After basically becoming the queen of Second Life YouTubers, Ms. Carmen King reluctantly donned her dusty Vive headset --"I get insane motion sickness... [and] "normally can't last 10 minutes in VR", she says -- to re-visit the social VR world of Sansar.
"First time I tried," she casually notes, while getting strapped in, "I saw people trying to fuck in the middle of the ocean."
No such luck this time, but she does narrowly avoid an alien probing and inevitably wields some dildo-shaped hand controls. Further Carmen-esque NSFW hilarity ensues, so just watch.
"Sansar seems really fun and I love how smooth the game runs," she tells me now. "Virtual Reality makes it a lot more exciting as you feel like you’re actually in the game!"
Sansar was originally developed by Linden Lab before its acquisition by Wookey; but does she prefer it to Linden's original world, Second Life?
"No, I see them as two different games. Second Life has endless possibilities of character creation and gameplay, whereas Sansar is more of a ‘walk around and look at things with your friends’ simulator."
Sansar's creators might protest that there are copious creation tools in the platform, but seeing as they're not as user-friendly or readily available as SL or The Sims, that point is probably moot. But as some Sansar developers do probably read New World Notes from time to time, they should consider Carmen's tips for making Sansar better:
"Better character customization would help a lot but the main thing to improve the game would be by expanding the player base." (And while the Sansar community is quite small, Carmen tells me they're "very sweet and ready to help out!")
Of course one good way to grow Sansar's player base is by getting Carmen to come in more continuously.
You would think someone like Carmen King could easily bring at least a dozen of new daily users there, no? That would double the average players on Steam (for as hilarious as that sounds), where she directed her viewers. I know I shouldn't be surprised if that doesn't happen so "much", but... nope, really zero changes in the graph after 2 weeks from this video, although in the comments someone was curious. So if anyone gave a try, they just gave a look and didn't stay.
Evidently it doesn't matter how much Sansar is advertised, it really can't keep people in, unlike VRChat. The problem is Sansar itself.
They could encourage optimization (even with her fast net, you can see she has to wait, cut download sequences... and not everyone has 1 gigabit network), they could make it funnier so that people won't get bored quickly, they could improve the interface and experience, and many other things. Advertising only can help up so much. For example:
"After following the hype train created by the team running the Disrupt Youtube channel over this game..."
https://steamcommunity.com/id/klrmz/recommended/586110/
These aren't haters, but people who would like to help. Also, more recently:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/queenhidi/recommended/586110/
But in fact Neos VR too - and without help - is doing better than Sansar, with more people online.
Posted by: Pulsar | Saturday, November 21, 2020 at 08:11 AM