lovestofu

SL is full of knowledge you only acquire by playing it. You need to wear some pre-mesh items and it's not immediately obvious that they don't matter entirely or at all. Eyebrows? Yes these control the shape of the eyebrow, sort of, but not the texture of the eyebrow on the mesh head. The inventory system itself is full of quirks, like Add versus Wear, which throw pretty much every new user. Experienced users will smugly chime in that you should be using Add not Wear to manage what you currently have on, and yet it is still not the default. Wearing up to 38 attachments as "outfits" is a different system compared to other games, where you equip items in pre-configured slots. The delay between attaching an object and seeing it render in world makes it a bit difficult to learn what is going on. Not everyone has a mental model of servers and latency. When an action is performed and the user gets no feedback from the interface, and has not been educated in how SL works, they will assume funny things and appear severely confused to the experienced user.

I agree with this. SL simply needs to show what an avatar looks like and people will imagine how it can be used for s e x. I think they are doing a good job keeping it subtle. If anything they need to make driving and sailing work better, among other wholesome activities.

This is exactly it. The use of alts to befriend the same person multiple times is rampant in SL, and it is difficult for the average person to detect unless they have highly developed spidey senses from being on SL for way too long. Therefore, everyone will assume any new face is actually an alt just to be on the safe side. They don't have a problem with alts themselves, they have a problem with deception.

It's great that you get a kick out of meeting newbies, but it still guts the tutorial. As it stands it's not even obvious that it's a tutorial. Newbie logs in, and sees two paths, one has people having fun (Social Plaza), the other has usually nobody except a lost newbie and a mentor ignoring them (tutorial). It's a terrible design unless the design is meant to make tutorials look stupid. If you want to meet newbies, you still could if they put the tutorial in the way, and they would still walk up to you to receive your wisdom. The tutorial is extremely short and takes no more than 5 minutes of reading to complete. Or, delete the tutorial entirely. Either would be preferable to the current situation where those who choose to go through the tutorial are split off from the Social Plaza. Both tutorial readers and tutorial skippers should end up in the same place. And the Community Exhibition should be right there too.

Groups are insular in SL because the meta has changed from real world. Alts can be scary and there's zero privacy in SL, so people are very guarded with their friendships and words. If you come on too strong with wanting to be a friend collector, you will give people the ick and have a bad time. You do have a point though, it would be fun to have a randomized matched activity that will group you up with someone in SL and bring people closer. But then the Lindens would have to build it, support it, and also provide the content for these activities.

Learn how link_message works and then you can use ZHAO II as a starting point Edit: but honestly you might just want to use a real AO hud as a base if you're not a scripter, and then just change out the animations.

That's exactly my point. Sure, they don't have to read, but right now they are very easily misled and walk straight toward the mass of people in Social Plaza. Argue all you want about arrows on the ground, they still do it. It's natural to want to approach other people and interact, and this guts the tutorial entirely.

Well, for one, the Community Exhibition isn't placed over the spot on the map that gets most traffic. Ideally, they should move the Social Plaza over to the Community Exhibition. They should overlap, even, so that experienced users don't feel like they're ditching their friends in over to look at the exhibition. This would have the dual benefit of encouraging new users to wade through the tutorial in their quest to find real people. I notice many new users head straight for the Social Plaza where everyone is standing, because they want to talk to real people in SL, not trudge through tutorials. Right now, when they do that, they short circuit the entire tutorial (and Community Exhibition). On top of that, the tutorial is stupid. It barely teaches you how to pilot your avatar. Once it does, you're prodded to buy Linden dollars and learn how to shop. It makes SL feel like a Gacha game for clothing. The tutorial should paint a more exciting picture of SL. As it stands, it makes it very clear to the user that they are the product.