Survey: Which of These Simple Features Would Most Improve the SL Experience?

Last week I asked NWN readers to suggest simple but powerful feature improvements to Second Life, and got a bunch of great ideas. Here are my six favorites -- now you tell me, which is your favorite overall?

Online Surveys & Market Research

Before you vote, read the lengthier explanation fror each suggestion by the reader who made it, below. After New Year's day, I'll blog the most popular one, in hopes that the Lindens reading New World Notes feel inspired to add it to their development queue. (Though I hope they're already reading this getting ideas.) And thanks to Pussycat Catnap, Planter Leitner, Shockwave Yareach, Sera Lok, JubJub Forder, Flo2, and everyone else for their suggestions.

Log new folks into places with clusters of other new folks. Something to get them chatting, which is what everyone seems to want to do first. - Pussycat Catnap

Create a kind of category within Events called "role-play." Then the calendar of events would become useful to the large population of roleplayers and make it easier to determine what's going on within Second Life roleplay. - Planter Leitner

Declare that all viewers must be mesh capable in 3 months, or be unable to enter SL anymore. While third party viewers has brought improvements to SL, they have also created a Balkanized world where two people in the same place see two different things. This destroys the entire "colaborative" vision of SL's very foundation. And without a foundation, what does the house do? - Shockwave Yareach

Add a Dropdown Filter in inventory to easily filter items by object/texture/script etc. - Sera Lok

Suspend/delist the marketplace listings of any merchant that hasn't logged in for over a month (or some appropriate timeframe). They cannot be providing customer service. I know several who have left SL permanantly, yet their account continues to build up money while the buyers are sometimes getting no delivery and no response. - JubJub Forder

Create animations for the following avatar-activities: "checking the map", (depict avatar looking at a map) "IM-ing" (depict avatar using a cellphone), "reading a notecard" (depict avatar holding a note and reading it). Why? - Because most of the time, the world of SL is not dynamic. Avatars just stand still, and for a newbie's eye, they do nothing. With these new animations, we could show that we are busy at the moment. And of course, this feature could be turned off if you want to hide that you are IM-ing. - Flo2

Comments

[Pussycat Catnap]

I actually think my idea is a bad idea unless coupled with the second half of my idea:

"Kill the infohubs. All of them. Or at least remove them from the places new folks see in selecting a destination. Change default home from 'random infohub' to 'random destination guide entry within user maturity preferences'."

:)

(we can skip the part of my suggestion involving mushroom clouds and help island... :) )

[Ciaran Laval]

They'e been moving towards allowing people to login to busy locations by allowing you to click events and destination guide locations on the login screen which can then set your login to that location.

What they haven't been so good at is telling people you can actually do this.

Personally I'd like to see them make events the same as destination guide locations when it comes to copying and pasting the code and putting it on your website.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

V1 viewers are toast anyway the day LL shuts off the v1 inventory fetch and the other v1 services like search, etc. Mainly inventory since a viewer is DOA without inventory. Mesh enabled or not.

[4realtho]

Why kill the infohubs? How about not allowing newbs near infohubs for the first 30 days? I personally enjoy hanging out at infohubs. I enjoy the silliness there.

If you instituted a time period for which newbs couldn't access infohubs, this would serve a dual purpose. You keep the sensitive newbs away from the harshness of infohubs, and you would also knock out the griefers who use proxies and throw away accounts to just come right back and continue.

@Ann

I don't see it happening to be honest, but keep dreaming.

[Melanie Ryzyder]

None of the choices seemed to really jump out at me, except for maybe the Mesh one. I have only run into 2 avis I could not see correctly because of Mesh. I am on Phoenix and their release notes for their Mesh enabled version were not convincing so I did not update. I am one of those that until forced to update, I stick with what works for me.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

I'm puzzled what Sera's suggestion means as you can already filter your inventory to select just objects, textures or scripts. Is it some sort of ordering that is being suggested, or is it just the selection from a drop-down menu rather than the selection menus on the inventory floater?

[Shug Maitland]

re. the Marketplace suggestion; I might agree with in if it applied to free accounts only. If someone is paying US$10/month for a premium account, it would take a lot of arrogance to delist their Marketplace stuff, even if they never came in world again!

[biffingbiff]

I don't really think that any of the options in this survey would improve the SL experience.

If LL wanted to improve the SL experience, they would do more to build community in SL either by creating regions that would drive community themselves or by working with community managers to build communities around user-owned venues.

I personally think that the biggest problem in SL is mainland. Sure, users having land is fine and great (I personally love my land) but, most of mainland looks like a rummage sale. It's full of outdated, poor quality and incomplete builds - not to mention the wide array of ugly. Trying to use any of the mainland features such as the Linden Highway is challenging at best.

[Moni Duettmann]

Since most people are obviously voting for banning non-mesh-viewers, I can only say this: I have been trying to use mesh viewers for quite a while now, but none has worked properly yet. So should Linden really follow this "suggestion", it would mean banning me from SL entirely. Thank you very much, folks!

[sirhc desantis]

None of these stand out to be honest except - ban non mesh viewers? Hmm lets see, a 'balkanized' world - I usually run voice and sound off, particles off and refuse to use your atmospheric settings, preferring a lighter load across the board most of the time. So logically, as I don't see (ok, 'experience') the world as everyone else anyway, why not include those criteria?
And yes I run all sorts of viewers depending on what I am out to achieve. More than happy with my existing ancient ballgowns too =^^=

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I think the way to go with infohubs is exactly the opposite direction; make them well-moderated and policed showcases for best-practice techniques and information.

Second Life is, by nature, mostly user-generated and lacking coherence and organization. I have no particular problem with that, and in fact resent restrictions beyond those necessary to curtail griefing and maintain a baseline degree of social function.

But I'd like to see an exception made for infohubs, to transform them into well-organized training centers for new residents (and old residents trying to master new skills).

Enlist residents in the effort if you want to keep it user-generated, but put it in a framework that functions as an organized user's guide to Second Life.

[Fenix Eldritch]

I really like the extra animations for using interfaces (maps notecards, etc). I actually made a custom HUD/attachment to try and do the exact same thing for myself... I should go back and finish working on that :)

[Adeon Writer]

The ability to display web content on the surface of a prim has been a feature for a few years now, but it rarely gets used because people are afirad to allow their viewers to automatically connect to servers that LL does not own.

Solution? Give all estate owners some web space on LL servers, to make use of MOAP.

It's a very powerful feature that had the ability to truly bring interactivity into SL but lack of security means few want to use it.

[Pan]

I'm not a fan of banning non-mesh viewers either, I've tried 3 mesh viewers and none have worked for me. Forcing this will ensure less people logging in.

[elizabeth (16)]

am not in favour of banning non-mesh. eg what about text clients??? they not render at all

new ppl more need a safe place they can run home too when they encounter something or someone inworld for the first time that they not sure of. hope ll make discovery islands with all kinds of portals to other places and allow new ppl to set their homes there for 2 or 3 months if they want, b4 they pushed out the nest

more animation defaults is cool. be good when/if we get a simple way in OLV to replace them rather than have to use a AO

being able to create tags for inventory items and filter on them be good

[Pussycat Catnap]

"I personally think that the biggest problem in SL is mainland."

A very simple solution to mainland would be to use abandoned land for linden homes.

Instead of selling the land, put it into the queue for the linden homes.
- Let people grab up a 512 lot, randomly picked, as one of the options there.

Would this hurt land sales? Yes, but no more than the currently linden homes do - and they do a lot of harm as it is.

Couple this with no more new linden homes, and auto-relocating people in them into clustering of sims each time a linden home gets abandoned.

(ie, if I'm in a Tahoe 5, and there's another sime out there with an empty Tahoe 5 that is closer to being full, move me and my prims to it - to keep the occupied sims as full as possible and slowly empty out the others.)

A second policy: set auto-return to 5 on all linden or mole land, AND on all user-owned land who's owner or group owner has not logged in for over 6 months.

And lastly, if you've not logged in for 2 years+, relocate the plot to a new cluster sim. Place these sims off to the north-west of the Shermerville area "somewhere" reachable. Maybe just a bridge away. And fill them with such clustered people. If these people return, they get the same deal folks moved during the adult content policy got: put in a ticket to claim a linden lot -anywhere- on mainland of same or smaller size.
- But my guess is 90% of them aren't coming back.

Violating an old terms for the good of active users is for the best of the active SL population... First landers who've given up SL can be safely cut or at least moved out of sight at this point.

[elizabeth (16)]

image tags be even cooler. like can take photo of ur house, builds, outfits even. tag to folder or item

[EhrmanDigfoot]

As much as I would like to see everyone adopt mesh viewers, I don't think taking options away from SL users is ever the answer. The solution to raise mesh adoption should always be to create more mesh content that people would like to see. If the neo-Luddites see me as a disembodied head, it's their problem.

I agree with biffingbiff, I'd like to see the mainland revamped with consistent low resource builds like those in the Linden residential land reserves ( http://youtu.be/FasibEZik24 ), they can even make them vampire themed if they like. I also like the idea of the extra animations and am surprised a dedicated viewer-side AO in the main viewer wasn't mentioned with better default animations.

Adeon, I googled MOAP but still have no idea what you're talking about . . . mobile oriented applications platform?

[foneco zuzu]

V1 viewers are toast anyway the day LL shuts off the v1 inventory fetch and the other v1 services like search, etc. Mainly inventory since a viewer is DOA without inventory. Mesh enabled or not.

LL does that and looses 90 pct of their user base!
Same will adapt, most will just migrate where to where those viewers are still used and will keep being (Os grid, Avination, Inworldz)!

[Pussycat Catnap]

"I'm not a fan of banning non-mesh viewers either, I've tried 3 mesh viewers and none have worked for me."

The mesh viewers all include (or did at one point) supposedly buggy anti-alias code that will lag 'some popular video cards' if people using them turn on Anti-alias.

Try turning off anti-alias. If this helps, then you're part of that bug...

Know also that the current viewer gets a lot of frequent updates, and at present likely also includes a lot of bug-reporting code. Some of that code may be slowing things down while they gather data, and is likely to cause a notable speed boost soon once pulled out. In fact each version of v3 seems to make a leap in speed over the last.

- The short of that is, try again each time they update it. Also, when it fails, get busy with the Jiras. While LLs no longer exists, at all, in terms of lindens we can find inworld, they've gotten more active on the JIRA side, and -do- read that as well as crash reports.

[Pussycat Catnap]

"LL does that and looses 90 pct of their user base!
Same will adapt, most will just migrate where to where those viewers are still used and will keep being (Os grid, Avination, Inworldz)!"

I'd wager maybe 2% would actually follow through on their rage quits. Much as back when Emerald was banned.

People love to make ultimatums. They think, as children are wont to do, that it causes them to get listened to. But in the end its only seen as the childish temper tantrum it is.

When v1 dies, there will be panic, followed by mass downloads of Firestorm... and then business as usual.

The 2% that actually do quit will pat themselves on the back for the luddites they are, proud to have 'shown the lindens what for' as they sit in a nearly empty OSGrid somewhere until loneliness causes them to come back to SL, or go play IMVU instead. :)

[foneco zuzu]

Well i can assure you that if V1 viewers (and as far as i know, that is not even being considered) where not allowed anymore, users for sure will not move to firstorm, but hopefull to v3 based tpv's like Niran's, Marine Kelly, exodus, Catnip or even newer ones.
But firestorm, unless it becomes really functional, already created to many haters (ppl that tried it and could not login or stay in world).
Seems that all didn't realize a simple thing, the user base that supports Sl, hates to loose time on installing software to be in world!
they want to login with what they are used to, and don't waist time guessing why all takes so long to rezz, why they crash in less then 5 min and so on!
They relay on a viewer that they already know and trust, that works for them every day.
Make V3 ui equal to v1 and you will not loose a single user, the 1 that count i mean, the ones that still spend money in world!

[shockwave yareach]

@Foneco -- and what stops the TPV coders who make V1 UI viewers from including Mesh together with their V1 UI viewers? Nothing?

When HTML on a prim came out, I built a working weather radar that people could use inworld and instantly see the weather where they were or where any friends were. Everyone would see the same radar screen. But only people using a V2 or V3 browser can see it -- everyone else sees a wooden prim. If we cannot have a virtual world where we all see the same things because people are still up in arms about the boneheaded decisions made in V2, then we have no virtual world. I'll have what I see and you'll have what you see... we may as well be playing Skyrim instead.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Meh...

The Firestorm / Phoenix thing.

That's just so 2010 and Emerald...

Not for like reasons. In fact the hatred of Emerald's developers was justified.

But you had people say they would never touch another product in that line - who are now on Phoenix or Firestorm. And you had people who said they would, that are now on v3 or something else...

People put out a -LOT- of drama and smoke.

In the online world, we're all like 6-year olds having constant temper tantrums to try and get what we want.

In the end, once Firestorm has its bugs ironed out, and V3 its bugs ironed out - people who swore up and down they would never use one or the other or both will.

The actual number of people childish enough to carry through on their drama-fest 'I will quit if you do that' rants is pretty small. Most of us get childish, and then later come to our senses.

*****************************

Right now the V3 line has undergone some major changes for FUI (which is the -worst- acronym I could possibly manage, why would you name such a great new UI feature 'F***ed Up Interface'?), graphics tuning that is -trying- to get all our diverse cards working again, tuning to speed up shadows / anti-alias that has worked wonders for some (I can play at normal speed now, with shadows on, on my iMac, and even my Toshiba can do almost 5-10fps in shadows; enough for photography), and of course - refining mesh to speed it up for us all...

- So we're going to see a -LOT- of under the hood changes. Things you will only notice in the short term if you run with your performance meter going - but which in the long term will make SL run a lot better...

BUT as a result each iteration of V3 feels more like a beta-release, and Firestorm is seriously trailing behind because FUI was done without telling the TPV-community. Unlike other V3 viewers, Firestorm has a lot of heavy changes, so they can't just slap on 3 lines of code and call it a release... :)

In a short while, those of us who were willing to jump forward with this new tech will see it performing very smoothly... Some of us already are, and its just a matter of time until people with other graphics cards get their patch.

[sirhc desantis]

to shockwave - "I'll have what I see and you'll have what you see" erm yes, was the point I was making and not just about "seeing". Would you prefer we all had identical setups, wants, even tastes? Hey why not disable wireframe while your at it - its a fun thing I like to wander around in too =^^=.
And to make it clear - I have used the LL viewers, the new FS, as well as my old standbys. From a visual poinr of view nothing has yet made me go any more than oh. Mildly interesting.
And as a scripter (and dabbler in blender) well - still leaves me at the 'meh' stage.

[GreenLantern Excelsior]

I agree with Arcadia - the infohubs really need to be cleaned up, or maybe cleaned OUT. The first thing a new resident encounters is some drunk guy cussing out some drunk girl, both of them shouting obscenities at the top of their lungs in voice, in a PG sim. Welcome to Second Life, now meet some of our outstanding citizens. What a great first experience for someone who's trying to decide whether to stay in SL or not.

Most infohubs are not used for helping newbies these days. They have become hangout locations where one or two dominant personalities hold court with their followers and ignore everyone else. There are places like Bear and Boardroom where newbies can still get help, but those places are rare. The infohubs need someone on duty with parcel powers to keep them newbie-friendly.

[Ciaran Laval]

@Adeon "Solution? Give all estate owners some web space on LL servers, to make use of MOAP."

Web space is something I've suggested in the past but I was thinking more along the lines of MySQL databases and Http servers for scripting projects rather than MOAP, but that's a good reason for web space too.

[shockwave yareach]

@Sirhc - If you want to render the world in wireframe, more power to you. You have the CHOICE to see what's there in whatever color scheme you want, with wire or windlight or whatever.

But if you are running Grampa Liverspot's Viewer, you cannot see the mesh at all, regardless of how you'd like it. And you're going to end up walking into invisible things that you cannot see while the rest of us see the ornately detailed mesh door that you are bumping into. Why not also say that you're viewer shouldn't have to display spheres or cubes smaller than 1m or Prisms on days starting with "T" while you are at it? Either we have a COMMON world, or we have no world at all. Even if you want to see it in wireframe, you still have it there to see.

[Arcadian Vanalten]

Honestly, I don't think any of these ideas is significantly good or effective for improving the user experience. I'd keep it simple myself...improve the stability. Period.

Thorndyke's Law. Behavior that leads to enjoyable outcomes is far more likely to be repeated. When I use ANY of the V3's (and I've tried 'em all, TPV and primary), I find that I spend most of my time relogging from crashes. This is not what I consider an "enjoyable outcome." If the resident's first experience of SL mostly consists of lockups and freezes, why would you expect them to be return customers?

If I have a project that really needs to be done, I stick w/ Phoenix. Been using it since it came out, and the only time I've ever crashed were times when the sim itself went down. The V3's...I'm doing good to have 30 minutes w/o a crash. The other night, I made it 2 hrs between crashes and I was shocked.

And I don't see mesh as the messiah of SL. Consider the all-mesh gawdawful mess that was Blue Mars. How're they doing, by the way?

[Josh]

New avatar mesh would be nice...!

[Deltango Vale]

Get rid of anonymous accounts. What good are a billion new signups of anonymous accounts? Attract serious people and treat them well instead of dumping them into welcome centers full of pranksters from whom they learn absolutely nothing except to get the hell out of SL as fast as possible.