What Are Linden Lab's Plans to Create a Sansar Community?

Last week's post on the potential for cannibalization of Second Life by Project Sansar provoked a lot of passionate and occasionally over-heated commentary, with my favorite insight coming from Argo Nurmi:

"After listening to the podcasts, what struck me was the way Ebbe described the [company's ideas on community. For the technical things in Sansar I heard detail and concrete approaches. I take that to mean Ebb and his team have done a lot of thinking and decision making here. But, responding to a question on how they envision a community working, the language turned high level and abstract. It's what you expect if not much time has been put into building a vision or thinking through the details. The Lab can be forgiven for being immersed in designing an improved rendering engine. But it's disappointing that Ebb, as leader of this Sansar vision, doesn't have much to say about what their future community will be like. This caused me to wonder about what they have in mind for their future community. Could it be saying that an SL-style community isn't in the cards for Sansar? There will be some kind of "social experience," yes, of course, Sansar is a social network. But, very possibly, the SL experience we all know will not be a part of it.

I can't speak to Project Sansar's plans as yet, but as someone who helped Linden Lab with Second Life's launch, I can definitely say the company put a lot of thought into fostering the early community:

I don't just mean giving them tools, but also gentle nudges to see themselves as a community, including an achievement and rating system which encouraged the first SLers to engage with each other and outside their social circles, and lots of direct interaction with the early community on a very high level. Co-founders Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka and their staff would regularly go into Second Life to socialize with the early users, not just in a formalized, one-to-many Q&A forum as happens now, but as fellow participants -- attending events, playing games, and so on. The Lindens did this with the energy of a startup, showing real passion for the platform's early adopters, not to mention a sense of fun. For instance, Cory created and patrolled the world as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and even played some gentle pranks on random users:

In the first couple years, it was commonplace to find Linden staffers in-world playing with their subscribers. The programmers regularly challenged residents to laser tag and other games; Rosedale himself went in to build prototype content like chimes, or improved the motion of his trees, when pushed by the wind. Cory Ondrejka was perhaps the most puckish: on a lark, for instance, he once turned his avatar into a Betty Boop-worthy cartoon sun with a grinning face, then humming loudly while his development staff team roared with laughter behind him, floated above a clueless new user, following just behind like her pet sunbeam.

Notch was just as engaged with his growing userbase when Minecraft started. Maybe it's possible to create a successful new 3D creation platform that also looks and feels like a world without so much attention to community, but I doubt it. So when Project Sansar starts to launch, pay close attention not only to the tools the company gives to the users, but the way it treats those users as a community.

Please share this post:

Tweet

 

Comments

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Doesn't sound like it's going to be a global community kind of thing. It sounds like a version of game engines like Unity3D or Unreal Engine and friends where people are building disconnected "games" that LL is calling "experiences".

The connecting points are a global user base and L$.

But I think you overestimate community formation a bit. If you can get users in and give them creative tools, communities will form whether you try to help it along or not.

For every venture that built community by getting a little involved, there's another startup that didn't try to "build" community.

Community just happens, it's not something that's groomed or grown with startup Miracle Grow. That credit belongs to users, not staff.

[Metacam Oh]

I get the impression the new Sansar world will smell like bleach

[Ezra]

Yes, it seems pretty clear Sansar will be a collection of individual "experiences". Not unlike Second Life. There won't be a single community, but instead thousands of communities for thousands of different interests.

Since Ebbe has stated they want things like identities and friend lists to transfer, stands to reason they might be looking into groups transferring as well. If so, a lot of communities won't be broken up to have to reform in the first place.

[Shockwave Yareach]

The more you tighten your grip ebbe, the more customers will slip through your fingers

[Customer]

Linden Lab figured out the big money is in content creation instead of their land product. By destroying Second Life and trying to move as much residents as possible to their new platform Linden Lab hopes to take a big bite out of the sales of content. 30% tax is their ambition now.

Sansar will be running on html5 webgl technology which is super cheap. In essence it is the same as High Fidelity but a bit more polished with some more bells and whistles integrated.

A bunch of game levels with a single character login server. So a game where each users can create their own level as they want and Linden Lab will host it for 30 Dollars per month as it costs them 50 cent to do that.

Ebbe has been a dirty boy, he offers the transfer of grandfathered homesteads for the fee of 300 US$ but in order not to upset his special friends he did now even more lower their special tier discounts so their friends are now undercutting the grandfathered tier of 95 US$ by offering sims for rent without a setup fee for 85 US$.

This just recently started the moment Linden Lab made their announcement previous week.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

@Customer Well, if the web based bit is true, then we're back to Cloud Party, plenty of room to improve on that and make it better.

Oddly, Cory helped fund Cloud Party, Cloud Party staff gets absorbed by Yahoo! and then Ebbe comes to us from Yahoo! to do ... Cloud Party 2?

Fate has a sense of humor.

[Customer]

@above poster

When Linden states they are making it easy to let anyone connect to these experiences how should that work?

When they state experiences will be searchable on the net via google? Html5 is html code that can be searched by google.

When they state everybody will get free land to build how should they do that unless they can provide land capacity dirt cheap? Again by using html5 webgl.

What is High Fidelity, it is html5/webgl pages embedded in a client using the three.js library.

Why are alpha testers restricted to Maya? Because Maya already has an html5 exporter plugin. Build scene in maya export to html5 and upload to Sansar. In theory you are just ftping a webpage to Linden their servers.

In terms of gaming html5 is also viewed as the future so it makes sense to use this technology to render. It is cheap, it has power, it works on mobile, web, tablets, pc and so on, it has wide support for the future. But and there is a but, it is not exclusive, meaning there are tons of platforms supporting it.

Here is a good example to try.

http://threejs.org/examples/webgl_decals

3D mesh in your browser great quality next gen.

I am not 100% sure but about 99.99% project sansar will run on this tech or run this tech in the background.

What I suspect is that Linden Lab will offer certain experience creators to run their experience directly in the browser and offer other experience creators to only have their experience in a client for better protection against copybotting.

When you teleport you just go from one webpage to the other, your teleport is nothing more than a hyperlink. This is my idea about it, I am waiting to see it myself but this is most likely what you can expect. A more polished version of Cloudparty with more tools and more freedom.

The thing is that proper game engines such as Unreal also export as html5, the only thing what Linden Lab has as added value is traffic, you know from those poor customers they will try to manipulate to go to Sansar while screwing them out of their businesses and inventories.

Cloudparty tried to sell their cloud areas for 70 Dollars per month. 70$ a month for a single webpage!

Linden Lab will need to provide incredible amounts of added value to this free technology to generate a viable business model from it.

[Wolkenreiter]

Why am I even reading that site anymore? Any post gets immediately taken over by the Dutch troll with the many names, spreading lies and utter b***sh**...

[zz bottom]

Well Wolk, what i do found real strange is that nowhere to be seen are LL defenders of usual.
Are they struck by the vision that they where used to a goal that is just to end Sl?

[Wolkenreiter]

Maybe everyone with the least bit of common sense just follows the golden rule not to feed a troll...
Anyway, I'm not too concerned SL is gonna die anytime soon, or LL even actively pursueing that..
Why? Because SL is full of people willing to pour insane amounts of money into a computer game, more than the Sansar target audience ever will (per user). That aside, as bad as SL has scaled up, as nicely it will scale down, SL will still be profitable if there's only 5 or 10 sims left...
If Sansar really mnanages to completely replace and kill SL within the next 5 or 6 years, it will solely happen because the users find Sansar to be the better product... And all that matters in the end is that the idea survives and flourishes, not the name which it gets sold under...

[A.J.]

zz bottom has made an interesting observation.

The usual LL cheerleaders seem to be losing some team spirit when faced with the possibility that they are just like everyone else... disposable.

If all the "little" people have sunk with the ship, there will be nobody left to care about the "special" ones.

[Kyouko]

I think that the audience of NWN has changed. In the past, people wrote substantial comments here on this blog. Currently most of the comments are from riff-raff and trolls. Maybe it's because NWN slowly degenerates into a cheap yellow press blog.

[melponeme_k]

Cloud Party Again. Cloud Party was AWFUL. IT failed because of how awful it was. They just lucked out because clueless Yahoo purchased their mangy dog at the right time.

Only in the Tech World would they create a product on a BIG FAILURE and expect it to finally hit the lotto. Meanwhile they throw a successful product into the trash bin.

Only in the Tech world would they do this insanity.

[Ezra]

@zz bottom "Well Wolk, what i do found real strange is that nowhere to be seen are LL defenders of usual."

Probably because of Hamlet's increased negative, facts-optional, reporting second-hand via linking and misconstruing others blog posts from the Metaverse way of doing things nowadays hardly anyone positive, actually active and succeeding in SL ever reads this blog anymore.

You reap what you sow, Hamlet has the audience and commenters he deserves now.

[zz bottom]

naaaa, it is not just here but in all blogs that posted the Lab chat interview, after some start questioning the honesty of the lab as a corporation (true, only in virtual worlds one could stand with such bad management for over all this years!) in its interest to keep Sl going, they just shut up all the way.
Where is Jo, Inara and so many of known LL supporters, comments regarding Ebbe's remark about cannibalizing Sl in favour of Sansar?

[zz bottom]

http://draxfiles.com/2015/11/20/show-95-lab-chat/
As the best example.

[Customer]

It looks like certain individuals have not yet been hit by reality. It is normal, some are faster than others.

Let me quote 3 CEOs:

CEO Kingdon:"Haha we are comfortably profitable here at the lab."

CEO Humble:"We are still running a comfortably profitable business here."

CEO Altberg: "We are already running a tight ship as it is."

Everybody is entitled to their opinion, even Wolkenreiter.

[Ezra]

@zz bottom "Where is Jo, Inara and so many of known LL supporters, comments regarding Ebbe's remark about cannibalizing Sl in favour of Sansar?"

Maybe on this blog it's news that the whole point of Sansar was to provide a better SL to SLers, and the 400k sign-ups a month that quit due to SL's issues, but um, no other blogger is making a big deal about Linden Lab attempting to create a SL replacement because that's been obvious from the start.

[Malinda Chung]

I think Inara does not like hamlet.for lack of sugarcoating events in the past or for not kissie kiss in the big fat Fanny of hers.

More then once did i express my feelings regarding linden laboratories changes on her website & Daniel Voyagers as well. only to treated as if i was stupid or they refused to publish my comments.

One persons troll is just a realist for others.and with that said investment wise around
five million real dollars left invested by me so worries take top shelf. thousands or a few dollars everyone is equal in rights to be concerned for what they have put in and stand to lose as one man tears apart the dreams of millions to achieve his. at all costs & opinions.

[Malinda Chung]

Kyouko. people change and for some good reason. you should read the concerns by Desmond Shang in the comments section.
His thoughts are shared by more then a few with parallel experiences.

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2015/11/second-life-versus-sansar.html#comments

[A.J.]

And Malinda Chung for the win.

[irihapeti]

@Malinda

i think is fair to say that Desmond Shang wound down SL as a major focus for himself bc he couldnt see clearly what the future held for him. A future made uncertain (at the time) by the changes regarding IP as it related to SL community-building on a largish scale

from what we can guess about the Sansar model, it may be that Sansar will be better than SL ever was for creating and sustaining Guvnah-lead communities. Guvnahs with clear insights of what the community they are leading actually is

from what we know so far then it seems that: Sansar Experience Owner = SL Estate Owner, and that the toolset allows the Sansar Owner/Guvnah to have more control over how the community within the Sansar Experience can be shaped. A Oriented-Community Experience. There is also the tantaliser that Guvnahs will be able to recruit community members directly thru their own web Gateways

+

for Experience Owners (equiv SL Estate Owners) that create/sustain Assisted Living Experiences (rentals) then it comes down to three basic things pretty much:

1) Can the assets (prim count) of a large Experience be allocated to individual residents. Either scriptable (prim counters) or land parcelling ?
2) What is the minimum tier that a individual will pay for a minimal own Experience when they buy direct off LL ?
3) Is the price differential between 1) and 2) such that it would make 1) sustainable ?

+

the 4th applies to both Assisted Living and Oriented-Community Guvnahs

4) Can the Guvnahs charge recurring payments to their renters/community members ? In what currency will this be denominated ? and will LL take a percentage of these payments (and how much might this be ?) in return for providing within the toolset, a rentals/recurring payments mechanism ?

+

i think is also pretty to fair to say that SL Estate Owners and Community Owners have concerns and that they should be addressed by LL. I would suggest that LL start to engage with the SL Barons soonest, if they haven't already done so

[Horse Farmer]

@ irihapeti
"bc he couldnt see clearly what the future held for him"

'As for myself, I'm sitting this one out. There could be something viable with their new platform, but right now I'm making far too much doing other things, to justify the risk.'
-Desmond Shang

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2015/11/second-life-versus-sansar.html#comments

[Horse Farmer]

@ irihapeti
I would suggest that LL start to engage with the SL Barons soonest, if they haven't already done so

That was done before Sansar was even public

[Customer]

Inara is a propaganda machine.

As for @Wolkenreiter his future vision, we should all be glad to have the privilege to pay "extraordinary amounts of cash" into Linden Lab their "game that will decline into nothing in the next 6 years until there are 5 or 10 sims left."

You sure know how to paint a bright future don't you Wolkenreiter. Lamentably economics do not work like you describe. The future you predict says the following Wolkenreiter:

-You will need to work the same amount of time for even less money when you stay in Second Life. In the end you will have nothing left since the platform will vanish anyway.-

You might describe this as "trolling" to me this is nothing more than the future prospect Linden Lab has to offer. I do not like that prospect Wolkenreiter.

A little heads up for you Wolkenreiter, I did not use a single alt in this article in case you were wondering where all this hate comes from.

[irihapeti]

@Horse

guess you never got the sekrit memo then

+

am just curious. Whats your fav drink: pepso or choke ?!?

q; (:

[Iggy]

"Currently most of the comments are from riff-raff and trolls. Maybe it's because NWN slowly degenerates into a cheap yellow press blog."

@ Kyouko well said. Alphaville Herald has been dead in the water for a while. We riff-raff had to land somewhere. I like being called "rif-raff"! Riff Raff was my favorite villain in the old "Underdog" cartoons.

In any case, there's not much one CAN do other than 1) wait to see if Sansar is better and less expensive than SL or 2) Go find something else to do. I've opted for #1, maintaining a humble presence in SL. I'm not much interested in MMOs or MMORPGs without user-generated content.

That's the secret sauce in SL. If LL makes it too hard for mere mortals to create in Sansar, I will just give up when SL closes its doors or becomes an utter ghost-town. Option two would be better than being in some pretty Disney "experience."

It's a geek-obsession to follow SL's and LL's travails, but it's fun. Or we'd not be here doing just that.

[zz bottom]

And the new Tos changes are not helping to believe Ll really wants to keep Sl going for long:(

[Rubber Ducky]

The new TOS update, the last resort for protection.

"Don't call us names or we will ban you from our game."

They sound like a 4 year old.

They must be really feared telling their customers if they dare to join a Class Action lawsuit they will be banned automatic.