New World Notes

Star Citizen Dissenters & Loyalists Debate Worth of the Still-in-Alpha MMO

The comment thread to last week's "Why Do So Many Gamers Passionately Want Star Citizen To Fail?" was definitely more civil and thoughtful than the brigade of Star Citizen hate that my first post on Chris Robert's crowdfunded MMO attracted. While the level of rage remains a mystery to me, I do have some more insight on its critics. For instance, from this comment by gaming YouTuber "Bootcha":

There have been very few people who have been financially invested in the Star Citizen project (I would know, I was one, I'm in the now-conspicuously-missing picture of "The Pledge" with Roberts and everyone back in 2012.). Everyone else is just a customer. Emotionally invested is a different matter. We are certainly witnessing a different brand of futurism. The game-ification of crowdfunding, as described by Roberts, if you will.

I don't question that the possibilities dreamt by the Star Citizen project are exciting, and no doubt they would be appealing to a customer or potential designer hire looking to do something new. However, I would wonder what the reaction of a programmer or engineer friend would be if you asked them about the project's technical needs. Nearly all of them give the same chuckle, the one where they're thankful they're not on the hook to deliver such massive needs. We of course have that one friend who is brilliant enough to try on the condition they're in charge of every little detail, or unwise enough to try for the sake of showing off.

The dialogue of either someone proselytizing for the project or condemning it to burn is only tangentially interesting, like watching two grackles fight over a piece of bread on the sidewalk. And if you want to study that in a sociological framework, I'm all for that. But if that's not your intent, what squabbles the fans and critics have distracts from the stranger situation of a company run by [allegations of questionable corporate governance that I'm unable to fact check at press time and so will just elide - WJA ] , all while the product of both side's concerns constantly faces years of technical delays and even media "editorial issue" problems that create an inconsistent narrative of what work is being done, during a reported funding explosion entering unprecedented territory.

Now, THAT'S an interesting story.

I definitely agree the behind-the-scenes of Star Citizen's development is one very interesting story to tell. But a story of corporate bungling would not necessarily mean the final product is a failure.

To make a movie comparison, the production of Mad Max: Fury Road -- which cost about as much to produce and market as Star Citizen -- was beset by cost overruns, ridiculous unforced errors by the studio, corporate politics and in-fighting, and delayed for years. And yet in the end, Fury Road still went on to become a modest hit -- and critically, one of the most acclaimed Hollywood movies of all time.

The other interesting story is why Bootcha's thoughtful opinion can co-exist with opinions like this one, below:

Why Do So Many Gamers Passionately Want Star Citizen to Fail?

When I wrote about the latest update to Star Citizen, Chris Roberts' highly-ambitious, massively crowdfunded MMO -- with over $250 million pledged so far -- I expected it to be received as some interesting insights into an online world that many people haven't thought about much lately.

What I didn't expect at all was a religious war.

But a text-based one more or less broke out in Comments, the first wave led by Star Citizen apostates unleashed by an online community devoted to hating Star Citizen. (Yes, that's a thing.) Some of the milder comments:

lol scam citizen. How much Chris paid you to publish this bullshit?

Scam Citizen the list of excuses why they keep missing their own deadlines continues. But fortunately the Roberts Family and his friends are now millionaires for selling you your own dreams and changing it last minute...

Well I never heard of this blog until now, and based on this article I can see the blog is shit...

I wonder how much Crobblers paid for this disinformation... It will never be released, because if it ever is, the money stream from fleeced rubes would suddenly end and the game would be publicly reviewed as a finished product, which is something the Crobblers will never allow...

"Crobblers", I guess, being a portmanteau for "Chris Roberts promoters". Which is witty! But it's the level of conspiratorial rage that's totally fascinating to me. Why do so many gamers actively, hungrily want this one indie game project to be a sham, and fail? 

"I'll be the first to say I've had and continue to have frustrations with Star Citizen," my colleague Joshua May told me, after reading the responses to my interview with him on the game. "That's just life. Things I want got delayed, things I didn't care about got implemented instead, everyone wants something different out of it. Everyone has a different idea of what the final game should be and gets disappointed if they don't think [Roberts' company] Cloud Imperium Games is going in that direction."

An indie game developer himself, May speculates that some of the anger is based confusion over what's required to publish an online world so ambitious.

"It can't make everyone 100% happy, because everyone disagrees on the end product," as he puts it. "That's the nature of any video game, especially MMOs. People just aren't accustomed to seeing the sausage made and most of them don't understand it."

Surely many Star Citizen detractors are angry because they've pledged money to Roberts' project over the years, and now feel buyers' remorse, because it's still far from complete. But last year, crowdfunding increased, while more and more content has been added to the project. Despite that -- or perhaps because of that -- many detractors still insist it must all be a scam.  

"Skepticism is healthy, but it's increasingly getting far enough along in development that the skepticism is less and less warranted," notes May.

But if Star Citizen has its detractors, it also has its defenders -- for instance, this reader comment that apparently came in via a pro Star Citizen community:

The Problem With a 12,000 x 12,000 Second Life Display -- And With Asking for It From an Unpaid Third Party Viewer Developer (Comment of the Week)

Last week's most popular post by far is this one about how the Black Dragon viewer now has a setting to take 12,000 by 12,000 images of Second Life. So clearly many were interested in that option. However, this also provoked reader comments like "4K is generally good enough for screenshots" and, of course, "Why?" (The obvious answer to the latter being, of course, Why the hell not?)

Black Dragon creator NiranV posted a comment going deep into his own sense of Why:

I did it because people wanted it and it was literally a 10 second number change that doesn't impact the Viewer in any way and doesn't add any bloat and fits into what the Viewer is aimed at.

I told people that it's quite pointless but some peeps were like, "but more pixels!"

But what do you need to pixels for?

"More pixels!"

Yea well that's fine and all but what for, 4K + FXAA is perfectly fine.

"But i already run the Viewer at 4K natively, it looks like trash."

NiranV proceeds to unleash a hilarious rant that's also an insight into a day in the life of a third party viewer developer attempting to serve the needs of their user community

The Incredible Power of Virtual World Ownership & Creation -- And the Real World Absence That Drives It (Comment of the Week)

Photo by Grazia Horwitz

Reader Luther Weymann, who describes himself as a tech industry veteran who last ran a company with 1000 employees, recently wrote a comment on New World Notes that is among the best things I've ever read about the power of virtual worlds and the people who use them, in order to own and create content -- and includes some good advice for people who might criticize the quality of their creativity:

Because I have poked into every nook and cranny of the grid for the past seventeen years, I have come to one inescapable conclusion. There is a humbleness that comes from many of the creations made by the residents of SL that cannot be dismissed with any argument. It cannot be criticized or misrepresented by any debate because it was the best work they could do.

I have seen current houses that were made by residents fifteen years ago out of a hollow block with a misaligned roof, with block prim furniture they managed to get a wrong texture on. And they have paid their SL Premium account for fifteen years for this mainland location they have never moved from and all the mainland regions around them are almost totally abandoned.

When they log in, they have a classic body and old classic clothes. And they love SecondLife.

I’ve visited a thousand tiny shops where no sales may ever be made, where the ladies who own that shop put every ounce of effort they had in their being into attempting to make 6-7 pieces of ladies classic clothing more than ten years ago. It's sold on an SL prim that sells a copy of the contents, and the vendor texture can be very humble. They pay their rent for a decade for their humble shop, they log into to SL and they get to look at their “business” they own.

They own a business and I’ve watched them reduce their prices to pennies just to get one sale a year.

If you don’t know that billions of us on this earth lead lives of quiet desperation, you don’t know what the hell is going on with Second Life.

That even applies, he goes on, to content creators who actually work for Linden Lab, aka "Moles":

Travis Scott's Giant Fortnite Show Is a Wake-Up Call for Linden Lab (Comment of the Week)

While Travis Scott's literally giantic performance in Fortnite inspired some to think about the metaverse's future, it inspired reader "Seph" to also think about the metaverse's past:

It's incredible how technically impossible 95% of that is in Second Life. Does Linden Lab hope for things like this? This is where so much of Second Life becomes a non-starter.

Take just Travis, he'd have to be an animesh object rigged with Bento, a winged cenotaur glued ontop of Ruth who outside animators will not want to deal with. Then having to understand what LI is and why Travis is 10k and can't be bigger than 64 meters and the space he occupies is only 256x256m with a 40 person capacity.

Nevermind how uploaded sounds can only be 10 seconds long and they'd need a shoutcast server.

Nevermind how with even 100s of emitters, SL's particle system couldn't accomplish 1/10th of those effects.

Nevermind even with recently released EEP glued ontop of old Windlight, they woudln't be able to accomplish dynamically changing the sky and world so drastically.

Second Life still wins in that anyone can join anytime and throw on a concert to tens of people a day whereas this is obviously super coordinated and we'll only get a few a year from a few big artists. But still, incredible how technically behind Linden Lab has allowed Second Life to be, and how they built Sansar even more crippled when Sansar had all the resources in the world to be able to match something like this.

It's not completely a fair comparison, since the Travis Scott performance was completely pre-recorded and took place on thousands and thousands of separate servers. But to Seph's point, I don't many people really care about those technicalities, when the actual product is so awesome.

It does make me wonder how much of Scott's show could be pulled off in SL or Sansar:

Fortnite is Succeeding at Becoming a True Metaverse Where Actual Metaverse Companies Have Mostly Failed

Reader Tan Mojo saw the literally massive Travis Scott performance in Fortnite, and says something succinctly that's been hovering in the air:

This was life changing. For a person like me who wants to become a content creator, this was a huge realization that the metaverse does not lie within known pastures. SL, Sansar, OpenSim, VRChat, High Fidelity, Sinespace -- all of these platforms INTENDED to become the metaverse have all failed in their own way (although I still have hope for Sinespace).

And here comes Fortnite with cartoony graphics, player base of kids, twitchy gameplay, and now live social events! Not intended to be the metaverse, but is starting to morph into one. The goal of Epic Games CEO is to transform Fortnite into a social hub that supports monetized user created content. Fortnite already has a creative mode and now offers a non-combat hub/map.

Yeah, the music was prerecorded and the entire event was pre-scripted. But, it was one of the most visually stunning things I've ever seen. The audience was not passive either. The event manipulated player actions, clothing, and surroundings.

This is a significant event. 12.3 million in attendance. Epic Games has the technological infrastructure to spin up 100,000+ virtual instances to accommodate that many people. It has made me rethink what the metaverse could be and who might be involved in actually creating it.

I downloaded Fortnite last night. I'm looking forward to this weekend of exploring the non-combat aspects of it. I also plan to do this Core and hopefully soon, Crayta, via the Stadia platform.

Minecraft was the writing on the wall. This Travis Scott Fortnite event just broke that wall.

I agree that Sinespace is still in the running to be a metaverse, but I am of course highly biased. What's fascinating to me is that a conscious intent on a company's part to become the metaverse (i.e., roughly defined, an open and shared 3D world that unifies all content and varieties of imagination), almost by definition insures that this goal will not be met. But when the original goal is just to make a fun and broadly appealing game -- as Minecraft did years ago, and Fortnite is doing now -- your chances of evolving into a metaverse seem to be much higher.

Mr. Mojo's point echoes a tweet storm recently unleashed by VC Matthew Ball, who wrote this must-read essay on the metaverse earlier this year:

Migrating Second Life Content to a New Virtual World Will Ruin the Day One Experience That's So Magical to New MMOs (Comment of the Week)

As Second Life grows older and older, many fans propose migrating its user-created content and avatar inventories over to another world -- if not Sansar, then perhaps to Unity (as difficult as that would be, for reasons explained here). Reader "Alicia", however, argues that that is exactly the wrong way to do things:

Why is it that every time someone brings up this [proposal] "You'll be a different avatar in both, but the name, money, friends list, and a whole group of things could go back and forth." or any equivalent comparable to that... I want to scream.

Why?

If "You'll be a different avatar in both, but the name, money, friends list, and a whole group of things could go back and forth." were done, then there is absolutely no point on having new users, or having that day one feel AT ALL!

Here's why that Day One reason is so important, she explains:

Half-Life: Alyx Isn't VR's Killer App -- But It's Modding Community Could Be

I was disappointed to see Half-Life: Alyx sales and usage floundering, but reader "seph" makes a very good point about how Valve likely sees its long-term success:

I don't think Valve cares about selling Half-Life: Alyx itself, it's free with every Valve Index purchase and it's being bundled with partners' headsets like Vive's new Cosmos Elite for free.

Half-Life: Alyx is only 10-15 hours of gameplay, it wasn't meant to hold people's attention longer than that is another consideration. The longevity plan seems to be the same as all previous Half-Life games, which is letting the community create more content for it.

Tools have been released for the Source 2 engine to help with modding Alyx along with Hammer, a new level editor built with creating levels for Alyx in mind.

Road to VR reports those tools actually haven't been released yet, but will be soon-ish. And Seph points to the track record of other Valve games, once modders get their hands on the tools:

Do Most New Second Life Users Not Know It's Mostly User-Created?

The current SL account creation page with opt-out for e-mail updates

Reader Luther Weymann, who describes himself as a tech industry veteran who last ran a company with 1000 employees, describes his experiences using Second Life during his retirement years -- and his impression of new users, and what they have to cope with:

I started with my first avatar on January 1, 2004, while browsing the web waiting for the Rose Bowl to start on television. That's how I discovered SL. That was 16 years ago. Like many in SL over 16 years, there is nothing I have not done or tried. SecondLife became my only hobby.

So, during the last 8-9 months, I've been looking at the nearby avatar list wherever I go and finding lots of avatars that are one or two days old. I find them at Big Daddy's dance place wondering how to fit in and dance or in large retail stores, not really knowing how they got there or someone on the mainland just frozen, not knowing what to do or somehow on an island in the Blake Sea not understanding where they are.

And in all cases, I send an IM that says, "Hi, I see you're 1 day old, new to SL. It can be difficult getting started, is there anything I can do to help you?"

The response is immediate and heartfelt. They don't know what to do. None of them know how to rez a prim, or have ever heard of the SL Market where you can search for L$0 clothing, none of them know how to change clothes or why their feet stick out of their shoes, or part of their body is transparent or what a sandbox is or where to look if you give them something.

None of them, really none of them, know that everything they see except the sky and ground was made by SL Residents.

And every one of them will eventually ask this question "Is this worth it?" because they have never been told this is a do-it-yourself world with no support or help getting started and it just seems so impossible for them to understand what is going on.

This is somewhat anecdotal, but it is also my impression that most first-time users don't know Second Life is a user-created world, or even know about prims. I certainly haven't seen many (any?) recent ads for SL which promote prim-based creation, even though that's something that would immediately be appealing to tens of millions of former Minecraft players in search of a new game world to play in.

Again this is anecdotal, but Luther's sense is that most new users aren't joining SL to create, but in search of something more essential:

With Sansar Gone, Second Life Needs a New Vision -- And Strawberry Linden Appointed CEO (Comment of the Week)

Most readers weren't exactly enthused about Engadget's interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg talking about his company's defenestration of Sansar, his calling Second Life a "cash machine", or of his list of improvements to Second Life, such as moving its infrastructure to the cloud. It inspired this rant from reader "Anne Frank" (I sure hope that's her real name):

Color me skeptical. I have about as much faith in these plans as I do that the US is moving in a good economic direction. It just assumes that the little people are always going to be along for the ride.

Why should I care about "the cloud"? Why should I care that their power structure is preserved after their huge failure? Why should I care that moving some free WindLight settings might become a commodity? Let's all hold hands and get stupid together. I didn't hear anything about "names". I guess now is not the time to want anything more than making sure you don't get less. Yay for us.

This is an unimaginably horrible time in our history, but we can celebrate an uptick in SL business. It's all good, babe. We're here for you and we're not planning to do a damn thing to make your experience better in the future.

Did I hear about any generous economic incentives to actually encourage broken people to engage in their tired old game? What are they giving to the future?  They seem to be giving their own well-being and we're supposed to be happy about that and give them our resources.

If ever there was a time for vision, it's now. If ever there was a time to lay the foundation for a better world, it's now. My god, the message LL should be sending is one of hope and compassion to its users. It should be sending an invitation to rally the troops to build, network, and engage. LL should be engaging directly with its base and its world.

Speaking of vision, Anne ends with a pretty visionary proposal of her own: