« Author of Upcoming Coffee Table Book Seeking True Personal Testimonials from People Whose Real Life Improved Through Second Life | Main | Cajsa's Choices: Riya's Stunning Avatar Portraits Are Studies in Light & Skin »

Monday, October 28, 2024

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Retired Secret Builder

This is very encouraging. SL needs the focus to upgrade itself into unofficial SL 2.0, The same people who whined about Sansar and LL not updating SL are now crying about SL being updated. LL Cannot win with these people! they need to just stay focused with strong business/tech sense leadership it now has in place.

I'm glad that Gambling is not being brought in as a financial crutch of sorts that would never work out to be viable anyways. I personally k=give kudos to the lab for taking a higher moral ground around this issue over money.

As for Gacha I've only seen it as a unintended cancer on the community it has caused so many ugly sims to be built with mismatched Frankenstein themes of ugliness of contrasting themes and generic lifelike texturing while well built foundation sims were forced to close not wanting to blight there work with someone else shinnies or the sheeple moving on to the Frankenstein sims.

Rod Linden(EA gaming rockstar) was the last CEO who had any vision until now, while it was an almost opposite strategy that given more time would have been way more successful had the course been maintained but the strip it down strategy Oberwolf is doing is also on par as it allows full focus. He knows what I've been saying for the last decade that SL is a billion dollar IP that has yet to reach its full potential and will be around another 2 decades at the least.

I think PBR will help revitalize inworld building as now prim builds can look amazing again, while full perm kits will be easier to make/sell by the creator and the buyer will not have to worry about learning PS or other complicated programs.

With all the PBR & Coming upgrades, I've decided to come out of retirement to build one last final cutting edge foundation sim for an old friend. this sim should be seen as a template and pattern for new people to build good sims in SL. I've built over a dozen now historic sims for there owners between the last two decades while only a few are still around unfortunately, I hope it can help the LL out as most of the good sims are gone or there communities have moved on.

One last thing I would love to see Oberwolf bring back the Linden Realms games as a retention tool for new residents who could learn SL in a fun way. Those game sims were fun and could even be placed next to linden homes to encourage new residents to go premium.

EmptyEyes

I have mixed feelings about this, some change finally coming is good, the shape of the change is less so in my eyes. Like the mobile app is cool, but can I get a terrain texture on my desktop viewer that's larger than 512x512, what about VR support, what about bringing the land price down in line with technological improvements so that the content people make for free doesn't slip into the abyss.

SecondLife's social stagnation is representative of fundamentally how the game works and the culture that it exists in. Things like the land fee, teleportation, IMs, infinite space, it being way more of a social experience than a game. There's largely no PvE content (due to difficulties with AI & NPCs, game AI not generative AI) so its hard to have non-social bonding experiences or entertainment that is competitive with other standalone video games. Graphics are behind, so its not the best option for just looking at pretty things. Land fees mean that thousands of hours of communal work can be lost to time, the benefits that are reaped from effectively free labor for content creation don't persist because of this. Many of the sims I would spend tons of hours on are now gone not because they were obsolete, but instead because the owner couldn't/wouldn't pay anymore. Teleportation is the anathema of local communities forming near each other. IMs encourage private conversations which leads to a quiet world. Infinite space fractures groups, as people spread out away from each other to get their own small domains completely outside of others interference. The marketplace means that there's pretty much no reason to be present to shop in-world. These all end up having second and third order consequences that are also produce negative social outcomes. For instance, the activities in second life are building, character customization, talking, shopping, NSFW, sightseeing, and games. Because of the above reasons only shopping, character customization, and NSFW provide experiences better than or on par with other modern games. Pushing people towards these experiences and away from the others, making them feel empty. That emptiness reinforces itself forward.

Also to be clear, I'm not saying that I don't like these things, lord knows shopping and NSFW are single handedly holding what exists together. I'm just saying that they encourage isolation and anti-social tendencies. Which I don't know how a mobile client + a trust and safety team are going to fix.

I like the focus on resident's experiences and the desire to increase trust in the company, he will catch flack for doing it because its seemingly been sidelined for such a long time that people are bitter about it, low communication, and a lack of experienced changes will do that. Also no shade on Bradford, these are just my impressions based on his comments about making changes for the long term - this seems like chasing a dragon of short term user growth (which is better than short term monetary growth) instead of introspecting the social dynamics of SL and engineering fixes or making policy changes to correct them.

SL is a deeply social game, just like EVE Online hires economists to ensure their markets are rock solid, SL should be hiring sociologists, psychologists, and MMO designers that focus on community building in games to ensure that its social environment and perception is rock solid.

HalfTheOfficeNeedsToGo

OB speaks about trust, and the loss of it.
This is very true. I also see it as karma, and LL has been milking bad karma for years.
For those of us who have worked closely with some LL staff in one capacity or another between SL and Sansar, their very combative nature of their customers and workers, or their decisions not based on technical success but of political ideology - firing a person who is competent programmer or 3d developer over a pronoun, but keeping an incompetent retard because they fit the woke political culture that LL constantly wingclips themselves with - can built up a lot of karma and mistrust.
Then the next day.. all nicey nice like nothing happened and all is bed of roses going forward.
Trust can be regained by making competent decisions based on competent workers. LL has gone too long being a babysitter and visionary rather than actually completing the journey and putting out a superior product. Profit is success, I guess, but at what expense? Just to play house and sing kumbayah in the office all day when the people inside know and fear that it is stagnant and dying - but too stupid to realize it is their own incompetence that is holding it all back?
Less policing, less chaperoning, less cloak and dagger investigating of people in private Discords and chat groups. Less abuse with the cross-participation of hidden Linden Lab staff on secret accounts playing games inworld or helping their buddies with inside information.. Not having staff compete with their own users on the marketplace - staff HAVE stolen ideas and IP from their users and made products to sell against them
Trust can be regained by having a fair set of ethics and following them... being inclusive of ALL groups, NOT promoting one ideology over the other. Why is BOYS TOWN LGBTQ+ put out front in a recent welcome hub event over any other?
Trust is regained by representing ALL SL Users... that means taking out your sexual politics, trump vs kamala, etc and leave that to your users to create their own spaces in SL.
Stop trying to change the world with your virtual platform, and let people enjoy it as they see fit. Be a PROVIDER of a service, not a GUARDIAN of an ideology.

I'd also like to see OB get a set of balls and clean house, and NEVER beg anyone to give a good rating on his mobile app. Instead, just make a good mobile app that we WILL give a good rating to, and an app we MIGHT ACTUALLY USE.

Iggy 1.0

Get players a full sim for the cost of a premium account, and you'd see more experimentation again.

What IS the cost monthly to LL for a sim? That's never been disclosed or I've not seen it.

SL's potential, warts and all, involves building our own experiences in a virtual space. Make it cheaper and the user base will grow in ways that do not simply involve growing older.

ThumbsUp

Good riddance to hateful transphobes like "HalfTheOfficeNeedsToGo". Not only do they disrespect and insult their colleagues and make the workplace toxic, but when confronted with reality, they grasp at straws and resort to parroting the totally misleading arguments of the far-right and Russian propaganda. This firing was well deserved.

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Working...
Your comment could not be posted. Error type:
Your comment has been posted. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Working...

Post a comment

Your Information

(Name is required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.)

Making a Metaverse That Matters Wagner James Au ad
Please buy my book!
Thumb Wagner James Au Metaverse book
Wagner James "Hamlet" Au
Wagner James Au Patreon
Virtual_worlds_museum_NWN
Second Life virtual world coffee table book
Coffee table book coming soon. Follow Haridsam.Resident on Primfeed for updates!
Dutchie SL furnishings
Bad-Unicorn SL builds holdables HUD
Juicybomb_EEP ad
IMG_2468
My book on Goodreads!
Wagner James Au AAE Speakers Metaverse
Request me as a speaker!
Making of Second Life 20th anniversary Wagner James Au Thumb
PC for SL
Recommended PC for SL
Macbook Second Life
Recommended Mac for SL

Classic New World Notes stories:

Woman With Parkinson's Reports Significant Physical Recovery After Using Second Life - Academics Researching (2013)

We're Not Ready For An Era Where People Prefer Virtual Experiences To Real Ones -- But That Era Seems To Be Here (2012)

Sander's Villa: The Man Who Gave His Father A Second Life (2011)

What Rebecca Learned By Being A Second Life Man (2010)

Charles Bristol's Metaverse Blues: 87 Year Old Bluesman Becomes Avatar-Based Musician In Second Life (2009)

Linden Limit Libertarianism: Metaverse community management illustrates the problems with laissez faire governance (2008)

The Husband That Eshi Made: Metaverse artist, grieving for her dead husband, recreates him as an avatar (2008)

Labor Union Protesters Converge On IBM's Metaverse Campus: Leaders Claim Success, 1850 Total Attendees (Including Giant Banana & Talking Triangle) (2007)

All About My Avatar: The story behind amazing strange avatars (2007)

Fighting the Front: When fascists open an HQ in Second Life, chaos and exploding pigs ensue (2007)

Copying a Controversy: Copyright concerns come to the Metaverse via... the CopyBot! (2006)

The Penguin & the Zookeeper: Just another unlikely friendship formed in The Metaverse (2006)

"—And He Rezzed a Crooked House—": Mathematician makes a tesseract in the Metaverse — watch the videos! (2006)

Guarding Darfur: Virtual super heroes rally to protect a real world activist site (2006)

The Skin You're In: How virtual world avatar options expose real world racism (2006)

Making Love: When virtual sex gets real (2005)

Watching the Detectives: How to honeytrap a cheater in the Metaverse (2005)

The Freeform Identity of Eboni Khan: First-hand account of the Black user experience in virtual worlds (2005)

Man on Man and Woman on Woman: Just another gender-bending avatar love story, with a twist (2005)

The Nine Souls of Wilde Cunningham: A collective of severely disabled people share the same avatar (2004)

Falling for Eddie: Two shy artists divided by an ocean literally create a new life for each other (2004)

War of the Jessie Wall: Battle over virtual borders -- and real war in Iraq (2003)

Home for the Homeless: Creating a virtual mansion despite the most challenging circumstances (2003)

Newstex_Author_Badge-Color 240px
JuicyBomb_NWN5 SL blog
Ava Delaney SL Blog
my site ... ... ...
Virtual_worlds_museum_NWN