The Promise and Perils of Adding Social Networks to Virtual Worlds

Good comment from Alicia, responding to Jim "Babbage" Purbrick's thoughts on the importance of bringing social networks in to virtual worlds and vice versa:

Honestly, keep social networks and virtual worlds separate. People want to keep their social networking/RL private for personal reasons while losing themselves in virtual worlds for a few hours a day/night depending on where one lives. Remember that there are people who have been stalked online by naively giving out personal info about themselves; or have been doxxed by a vengeful person seeking to create trouble for their victim(s) wherever they are.

I can attest to that last point, having interacted with several people (all women, actually) who've been stalked in virtual worlds by men who figure out their account name. Always important to remember.

However, a social network doesn't necessarily have to be a real name-driven one like Facebook -- in many case, it's better that the social network just be avatar name-driven, a great way to drive and maintain user activity.

When he was still at Linden Lab, as Jim told me recently, "The friends online page on SecondLife.com was the most visited by orders of magnitude." That is probably one of the reasons, by the way, that Facebook is integrating Oculus with its social network -- so people can tell when their friends are online in VR. (I.E. it's not just about personal data mining.)

In any case, Alicia agrees with Babbage's point that virtual world companies need to focus on player-to-player communication, if only because players tend to consume the game content incredibly quickly:

When that happens, a period of downtime occurs between the devoured initial content and the next patch. Case in point is, literally, World of Warcraft as every time a new expansion is released... there's always the mad dash to become the world first highest level.

Then, as it pertains to Mythic Raiding, the best guilds in the world such as Complexity Limit (US, formerly Limit), Method (EU), Exorsus (EU), Alpha (Asia), etc (https://www.method.gg/raidprogress) all prepare weeks in advance before the first raid goes live. These guilds specifically start on Heroic Raiding to get the gear they'll need the moment Blizzard opens the Mythic (highest difficulty) version of the raid; and will literally spend countless hours, with breaks in between, to learn the boss fights... figure out which piece of gear, ability/spell will give them that extra boost of DPS (Damage Per Second)/TPS (Threat Per Second)/HPS (Healing Per Second) to get their raid team on top, and so forth with all the intel they gather and learn with each attempt. 

Without a gamified system, open-ended virtual worlds like Second Life can quickly lost new user growth, because incoming players who don't know anyone feel like there's nothing to do. Conversely, virtual worlds with a gamified system can quickly lose user activity when existing players who don't know anyone feel like there's nothing to do.

Comments

[Alicia]

Ok, the last sentence in the last paragraph is easily countered with playing alts or at your own pace. The only people that will be affected by that are those who've cleared the content (IE: The people that "Keep up with the Jonses'") and are waiting for the next patch... or expansion to be released... or people taking a break over boredom or just burnout.

In my explanation a few days ago on this, I did forget one vital piece of info as it pertains to the Mythic Raiding for World of Warcraft. The guild I listed all compete for the "Race To The World First" as it pertains to raiding. Since these world class raiding guilds have started to stream their attempts to become world first, lots... and I mean lots of attention have been drawn towards competitive gaming in terms of raiding. There's also WoW's Arena PvP that's being part of the E-Sports of competitive gaming alongside games League of Legends, Rocket League, and any sports game.

[Pusar]

Very true about stalking. Also many things in SL have been done under the assumption it's anonymous enough. I won't touch SL anymore if a Facebook login would become mandatory. In fact (https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/05/facebook-deleting-second-life-avatar-profiles.html) Facebook used to delete profiles made after SL avatar names. That's how radically different they are.

Indeed if you really care for privacy, you would prefer to use an internal social network, like my.secondlife, that uses your avatar profile, rather than to give your IP and other data to Flickr as well. It would be also more handy and practical. Sadly my.secondlife is really basic, insufficient for various purposes, and it was also unreliable too many times (even failed at uploading your screenshots). If you could connect and communicate from the friends online page, that would be pretty nice.