Today's stupid idea...

As we all know, "age" in second life is the number of days since first login. The problem is that if you don't use an avatar for a long time, it still gets older at the same rate as one that is used all day.

What would be a better way to measure "Age"? For example, it could be

1. Number of hours logged in for that avatar.
2. Number of hours logged in for that typist, summed over all his or her avatars.
3. number of days since first rez for that avatar.
4. Number of days since first rez for that typist, summed over all avatars.
5. Some combination of 1 to 4.
6 Other.
7. Screw it, who cares.

I'll take door #7, please.

What, no pie??

I think the real question is: what are you trying to measure?

#1 sounds like a good, disclosure-free solution to measure experience (for a very limited value of 'experience') in SL. Then again, #3 gives credit to those hip enough to be trend setters and use phrases like "I remember when..."

errrrr.... #7 for me also. with a side of fries. to go.

8. Number of hours typist is logged in, conscious, not AFK, and not using bots or pings.

[ETA: Make this a reverse logarithmic progression so that too many hours spent on line leads to diminishing returns. I mean - you should try to have a 1st life too, if possible.]

9. Number of unique sims visited.

It's not such a stupid idea so much as a tricky one.

I can see how the number of *active* hours in SL would be a useful bit of data to have on a particular av but hours in-world doesn't tell us enough. A camper could easily run up a tremendous amount of time in-world but I don't see how that makes the av any more promising than a bot. So activity would definitely be a condition of hours spent in-world.

On the other hand, although the number of hours logged-in by a typist certainly shows activity, it is not a useful indicator in itself. I spend days, sometimes weeks in-world on this account or one or more of several others without typing very much into chat and even less into IM. In this respect, I log more communications on these forums than anywhere else apart from RL. I don't think any of my avs would show a very promising statistic despite the fact that they are usually quite active in some way.

In conclusion I'd have to bemoan the lack of pie in lieu of a workable alternative.

I think the age since joining is still the most interesting figure.

Number of prims created by an avatar, rezzed/owned by others? Hmm..nope, this is still an imperfect indicator of...whatever we are trying to measure.

Words typed, perhaps?

Age since joining but... here's an amazing things - have you noticed how many peopel who use sl all have the same birthday? November 30th. Hmmmm. Aliens perhaps?

Parse error

It's simple. If you can't tell how long an av has been in SL by looking at how they're dressed, how well they walk (particularly with lots of glass windows and doors around), how their AO (if any) looks, whether they know about "/me" and "/1 show", how quickly they find the dance ball, etc., then you're still a newbie.

Seriously. Once you see someone dressed to the hilt and navigating SL proficiently, with a rez date less than 7 days ago, you know they're an alt, and that their rez date is otherwise meaningless. Or if you see someone with a rez date of two years ago, and they still can't walk well or change the group tag, you know either they gave up on SL the first few times or else something suspicious is going on (like a kid using a parent's account).

In other words, any numeric measure of age is really only useful for spotting inconsistencies. In most cases, it's not much value.

I spend about 8-12 hours active in SL per day, the rest of the time is AFK & sleeping.

I know some people who only log in once every 9-12 months, for 2-3 day stints.

Somewhat related and not really all that accurate, but if you go into the Advanced menu and into the debug settings, under "numsessions" it will show you how many successful log-ins you've made. Bear in mind that this gets reset I believe when you reinstall a viewer so not all that accurate. Would be kinda cool, or perhaps a bit scary, to have see how many hours you've logged.

On an unrelated note Lee, how's your Dad liking SL?

I'd go for that one except that it would make me a withered old crone.

How do you mean make? we 07's are old, 06's granny and 05's fossiels

I would really, really, really rather not know how many hours I have spent logged into SL.

1 user agrees

Make that two. It puts the willies up me just thinking about it.

Good thing Briana isn't here.. She's REALLY old..

That's just stupid, it's like saying, well, you sleep 8 hrs a day, so you're only actually 2/3rds your age. I started in SL on Sept 12th, 2006 (Oct 22 2006 for this avi), so I'm about 3 1/2 yrs in SL weather I'm on all the time or not.

FIFY

I dont understand what the problem is... you still have an avvy even if you dont use it

its not as if youre charged per age of your avy.

And if you were in a coma in r/l your body wouldn't mircaulously stop ageing.

#9: The times we had sexx0rz in SL.
#10: Number of poseballs we hopped.

Still I go for #7: tell me again why I would care?

#11.Number of crashes