit

The name feels way less cool now.

Edited August 11 by WeFlossDaily
just because

[WeFlossDaily]

2 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

As opposed to icantfindanameformyavatar.queenstown, who joined in March, 2010 when there were (wait for it...) last names.

I'm just poking fun at some hypothetical names that roughly resemble names in-world.