Secondlife

[UnfluffyBunny]

well it's been brought up before, but it hasnt had its own thread, so here it is.
I know a few people have said they've tried secondlife, and just not been able to get into it, so I thought we could discuss it :)

my personal experience:

back in may, Kommando got me to sign up, I went in, and he gave me 2000 L$ (about $8)
he took me round a few places, I got some basic clothes, a pair of boots, a trenchcoat and I was set, and withmy remaining L$ I started uploading textures (10L$ a texture)
pretty soon I had a set of base skins, and Kommando got me set up on a couple of comission jobs for skins to get me started, rom there we worked together on an avatar we could sell, and I learnt to build things using primitive shapes, and learnt to script (Secondlife has its own unique, but relatively simple scripting language (check lslwiki.net))
come june we were using a 10 prim vending spot which consisted of a vendor each and a 4 prim animated sign (a simple vendor is 3 prims, a screen a back button and a next button).
come july we were renting 60 prim spaces.
now we've just opened our second store, on land I bought using only the profits made from secondlife (£80 real money) where we rent space to others, aswell as having stock available in 8 other locations, I make an average of $100 a week, usually more, just for creating things.
I find it a highly enjoyable experience, i've made some really good friends, it's a whole different atmosphere.

so yeah, thats my own personal experience, which as you can see, is a pretty good one :)

so if you've tried out SL, please share your experiences, if you have any questions, please ask away

erm... yeah I suck at writing today, so i'm ending my post here, discuss ^_^

[captainspud]

There's a great article in Wired this month about how the supposed "new frontier" of Second Life marketing is completely nonexistant. Two marketing companies have convinced companies like Coke that there's a ton of money to be made advertising to Second Life peeps, but in actuality, the game world is a near ghost-town-- the subscriber numbers given by the company running it are "accounts registered", which is a several decimal places greater than the actual continuing subscriber base. Coke sees, on average, five visitors a day to its pavilion. Most stay less than a minute. This, after pumping millions of dollars into creating it.

Second Life is an interesting technology experiment, but it was never intended to be the social hub it's now attempting to become. The software simply doesn't support it. The upper limit of people in one location is something like 70-- any more and the software crashes. It's hard to have meaningful events when you can only support 70 visitors.

I've brought it up before, but in any discussion about Second Life, I think the most important stat is this:

90% of people who start registration never make it in-game.
80% of people who make it in-game don't stay more than 10 minutes.
90% of people who stay more than ten minutes don't stay more than an hour.
70% of those who make a permanent presence are game developers researching how to make an online world work.

The population just isn't there. The game world is little more than a graphical IM client, and that's just not enough to hold people's interest. There's a ton of potential if they sacked the world and rebuilt the software from scratch, but at the moment it's all far too limited to support the lofty dreams the developers have for it. Until the game sees a significant infrastructure boost, it'll remain little more than a curiosity.

[UnfluffyBunny]

kinda curious where the numbers came from?
the numbers SL give peole are these:
(taken off the site this very second from an auto updating form)

Residents Logged-In During Last 60 Days      1,639,432
Total Residents    8,968,326

your numbers would mean atleast an 8th of the community only signed up in the last 60 days.

inversely there's an article about secondlife in this months 3D world, which talks about the potential for 3d artists to make a profit inworld, including a few success stories, an inspiring read if your interested :)

[edit] the math interested me

"90% of people who start registration never make it in-game."
would mean 89693260 people started the registration (SL keeps record of alt accounts, so there arent people counted twice there)

"80% of people who make it in-game don't stay more than 10 minutes."
that leaves us with 1793665 residents

"90% of people who stay more than ten minutes don't stay more than an hour."
leaves us with 179366 residents
thats less than a ninth of active people in the last 2 months  :wacko:

[edit 2]
inversely, your numbers might of meant they completed registration, but didnt make it ingame, so they'de be counted on the population, which would mean 10% of 20% of 10% of 8,968,326

which iiis... 17936 people (rounding up) but there's more that 40,000 people online right now.

[captainspud]

Which is another thing the Wired article brings up. The numbers the SL people give aren't real. I don't remember the specifics, but they're counting a large chunk of people who actually aren't there at all.

I'll try to find my copy and get the details.

[GhostMachine]

I tried Second Life and just couldn't get into it at all. I've also tried Kaneva, which looks to be a bit better than SL, and can't really get into it, either.

The one big gripe I had with Kaneva is that they gave everyone some credits to start with, so you could buy clothing, an apartment and furniture, but all the items were not resellable - once you bought something, you were stuck with it - and later they re-designed the avatars but did not provide funds for players to reclothe their new, improved avatars. The only way to get credits are to log on at a certain time on a particular night of the week and stay logged in for an hour or to spend real world money to buy them.

I'm mostly put off of Second Life because of how the avatars look, but there are other reasons as well.

[captainspud]

Also keep in mind that that formula is "the best I can remember". It was told to me a couple years ago, and I've been playing broken-telephone with myself, re-quoting it periodically, so the exact figures are probably wrong. I sent an e-mail to the prof who told it to me to see if he can refresh me on the exact figure. It was in a slide, he's probably still got it.

Another thing to keep in mind, is that this figure was from before SL allowed e-mail activation. SL's registered population quadrupled in the six months following this change, so I have no doubt that there have been some shifts in the validity of that formula. However (and I've looked, and can't find the source where I read this), Linden's own research has found that the bulk of the "e-mail wave" crowd, even the ones who stick around, aren't quite as dedicated or involved as the old crowd, and don't contribute as much to the gameworld. So basically, while they've helped fill in the population, they haven't added much to the culture. The bulk of people making meaningful contributions to the game world are the people who came in before the format change.

EDIT: I can't find this month's Wired (I think my dad swiped it), but here are some quick Google results:

Are there really two million people using Second Life?

Philip Rosedale, the founder of SL maker Linden Lab, last month said that churn was probably around 90% - meaning just one in 10 people who sign up use it in any meaningful way.

there are somewhere in the region of 100,000 regular users

Second Life: A Story Too Good To Check

If we raise the bar to people who come back for a second month, I wonder if the service breaks 10,000 simultaneous return visitors outside highly promoted events.

Even the recent Second Life millionaire story involved eliding the difference between actual and potential wealth, a mistake you'd have thought 2001 would have chased from the press forever. In illiquid markets, extrapolating that a hundred of X are worth the last sale price of X times 100 is a fairly serious error.

However, their definition of "recently logged in" includes everyone in the last 60 days, even though the industry standard for reporting unique users is 30 days, so we don't actually know what the apples to apples churn rate is.

[Kommando]

Currently, not including the land I own, I have over US$550 in assets in SL, that I can take out at any time.  I am currently making between 80 to 100 US a week for a casual hobby that is beginning to expand.  The numbers Spud mentions do not include concurrency (number of people on at any one time) which hovers between 40 to 50 thousand people.  Also, companies like Coke have low traffic because they have little to offer residents.  Meanwhile other companies, like Avilion not only make a living for the owner but the owner runs four regions that cost close to US $800 a month to operate.  My business easily pays my land fees, and keeps growing the more I put into it.  Certainly there are few business compared to residents that turn a profit, but then the casual resident does not take time to study the market nor is devoted enough to make a serious go of it.

My circle of friends on SL is generally those who run their own businesses, and most of them do a pretty good job of it.  I love how the magazine articles try to run SL down, you can tell reporters have had very little interaction with the community and it always reads as the voice of an outsider.  In any case, it works for me and Synthos and anyone who has an ounce of talent and the devotion to follow through.  Not to mention its one of the best RP platforms I have seen thus far.

[captainspud]

I love how the magazine articles try to run SL down, you can tell reporters have had very little interaction with the community and it always reads as the voice of an outsider.

Well, yeah.

That's the whole point of journalism-- it's objective. Articles with an obvious insider bias, on ANY subject, largely do not get published. To SL users, the reporting is "an outsider's voice". But that is exactly what the reading audience wants. Nobody wants to hear someone rave about their hobby. It's meaningless. My uncle is fanatical about fishing, but no matter what he says to me or how awesome he says it is, he's not gonna get me to convert. I just... don't like fishing. What MIGHT convince me, however, is the testimonial/reporting of someone objective who acknowledges the flaws (something die-hards of any hobby are unlikely to do) and makes a reasoned recommendation based on real merits. Reporting isn't about pleasing the people you're writing about, it's about serving your audience. Syn's 3d mag will have a good opinion of the game because within that context, it IS a good thing to look into. As long as the false buzz continues buzzing, there's a ton of work for digital artists. Writing that article makes perfect sense, as it tips its readers off to a possible source of revenue. The articles I've read, however, were intended for different audiences-- marketers of various stripes, and general players. As a marketing avenue, SL is a TERRIBLE choice. Wired reported that, and rightfully so. Writing anything else would border on fraud. The articles aimed at possible subscribers concentrate on the extreme learning curve, frustrating controls, and lack of concentrated population-- which, again, are tremendously important factors for THAT AUDIENCE to know about. The fact is, looking at it objectively, I can't recommend anything in SL to anybody except small entrepreneurs looking to fill a niche, developers doing research, or die-hard techies who are used to braving a frustrating interface to get at the hidden gold. For anybody else-- and here, this is "the vast majority of people"-- the game is just not as cool as the buzz tries to make it sound.

Linden wants SL to appear to be bustling, so it's the media's job to find out if it's true or not. And everything I've read says that it isn't. Over and over, I read that the overall subscriber base is too small, and spread over too large an area, to form any kind of meaningful whole. This reflects everything I've seen when I've gone in-game-- the place is a ghost town. Without large congregation areas (which are simply impossible on the game's framework), new users immediately feel lost and confused. The vast majority of people log in, get frustrated, and log out forever.

SL works almost entirely based on user content on an infinite plane. This is a bad setup for attracting new members. The only world-format that's ever been proven to be reproduceably successful is a hub-based world. You make one or more central hubs (cities, markets, main lobbies, whatever) and then the bulk of the content spreads out between hubs. Even if players don't spend the bulk of their time there, they are always available, and they are the first place you send your n00bs. Online worlds depend on noob-friendliness to survive, and SL's lack of populous hubs, where they might go to ask questions and get assistance, makes it a tremendously difficult place to be new to. I have no doubt that a SL2 with from-scratch software designed to support large gatherings would be tremendously successful, as it would allow the creation of true hub areas (absolutely critical to the success of any MMO world).

[Kommando]

Anyhow it seems as though Syn's point of the thread has been completely derailed, so I see no sense in discussing this further.  Of course its Syn's thread so I'll leave that up to him.

[captainspud]

I know a few people have said they've tried secondlife, and just not been able to get into it, so I thought we could discuss it

I would argue that we're doing exactly what Syn set out to do. We're discussing it. You guys have a very positive personal testimonial, I have a much more skeptical opinion from a more removed PoV. Threads filled with like-minded people are incredibly boring to read. Threads where you can have a real point-for-point argument are far more entertaining, IMHO.

[UnfluffyBunny]

well, an arguement isnt really what I was expecting, arguments tend to make curious people less likely to get involved in threads IMO, not what i'd call "entertainment" either really, but I wont deny there's some relevant points that need adressing.

I've never read wired, I dont believe we get it here, so I cant really comment there.
I can however say the media over here seems to be impressed with secondlife, a recent financial expert (forgive me for not being able to source, it was on tv) recocomended investing in land, with an estimate of it doubling in value over the next 2 years, so calling it a false buzz is a little presumptuos.

what I really wanted to comment on was this:

SL works almost entirely based on user content on an infinite plane. This is a bad setup for attracting new members. The only world-format that's ever been proven to be reproduceably successful is a hub-based world. You make one or more central hubs (cities, markets, main lobbies, whatever) and then the bulk of the content spreads out between hubs. Even if players don't spend the bulk of their time there, they are always available, and they are the first place you send your n00bs. Online worlds depend on noob-friendliness to survive

sorry spud, totally uninformed there, this is total crap, there's several public hubs / sims, and the first place you arrive is in one, infact a friend just volunteered to become a "SL Mentor", the first thing she said was that she, as someone who believed she knew everything about the technical side, had greatly underestimated it, and was shocked to have to keep the locations of over 200 orientation sims.
there are people that spend hours of their time at these sims looking out for newbies and helping them out, I have friends that even donate money to newbies on a regular basis.

anyway, I plan on taking some pictures of some of the sights in secondlife to post up, secondlife seems to evolve at a high rate, especially since the introduction of sculpted prims.

[captainspud]

The game engine can't support more than 80 people in one location, and the devs prefer not to encourage more than 50 at a time, just in case. The hubs that do exist are designed only as waystations and crossroads-- come in, and move out. They're designed to send people away, not bring them together. Thus, not a real hub.

[UnfluffyBunny]

I didnt say they were specific gathering places, you commented on the first place to send noobs, i responded with over 200 orientation sims
orientation being the keyword.
once your beyond that, unless your completely computer illiterate, it's pretty easy to find a city, or a big mall, or a general gathering place for your specific tastes.
there is FAR more than enough usermade gathering places, malls, role play areas, building areas, clubs, race tracks, combat areas, rifle ranges, whatever else you could expect from a 3d environment, to keep people busy if thats what you want.

I presume your experience of secondlife has been purely through reading? and not actual interaction?
I really didnt start this to argue about the software, or the numbers, or how the company's run.
it's like i'm not going to abandon my web browser of choice because people download it and then dont use it, and I dont need my web provider to provide pages to entertain my time, i'm more than capable of finding stuff I want on the net and spending my time doing what I wanna do, and thats exactly how it is in secondlife.

I understand some people dont like the interaction, some people dont like the look, some people dont like the interface, some people dont wanna put money in and dont want to make their own stuff, it's all valid, thats what i'm looking for, actual experience, not spiel from someone elses written word.

second life is personal flavour, I dont expect people to sign up and enjoy themselves forever just because i'm having a good experience, i'm just trying to get feedback from others on their experiences, and possibly make people aware if its something they havent encountered before.

so as much as you may enjoy trying to make this into a debate of numbers and pedantic points, it is ultimately, irrelvant to any personal experience someone may have in the game.
if  a multi-million number of people I dont know signed up and dont play, it dousnt affect me
if I want to roleplay in a sim, but cant roleplay with more than 50 people talking all at once, I'm pretty sure I can manage that.
if the noobs cant work out to click the button with "search" written on it, I doubt they've actually got the program installed.
if some journalist wants to sit at his computer and write "OMGWTF T3H NUBZ LOLOLOL" I dont care because i'm having fun, I interact with new people everyday and have a positive experience doing it, and i'm making a tidy sum of sidechange for a hobby.

with that, I would like to ask any further posts to refrain from the subjects of what this and that article said, refrain from debating the company ethics, and follow ghostmachines lead (thankyou very much GM btw ^_^) and return to the discussion of the secondlife world and experiences there in, unless all this mess has just killed the thread in which case it'll probably just sink and die -_-

[GhostMachine]

Syn, sometimes I think Spud argues just because he liked to argue.

I'd probably give Second Life another shot if I felt there was any way to enjoy it - or make money (real or game money) - without spending a dime of real cash. But I'm not in a good place financially and would rather spend my money on CoX and original art, os its just not worth my time.

[captainspud]

Actually, I have played it, as I mentioned above. I spent a week or so tooling around in it a couple years back, and left because there wasn't much to do in the world at the time. I went back a little over a year ago to do some research for my university, and found that little had changed.

Granted, I haven't been back since the flood, but from everything I've heard, all that added was noise.

But anyway. Forgive me for taking you at your word and thinking you were open for a discussion. Next time you want to make a cheerleading thread, please be clear on that fact.

[UnfluffyBunny]

apolagies spudly, after re-reading I did indeed find 8 words that suggested you had at one point been ingame.... god knows how I missed that  :rolleyes:

and forgive me for not being clear enough in the begining, perhaps I should have included big red letters commenting that I actually wanted to discuss experiences with the game, and not jargon, even tho I did indulge it till I felt the point had been covered, seeing as you really were re-iterating the same points over, I felt the horse had been flogged enough really, so forgive me also for wishing to progress the discussion.

and forgive me for believing you have nothing more to do that try and start up a heated debate, your comment on arguments, your signature, really dont know how I could have misconstrued that one, I mean i've obviously been reading you completely wrong for the last 4 years.

so yeah, please people, ignore my comments about asking for bad experiences aswell, and bring forth the cheerleading  <_<

and, for the record, I -do not- enjoy arguements, relevant or otherwise, I enjoy discussion, which is pretty much why i'm trying to stubb this in the butt, unfortunately I think the damage has been done

[captainspud]

and forgive me for believing you have nothing more to do that try and start up a heated debate, your comment on arguments, your signature, really dont know how I could have misconstrued that one, I mean i've obviously been reading you completely wrong for the last 4 years.

Yaknow, this has been coming up far too often lately. It appears I haven't been doing enough to maintain my mystique as the beloved grumpy a**hole of the community. People keep acting shocked when I start up pointless arguments or arbitrarily poop in people's cereal. Metaphorically speaking.

I really need to correct this PR disaster. Well, I guess this thread was a good start, at least.

*stalks off in search of more prey*

[ThePrelate]

I tried SL but just didn't get into it.

I have friends who enjoy it, but I'm more interested in wearing a cape these days, it seems ;)

[Kommando]

*stalks off in search of more prey*

Indeed, Captain Buzzkill strikes again...   :banghead:

[ow_tiobe_sb]

I'd like to add that, if Second Life prompts Syn and Kommando to continue to produce challenging, stellar 3D and 2D work, then I say, "Good on you, sirs!"  I've not experimented with Second Life or its modelling software, but I've seen the results in other threads and have been very impressed.  The Neo-Marxist in me is wagging his finger, but the art admirer in me is nodding his head in appreciation. ;)

ow_tiobe_sb
Phantom Bunburyist and The Prat in the Hat

[Ajax]

I love how the magazine articles try to run SL down, you can tell reporters have had very little interaction with the community and it always reads as the voice of an outsider.

Well, yeah.

That's the whole point of journalism-- it's objective. Articles with an obvious insider bias, on ANY subject, largely do not get published. To SL users, the reporting is "an outsider's voice". But that is exactly what the reading audience wants. Nobody wants to hear someone rave about their hobby. It's meaningless.

I have to disagree with you on that Captain. Hunter S Thompson was inside the Hell's Angel for nearly a year and that is what made his series of articles (later published as a book) so great. He was able to see the real world of the Hell's Angel, which is the only way you can truly understand a sub culture, especially one that is by and large seperate from mainstream society. Second Life I think should be treated in this way. If they want to write an article on the world of SL than they should have someone immerse themselves and write about their experince cause if they don't it will always be biased.

Anyways, I tried SL a while ago and couldn't get into it, guess I'm not use to games that aren't objective based.

[UnfluffyBunny]

Anyways, I tried SL a while ago and couldn't get into it, guess I'm not use to games that aren't objective based.

*nods*
I think thats another issue SL has, while there's countless ways to play inside secondlife, SL itself is not, in the strictess sense, a game in and of itself.
it's pretty much just like the real world, in a sense that you have to decide what to do, and then go do it.
If I wanna go play superhero, I could go to gotham city, or apply to the green lanterns group, if my passion was post-apocalypse, i'd find my niche in the wastelands, steampunk to celdonia, pretty much any environment you'd like to be in you can find.
from star trek and star wars, to forgotten realms and world war 2, there's such a varied selection.

[GhostMachine]

Anyways, I tried SL a while ago and couldn't get into it, guess I'm not use to games that aren't objective based.

*nods*
I think thats another issue SL has, while there's countless ways to play inside secondlife, SL itself is not, in the strictess sense, a game in and of itself.
it's pretty much just like the real world, in a sense that you have to decide what to do, and then go do it.
If I wanna go play superhero, I could go to gotham city, or apply to the green lanterns group, if my passion was post-apocalypse, i'd find my niche in the wastelands, steampunk to celdonia, pretty much any environment you'd like to be in you can find.
from star trek and star wars, to forgotten realms and world war 2, there's such a varied selection.

Are there any worlds with giant monsters running around? I know there was a world based on the Tri-Star Godzilla movie when it was out, but that was a long time ago and I don't think it exists anymore.

[UnfluffyBunny]

currently down for maintenance at the moment, so I cant get any shots of my own, but...
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1242/1054492309_d6f895abd3.jpg

[UnfluffyBunny]

well maintenance is due to finish in about 5 minutes (wether it does or not is a different matter admittedly)
so i've just sat down to read this article:
http://www.informationweek.com/internet/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201500141&subSection=
I found it an interesting read, it's titled "Five Rules For Bringing Your Real-Life Business Into Second Life" tho you dont really need to have that in mind to get what the article is saying, it covers briefly the high and the low points of their personal experience as a business integrating themselves into secondlife.