Josh Susanto

I wish I had the startup capital to open a whole sim so that I could also then petition for subsidy when it loses money. Maybe a museum that meticulously documents how Ayn Rand ultimately paid for her cancer treatments...

>I think the idea behind creating tools to make game-like environments is, to convert SL into a platform which could attract game developers - a bit like facebook provides a platform for them as well. It's not necessarily impossible, but it would require LL to do things which we have already been screaming at them for years to do, and which they have already made a point of not doing even as it already costs them untold thousands of new users every day. >IMO this is an idea, which (1) comes far too late The idea is as old as Second Life, itself, as is the idea of not doing anything at all to follow up on it, ever, apparently. It seems like Rodvik's solution to make SL more game-like is not to change anything technologically to make games more viable, but just to invite a bunch of gamers to participate; gamers being exactly the kind of people who already don't want to participate, and specifically because of the technical limitations Rodvik intends to somehow use the gamer presence in order to continue to ignore. SL has become Rodvik's "Field of Dreams", except he's saying "When they come, THEN I will build it." >and (2) would require a platform with better performance Given that it's already only marginally adequate for people at the opposite end of the tolerance spectrum from gamers, I find that I can disagree with your statement only by pointing out that it is profoundly understated (that is, I more than agree). >and (3) would require a platform, which is capable to host a much higher concurrency, I don't think the raw concurrency number is the primary challenge. If new users could somehow be magically distributed evenly among all sims, there would be plenty of room for them. But I seriously hope that's not how Rodvik is already looking at the numbers problem. If he's going to somehow socialize lag by causing it to be more evenly distributed across sims regardless of their varied data load, that might not actually be a totally bad idea, but he should really say something about it before the tinkering starts. >because if you have a bunch of game-like envirionments around, you need a critical mass for each of these games, to be attractive to players. It's not even the number of game-like environments that really matters. If SL can't support even one of them properly, failure to support others will be more an indictment of the basic level of service than an indication of the inability to handle a large basic concurrency number. >SL is not providing these and so this idea will IMO be a dead born baby, when it will finally be implemented. Agreed. Imagine going to a new Disney park and being told only after entering that construction of none of the rides has actually been completed yet... and that there is not only no deadline to completion, but no existing plan to complete them. (and, again, I say...) I don't think the god Shiva, himself, would be adequately equipped to produce the facepalmistry to express where this plan is headed without, numerous, massive and immediate technical implementations that seem not even to be in the works.

The 40 million figure is not part of the thread proper, but part of a link I didn't read first because I was already aware of Steam. The figure was not extracted by the person who posted it, and I was responding not to that person, but to you. If I'm required to read content of links for that which is not extracted, I should point out that the link also contains linked material, and that material includes further links. How far should I go with this before I am prepared to respond to you? I occasionally go to libraries or book stores to find sources cited before I continue reading a book, but I have never done so to alleviate the suspicion that the word "them" has been used in place of the word "these" or in place of the word "those". The argument seems to begin with your claim that your own estimate is more conservative, and I agree that it is more conservative in the way that you have now stated it. So, really, I initially responded to something that you did not realize that you had said.

I never get anything flagged from the category "Everything Else".

The culture is constrained by the comparative utilities of the medium. Right now SL is a good medium for people who like to make stuff and who have a huge amount of patience with technical failures. I don't assume that can easily change very much, but it's not impossible. If lag can be mostly eliminated and logins and inventory access can be made more stable, there would automatically be some number of people who would find the continuing limitations acceptable for specific games they want to design and/or play, so the total culture could shift somewhat in the direction of gaming if the technology would allow. I'm still not really sure what the point of pathfinding was ever supposed to be, but I suppose it is probably necessary in order to make a bunch of other features less pointless, whatever those features might be. To deploy pathfinding first just because it's the easiest new feature does make at least some amount of sense. Getting the bugs out of that would tend to frustrate people less than getting the bugs out of some other new feature they actually care about.

I guess it's a bit like radiation or chemotherapy. The treatment may kill the patient, but the patient is going to die otherwise anyway, so why not give it a try? If Rodvik makes everything faster and smoother, I'm OK with that in principle, but I don't thinks that's going to happen. Not every game is a question of how quickly people can jump and shoot with their thumbs. I haven't see everything that Steam offers, but the core appeal of games is ultimately in escalating challenges to creative problem solving ability, and SL could work that angle a lot harder than most of the 1st person shooters that already exist ever will. If Rodvik can get the marketing spin to focus on angles like "openly emergent narrative" and "evolving challenge structure", the most imaginitive and intellectually curious gamers should actually see a huge opportunity to do something other than eradicate gold farmers and outbid their college roommates on Craigslist for items that will make them invincible. And those are the people SL actually needs, aren't they?

200,000 new users doesn't mean 200,000 new concurrencies. It means some fraction of that. Probably it means just the amount needed in order to jam up the grid so that most of the remainder never even get logged on to begin with. Maybe the existing concurrency plus about another 50K? That is150,000 brand new, possibly permanent non-users.

>I don't want to split hairs, Josh, but languages are different and in german there is no difference, because we assume that people think about what is said and put it into the right context, which I provided as well. I spoke of possibly 200,000 new users, what is 40 million * 0.1 * 0.05 - can it be any clearer?- I don't see, that anyone thinking about it, could get it wrong. The 40 million number was not present in the original context. No language gap explains my failure to appreciate a number which was not yet stated. Moreover, I would have had to calculate backwards from your final figure (by using the numbers you did provide) in order to reach the number which I was led to believe you meant to imply in place of the 40 million which you did not mention. I didn't do that because I assumed that anything you left out from your figures either would not be necessary in order to compensate for your grammar, or would be provided for that purpose. Every language has shortcomings. It's difficult for me to belive that German considers a similarity or difference to be a distributable property among 2 items, such as in a construction like "difference between (both/each/either/neither)". In English, if your left sock does not match your right sock, your right sock cannot match your left sock because difference or similarity is a reciprocal relationship, not a distributive property. >I do not agree with your view of the current situation. SL is not in stagnation, it is in continuing decline, I can't disagree with the general trend of decline. But the current mechanisms of decline are not identical, as a collection, to the decline described with the 50% figure. The 50% loss is mostly due to the disillusionment of speculators. The current losses, regardless of the comparative rate of loss, is due more to persistent technical and service failures which have no clear relation to the collapse of instinsic overvaluation. Without more and harder numbers, I don't think we are really in a perfect position to agree or disagree about whether the current state of things is more like a stagnant reflection of the stagnant RL economic situations that inform SL market dynamics or more like a continued correction of overvaluation. But I fail to see what bubble, other than SL as a whole, is being slowly deflated here. Pyramids normally collapse much faster than they have bene built, and that's not really consistent with what people have so far explained is happening to SL right now. I do think we can agree that we are at a crossroads. If Steam does not bring a significant number of new users, I think that we can probably both see that LL needs to fix old problems faster than creating new ones anyway, if they intend to stop the continuing losses. And if Steam does bring a significant number of new users, I thimk we can probably both see that this opportunity will be wasted if LL continues to create new problems more quickly than fixing old ones.

>I would not call a more than 50% decline in L$ spent since 2008 "stagnation", tt is a massive decline (for those who do not remember those times or were not in SL yet, about 2.1 million US$ were spent daily in SL). The total trend is certainly more than mere stagnation, yes. I only meant that the current state of things is one in which there is neither rapid growth nor decline. I'm not especially concerned with the 50% decline because that could be explained as a massive market correction, such as the burst of a bubble or the collapse of a pyramid. If the market peak was 100% above baseline, then a 50% loss from that is not necessarily a sign of any real kind of trouble, in and of itself. The problem is the baseline. LL needs to stop the slow trickling away of the remaining value before they start looking for new ways to artificially inflate consumer confidence. More than anything, this means the removal of technical deterrents to normal use by normal users. Things like failed access to inventories are much larger long-term threats than something like a backfired marketing strategy.

>Oh come on - "of those" or "of them", this means exactly the same to me, I am not a native english speaker and in german there is no difference between both. A difference between both would be a difference specifically contrasted with a difference between either, which would treat a possible difference between an item and itself, which is impossible. If you do not care about the difference between one identity and two identities, I shouldn't be surprised that you also do not care about the difference between a subgroup of a primary group and subgroup of a subgroup of the primary group. Except that I see that you do, apparently; just not when it comes to the grammar. I'm not really interested in this kind of argument, but if you want to split hairs, we shall split hairs. Otherwise, I should simply recognize that you must have meant what you said you meant, and point out that I also meant my first response not as a criticism of you, but merely as a clarification to readers more generally of how what they should really expect would probably be different from what they had read in your message.

>They really do not understand what makes up the their current customer base. But why should they even care if they're just losing their current customer base anyway? Surely, if they just find something shiny enough to dangle in front of some new people, the eleventy-billion open JIRA's will somehow just take care of themselves ... right?

>That is why myself and other thought Medhue's "mesh is the answer to your problem" was: a) not even a valid solution since Mesh is NOT a new magic money generator for most, Moreover, if I'm still not having a problem selling sculpts even a year after mesh dropped, even to people who actually make mesh, why do I even need a "solution"?

> LL doesn't value peoples time, rather they ask for content for free and then charge you on every single aspect of its use. Exactly. Why should I go through the trouble of producing meshes instead of sculpties when the support for a market system to make them profitable just isn't there? I can produce and list a profitable sculpty in as little as 5 minutes sometimes. It takes that long just to get Blender just to decide whether it's even going to let me do anything without a reboot. And then I either have to pay 8 times as much to load the thing as I would for a sculpty, or I have to kill off a bunch of the detail that I know my regular customers already want.

>If the OP would take Medhue's advice, she would be limiting her ability to sell her creation in any of these other grids. Moreover, I happen to know for a fact that people are buying my sculpties in SL specifically to export them to other grids, and I'm fine with that. In fact, I'm better than fine with that. People wouldn't be bothering to export the sculpties if they didn't find some aspect of SL to be deficient. When I get fed up enough, I'll probably just go back to offering everything so cheaply that LL doesn't get a commission.

> I don't think Valve will do that more than once or twice before telling LL "Your platform is stupid, get off of ours." By then, there will be plenty more for them to subrogate in the works. It will be cheaper for LL to clean up their act and try to make nice than to fight that mountain of aggregated microclaims. So, naturally, LL will pay someone a lot to try to fight it, lose, and ultimately completely go under as a result. Or something in the culture at LL could change before that, but don't hold your breath.

>You can have flexible or fast, but you can't have both. But the faster ones are becoming more flexible and the more flexible ones are also becoming faster. The speed-up is just a general thing with computer technology, though, so there's not much point in focusing on that, especially as speed will eventually approach some point of diminishing returns at which everyone will have to turn to flexibility as a focus. And when that happens, who will be better positioned - the platforms that are 1% faster or the platforms that are 2% more flexible?

>We definitely need a lot of people with empty inventories around to keep this pyramid economy working. There are about 6 billion people who have never used Second Life, so there might be a way to go yet from that angle. And if it is to become an economy to which the pyramid quality is unimportant, that will probably take a while to make happen. If users are allowed to continue making both design and funding decisions for content development, a large enough market will have to exist in order produce the optimized results foretold by market capitalist dogma, and that may mean allowing the pyramid dynamic to play itself out to some kind of terminal correction (or that could just be catastrophic, OK, I get it). At least the money in SL flows in more than one direction, at least some of the time. How many pay platforms can you name in which there's really no legal way to cash out?

> if the whole point of SL is not getting through to them. Then maybe they just need to be told why anybody keeps coming back at all. What are the reasons?

>But this does not mean that those are all shopaholics. They don't need to be shopaholics. They just need to produce some threshold margin of growth that will allow the platform to provide an even yet-broader appeal to other new users, rather than continuing to sink into stagnation.

>Josh, you misinterpreted my numbers - I said if 10% try it out and 5% OF THEM stay You're still saying the same thing. Did you mean to say "5% of those"?

> A real gamer will walk into SL, see massive lag, from all the sculpty wearers, texture abuse, and sculpty builds, and turn right around and uninstall SL. Or there will be enough of them to damand that things be fixed. (Of course you know that I think there's no reason that sculpties couldn't be rezzing just as quickly as meshes, given the same amount of data, but that's beside the point).

>Someone making beds and skirts isn't going to see that. They will if they can somehow provide beds and skirts appropriate to the new scenarios in which they will be needed. The larger picture, though, is (or should be) a total net increase in supply chain movement and flow of currency. Put simply, more total economic activity should also ultimately empower existing users to buy more of what they already buy. The merchant who sells the rocket propelled grenade lauchers might want a bed and a skirt, but probably not. OTOH, she might want a collection of jungle plants produced by someone who wants a bed and a skirt. The very design of SL assumes that the partitions between user types have little or no practical meaning, and I think that is probably the very thing that has allowed SL to survive this long at all. A platform that does everything a bit clumsily will never be of great appeal to someone who wants a platform to do one specific thing, but there is a large pool of potential users who just don't like all that much the idea that the platform they use has to be basically about one thing if that means not being at all about a bunch of other things. SL offers a more genre-balanced experience to users than do the less contextually clumsy platforms, so, assuming that is a viable means of appeal to the new users from Steam who bother to stick around, this greater balance of interest will almost certainly be reflected in a diversity of buying habits.

>Do the math,more sellers then buyers will always lower the economic results. Not for component-level producers (like me). Hardware stores always seem to squeeze through a recession. And some of them prosper.

>Overall, I think it's a misguided attempt to attract a new type of customer, in spite of the fact that what is available here and what can eventually be implemented here will never measure up to the stellar graphics and game play found on dedicated gaming programs/platforms. As misguided as I agree it probably is, I suspect it could still end up working out decently if LL doesn't continue to produce more bathwater with which for new people to throw out their respective babies. If there is even one aspect of SL that is in any way superior to the other platforms, that could be a viable hook for an adequate number of new users. Probably, that hook is the comparatively high degree of control of users over content design. If LL should simply leave that alone, it would probably be exactly what they need to start getting re-established as a respectable platform. For that reason, I can only assume they're going to start "improving" things, like they did with the shadowing on curved surfaces. >So while they'll be able to generate numbers that look like a success, they will instead be flooding the grid with unhappy and disillusioned newbies who quickly leave, spread negative opinions among their peers, and further bog down the platform with stuff that no one ultimately uses. People who don't like it will of course complain, but they'll mostly stop talking about it immediately after blogging their first gripe. For that reason, LL really only needs to please about 20% of the new users, and that shouldn't be to hard if they simply stop adding new pre-broken features. And with any luck, the critics will be about evenly divided between people complaining about hom much SL sucks and others simply complaining that Steam is what sucks for directing its users to a platform that is so dissimilar to what else they offer (which is really not necessarily a bad thing, eh?).

>I don't really understand what you mean by, "producing content just for that audience". I think we all have some ideas already about what "that audience" would demand in terms of content as compared to the current market, but we can't really know. They could be people who are getting tired of the other Steam-related types of content, or they could be people who want more interactive content control of the same kinds of content, or they could be both. My guess would be both. But that's not necessarily important. Responsible merchants will continue to risk new product types as they always have, and will continue to adjust to perceived shifts in the market as they always have. The part I find doubtful is the "just for that audience" part, since it seems to imply that the interests of that audience are essentially different from those of current users. This could be true, but I would more expect a mere shift in terms of what interests are emphasized. Surely, practically anything that will interest those new people either already exists or has already been tried in SL. Moreover, if there really is a new market for types of content that are currently marginalized in SL, that could also result in developmental efforts that make such content more appealing for existing users. Old users and new users might be demographically different in some ways, but there's no reason to think that most of them couldn't just as easily be characterized as fitting one group or the other. I must tend to doubt that you're going to see a more bimodal or more polymodal distribution of content interest types than what you already see. Maybe furries don't hang out in vampire sims or vice-versa, and that sort of thing is bound to continue. But if combat simulation should happen to improve (for example), that might do as much to bring vampires and furries into the same sims as it would to bifurcate the total user pool into combat people and non-combat people.