Beautiful Disaster: SL's Paradoxical User Activity Caused By Increased Quality *And* Technical Hurdles (I Think)

As a five year observer of Second Life, it remains one of the most vexing paradoxes: While total aggregate user hours and maximum concurrency continue going up, the number of recurring active monthly SL users has remained at around 500,000, at least since May 2007.  Why is this happening?

Morris Vig at Second Arts has been thinking about this problem from another direction; he believes the plateau is caused by decreased quality at major SL social events.  "Despite the lag and other inconveniences," he writes, "we hardcore users struggle on despite the hassle-- recognizing that lag and other technical glitches are the price of admission to hang out with our friends, create and be inspired by others’ creativity."  Mr. Vig's observation inspires me to think of a likely explanation for the plateau:

As the ultimate experiential quality of Second Life improves, established Residents become more passionate, while casual visitors become even more discouraged.

Consider:

As Second Life becomes more beautiful (WindLight was introduced in May 2007) and technically robust (Havok 4 physics and Mono were introduced this year), established Residents become even more active and productive. At the same time, since these enhancements do not improve the initial log-in experience, and occasionally make it even more difficult, they become additional hurdles for new and casual users.

Think of the log-in experience as it is now: you launch the SL client, and you're typically greeted by lag, blur, and avatars who are gray blobs.  (This often happens after any point-to-point teleport.)  Established long-term Residents know this is a temporary condition, that if they wait a few minutes, the world will be even more beautiful and offer even more opportunities than it has before.  For less engaged users, however, who don't have a sense of what awaits them, this frustration period is only one more incentive to quit.

As far as I know, this is best way to explain how total user hours continue increasing, while total number of actual users refuses to meaningfully grown.  I'm definitely open to other possibilities.

If I'm right, however, growth in Second Life user numbers won't be significant until the world is beautiful and robust and relatively lag-free and crashes are rare.  Or as Vig puts it, "I just can’t see how SL can meaningfully grow until that infrastructure catches up with user demand for satisfying group experiences."

This is leaving aside improvements to the UI, to make it more user-friendly.  I'm beginning to believe this is a secondary priority.  What difference does an intuitive user interface make, if you can't even reliably and consistently participate in the world it's been made for?

Image credit, left screenshot: Second Arts.

Comments

[Doubledown Tandino]

Morris is a genius! and he's got smarts too!

[Ann Otoole]

Nice assessment. Keep in mind that the hardware needed to run SL well is a year old or less today. This technology will become cheaper quickly so in another year, when the wal mart consumers have access to decent stuff, then the number of people that can participate enjoyably will increase.

The barrier Windlight introduced was mandatory nVidia 8000 GPU, 4GB RAM, and a 64 bit OS or better. Many of us continue to think there needs to be a LL maintained low end browser that contains no Windlight functionality at all. Especially if the Lab wants to push SL as an educational medium given the general capability of school computers.

[Morris Vig]

Interesting thoughts, Hamlet. Can't say as I disagree.

The key is not the technology, though. It's the social engagement that comes from the technology. SL is one heck of a platform, but it's the connections that it makes that keeps us coming back.

[VIajero]

"The barrier Windlight introduced was mandatory nVidia 8000 GPU, 4GB RAM, and a 64 bit OS or better."

Bull. If one did any research at all, they'd find that PLENTY of people on SL, utilizing Windlight, with far lower specs. That's what I've found.

Includng me: nVidia 6200, 1GB RAM, and 32 bit Windows. FPS aren't pretty, but usually workable, and I hardly ever crash.

I'm all for Linden focusing on stability and lowering the technology barrier to SL, but exaggeration doesn't help this cause.

[Martien Pontecorvo]

I think one of the problems that SL faces is that *everything* is locked up tight on Linden Lab's servers, and every time you log in, you have to wait for *everything* to download. That's textures, prims, animations, sounds, even the UI graphics and sound effects.

People signing up for the first time need to be grabbed ASAP, but that's not likely to happen if they end up flailing around in a grey void. Unfortunately, as long as the bandwidth is clogged with not only movement updates, but also world information, people are going to be put off by the tardy response of the system.

I think more trust needs to be given to the client side. E.g. the servers would still serve a role, storing persistent builds, handling Lindex transactions, and other functions best suited to centralised systems, but also instructing clients to send data about their inventory to other clients -- a sort of peer-to-peer asset system running alongside the central grid, taking some of the load off.

However, given the state of some broadband connections, this might not be a good idea, although being able to backup your inventory to local disk seems to be a much-desired feature.

SL lag comes from too much data being transferred, and until the packets get fewer, richer and smaller, we'll just have to put up with it.

[Iggy Os]

I got a bit of a drubbing from fellow educators when I suggested that these tech barriers hurt adoption of SL by "mainstream" faculty in higher ed.

Give a time-strapped, constantly assessed faculty member this reality and they won't bother to see the treasures that SL offers.

And while students will dutifully complete a project in SL, I don't think they'll be sticking around or coming on their own--especially on their laptops. Thus we see LL's percentage of residents 18-25 decline, as cited elsewhere in NWN.

[rightasrain]

sorry Morris, not sure I buy that although concept that a hardcore user is online more of course makes sense. But by definition, hardcore users are a small percentage.

It is of course perplexing...but Linden Lab of course has all the answers to the real user activity in SL--maybe one day they will share it.

Their view of "community" is more like the hardcore users are guinea pigs stress testing their platform--and paying to do it.

Major unknowns in the user activity--

* Bots--someone at LL said this was like 20% of concurrency, but how much of monthly hours?

* how many sessions for newbies never leave orientation or get passed first 1 hour inworld?

* how many people are all these avatars?

* how much traffic is on private islands? or at least sections of the grid that are not viewable in search. So this would take out IBM closed sims for example.

* How much traffic is from LL staff? (Although they never seem to be inworld)but they should report their hours or net them off.

[Lish Lach]

If you want to see what "concurency" is all about these days, search for vertical avatar stacks on your Map, teleport over, and try to strike up a conversation with the crowd. More often than not, you won't get a single response, because they're all bots. (If you'd like to see a 24/7 example, try Orient 80, 150, 50.)

What's puzzles me is why the puppeteers often take the time to "personalize" each bot with faux SL and RL bios in their profiles. Who are they trying to fool with these charades?