Why SL cannot succeed - a personal opinion.

Stephen, I think you will find less disagreement than you think

But maybe for different reasons. It is a pretty near universally accepted truth that most of SL looks remarkably like a rummage sale. This is also part of its charm, however. For example - I specifically signed up for the intrigue of seeing what the “average person in the street” would do with a world of their own and a tool set.

I wouldn’t be interested in yet another world/game/environment created by yet another professional graphics designer. Once you’ve seen it, then what? Part of the magic of SL is that you or anyone else can contribute to it. SL is full of stunning builds by professionals, but they are hidden largely on islands where the surrounding environment can be controlled. At the end of the day, people want to connect with other people and an island like Svarga (professionally built) gets passed over for SEXY FREE MONEY CAMPING DANCE in a location that looks like a 10 year old put it together.

Another critical element of SL is individual expression. If all the content were created by a team of professionals then people would be limited to whatever those professionals chose to create. We would be right back to rows of barely distinguishable houses just like RL. Now, for people who value that type of order and consistency SL is indeed a nightmare of epic proportions – except for themed islands where builds are consistent.

Finally, I would argue that the reason SL makes a lousy impression has much less to do with the creative attempts of amateurs and far more to do with massive failures on the part of LL to 1) make SL usable for people who don’t have high-end computers, 2) to create an orientation system that is easy to learn and works 3) and more than anything else failure to create a welcoming environment of safe harbors at mainland entry points that are free of griefers and assorted assclowns. Far more people are driven away by those 3 things than on any flying toilet bouncing around on a mainland parcel or badly textured dance club.

Hmm, can we get some sort of official certification that we're not a griefer or an assclown? Where do I sign up?

Carolyn is mixing two different issues here, performance and stability.

LL needs to do a lot of work to improve stability, no argument there. However, they will never be able to provide ideal performance. Here's why: user-created content. The faster the sims run, the more content-creators will bog it down until typical sim performance is bearable, but just barely. And note that it's not just the creators, but the users who BUY and USE the content, that contribute to this issue. It's a classic case of the "tragedy of the commons".

If LL implements a per-user performance impact limit, that would alleviate this problem -- but don't get your hopes too high.

Meanwhile, the performance of the sims themselves (i.e., measured in number of avs, objects or scripts they can handle) will keep improving -- as we all notice with the difference between class 4 and class 5 servers, and as we will hopefully notice with the advent of Mono. But the improvements tend to be short-lived, as we learn what we can get away with and bog down the servers with content until they're almost unbearable.

What's the level of bearability and how is it reached? Simple, you vote with your (avatar's) feet. You go where you're comfortable, and leave where you can't stand it. (When that's your property due to neighbors bogging the sim, well, that's a shame and it would be nice if there were better ways of limiting that!) Places with very popular content bear a lot more sim-bogging, and it's no surprise that they're laggy.

It would be nice if there were a technical solution for this, but I suspect there isn't. Note how ever few years you get a computer that's so much faster than your old one, but after a few years, it's just as slow as the old one you got rid of? Same thing only worse in SL because at least you own your computer; it's not shared with others who have their own agendas.

On the other hand, we notice that we're now wearing hair with hundreds of flexi prims, which we couldn't do without killing the server a few years ago. So it's not like there's no benefit -- it's just that the benefit isn't "observable performance" or lack of lag; it's that we get more complicated or better looking stuff.

Hopefully, as technology improves our tolerance for lag will steadily decrease, and that level of bearability will rise.

Well from the graphs Linden Labs keeps making more and more money.
They have been here five years.
If they were going to die do you think they would have by now? Or at least Phil would have gone bankrupt by now if they haven't made enough to keep the doors open this long,
Yes lots are imperfect with Linden Labs but tell me one place that makes games, or similar content that doesn't have issues.
EA sold buggy software one after another for years and blamed fan based content for if they complain. And a lot of people kept buying the programs for whole lot less then we spend here a year to do what we are doing here creating in spite of the bugs.
Even if some of us, which seems sometimes like sometimes a large majority are creating badly at least we get to do that here. Personally I am glad to have the opportunity to create badly. I just wish there was less problems doing it some days.

Funny you should mention that. In many of the MMO Review sites I frequent, the #1 complaint about SL is "It looks dated". One person summed it up as "The graphics look like Skunk Ass". LOL!

Turns out most of these Potential Residents are also using the old viewer, not the Windlight viewer.

There's a balance to be made between stability & keeping it looking "up-to-date".

The thing is, you've touched on a problem there - the people going to those builds aren't going for the experience of amateur content, they're going because of the appeal of free money and sex. Free money is appealing for obvious reasons and sex is appealing because it's the lowest common denominator for consensual role-play.

That's the issue - anyone can contribute to SL, but it's hard to get that contribution noticed if it isn't professional quality and isn't one of the lowest common denominator themes.



Yes, I have always wondered why SL insists on having the orientation system be part of the regular SL engine..



.. but this a contradiction in terms, unfortunately. The only way to do this would be to check that every new arrival wasn't a griefer and being constantly under suspicion isn't welcoming.

Interesting analogy. Let's explore it.

In the case of a computer operating system or platform, there were extreme market forces supporting a "one winner" world. Developing applications is and was a very costly effort, and supporting an application on multiple platforms was a daunting expense. It was a given that one platform would dominate. (Things are much better for cross-platform development today; this force is weakening.)

At present, I don't see the same force at work in SL. Maybe in the future, but currently most content is provided "bottom up": huge numbers of extremely low-investment businesses creating meaningful products or assets, most of them hobbyists and not serious RL businesses. IMHO, most content is provided by people who joined SL for the fun of it and are looking for fun things to make, rather than businesses with plans to exploit SL markets. As SL grows, that could swing the other way.

One thing SL does have going for it (like Windows) is an entrenched user base -- and this factor is even stronger for SL than for MS. If a good alternative to SL appeared, many of us would stay here because of our investments into SL (of time, money, and creativity) and more importantly the relationships we've developed.

A competitor to SL would win not by luring away SL players as much as by retaining more new users.

In any case, I suspect that in 5 years we'll be laughing at Phil's implied prediction, as we have fun in SL and curse its problems. How about in 10 or 20 or 50 years? Sorry, that's far too far into the future for my cloudly little crystal ball! But I have high hopes, if not for Linden Labs then for some future open platform. I wouldn't be surprised to find some vestigial LL code in it either! (Not that I'm likely to be around to see it in 50 years, or appreciate it much at age 100!)

More places like The Shelter or NOOB Island would help a lot - they are protected 24/7 by the Residents who run them. In fact, why doesn't LL encourage, license and maybe even PAY FOR more of them?

Because if LL do that for a limited number of people, there'll be FIC allegations.

If they do it as an open program, it'll be abused.

Also, LL generally don't pay for anything that could support itself. The Ivory Tower of Prims, for example, is Linden hosted now, but AFAIK it only became that way when Lumiere started having trouble supporting it.

I say let the commerical paid islands be the OI of sl. Cute cost and let the Lindens resouncible for the failures of the creation of OI get off the hook as they say. Commerical paying islands are a doing the newbie training as it is now. OI island is nothing but a fulled with griefter place.

I'm certainly listening to what's being said, Michael. In fact I addressed your points earlier. In a nutshell, they are that the whole ball of wax is basically being rewritten while incorporating windlight. What I said earlier is that the whole ball of wax could have been rewritten without needing to include windlight. Using windlight gives them the opportunity to stabilise things, as one Linden put it, and that makes perfect sense, But it isn't windlight that's the stabilising factor (assuming they actually stabilise anything) - it's the rewrite, which could have been done without the inclusion of windlight. That's pretty much what I said earlier.

I thought about what someone said concerning first impressions and keeping new people in, and it assumes that people generally come from a games playing background, but I don't think that can be assumed. I certainly didn't, and I was very impressed with SL. I'd never heard of the games and systems that keep being mentioned here until I started using this forum not many weeks ago. I've never heard of the MMO Review sites either, but I guess they are about games, so it wouldn't be surprising that SL is compared to games.

Anyway, IMO keeping new people in SL is better achieved by having a stable system than by having a prettier one. That doesn't mean that it's not good to have a better looking system - just that stability is paramount, imo.

Well, *theoretically* the other improvements could have been made without WindLight, but it would have been re-inventing what was already inside the WindLight engine, and would have required hiring the kind of graphics developers that LL got when they acquired Windward Mark. And then doing all the stuff that those developers have been doing before and since the acquisition, making everything play with the rest of the SL client.

I dunno. Read the press release (http://lindenlab.com/pressroom/releases/05_21_07), maybe it will help.

I agree with Ordinal, SL has been slowly experiencing LESS downtime and fewer major issues since last year. As for the whole system itself, let's look at it this way...NO other 3d online system has the building platform that SL does. It is possible to create some content in a few of the games, but no where near SL. The fact that (as I recently learned) it takes TWO IBM blade servers per sim and they coordinate how many sim blocks to work relatively seamlessly? is alone impressive. How often was the original arpa net up, or our www up with no down time? For those who think LL isn't pulling the weight, or isn't doing things right, I think you should talk to some of the people who really know how much resource and work it takes to keep an environment like this functioning. Little things like a tp failing, or the occasional downtime (remember one day a week at least?) are seriously small potatoes for the amount of uptime and potential growth there is.

Someone earlier said something about removing the word beta from the platform, henceforth people who are paying customers are not going to be happy with a product that is no longer supposed to be a beta product.

I'd be happy with eight hours downtime and then largely stability, but that's not how it works here and that's where the frustrations stem from. There are always going to be issues, unforeseeable issues too but they are too regular here for the platform to have lost the tag of beta.

I've heard that argument a lot really. But, let's look at one other thing that has been out of beta for ages...Windows. How often does your compy freeze, find itself unable to complete the most mundane task, need the newest update? It really is very similar, but for some reason people accept that as par for the course from Microsoft. I'm really just trying to put things into perspective. After all, how much money do people pay for the SL service? they don't have to at all, free account and all. But how much do they HAVE to pay to use Windows? Just buying Windows XP will cost you $199 for the full version (http://www.microsoft.com/products/info/product.aspx?view=22&pcid=a9d2c448-eb05-
4a2b-a062-9c711c533e0c&type=ovr#HowToBuy)
It's a service/software, and has at least as many borks as SL. So, IMHO, the "it's a service I pay for, so it should work flawlessly" argument I just don't agree with.

Edited to shorten the URL

I'm just curious............what services work flawlessly? I haven't heard of any nor have I had any experiences with something that works flawlessly in anything, not just computers.........but really ANYTHING!

I feel like I've been a member of sl over its growth period to system saturation point.

When I first joined back in Dec 06 I think there was about 15-18K people online at any one time, this steadily grew and grew (with little bumps along the road when things got really bad, then sorted it) up till about 38K

At this point things slowed to a crawl as the problems seem to become way more frequent.

It's growth now has been from 38K up to say... what.. 42K at the most? for months and months now.

It's very hard to believe Lindens claim of handling 100K when its been stuck at this much lower level for soo long.

So there's either three ways of looking at it:

1) The growth has stopped because new users that join are put off by the instability issues

2) Second Life simply can't cope with users beyond 50K, the whole grid goes tits up.

3) Both of the above.


Perhaps what is needed is a total redesign of the entire system.

The problem with that of course is, all the time effort and money invested into the virtual world thats already been built, along with all its networked transactions.

I don't envy Lindens position and I really looked forward to sl becoming a stable system that would become the next internet.

It seems we are still a looooong long way from that happening though.

What it'll take is the virtual world equivalent of a 'google' company to show up with a virtual world that's soo fast and streamlined the way google took the less than reliable search engine to a totally new level of accuracy and speed.

..it'll come....

...whether it comes from Linden, thats the question...

actually, it's been in the upper 50s for quite a while now. as we "speak" it's 58K.

additionally, ppl keep saying growth has stopped. if so, who ARE these 60K avies?

So it is! haha.

Still, I think its very fare to say its nothing like the growth that was going on since Dec 06, if it was following the same trend we'd already be hitting 100K and beyond by now

How many of them are camping bots or alt farms? Skin Oasis uses 70 or so by itself. Phil uses 16 or so.

Bots.

There are plenty of Windows updates, and Windows always has flaws, but it's been a stable operating system for long long time. It could never be compared to SL.

Take TPing as an example of instability. I joined in Dec 2006, and I've never known a time when TPing was reliable. Sometimes it's worse than at other times, and right now it's pretty bad. Why? Why after all this time is TPing so unreliable? It's not because it can't be fixed. It's because the people at LL haven't had the will to fix it. Which is more likely to cause people to leave SL - TP failures half the time, including plenty of crashes whilst TPing, or not having a more attractive environment? My money is on instability.

I can assure you that I don't have to close the company system for 8 hours a week because of Windows. I can assure you that my company doesn't experience the crippling effects of SL when we use Windows. I can assure you that people here pay a hell of a lot more than they do for a full copy of Windows. I'm paying way more per month.

Okay... time for me to throw that back in your face. "That's a MASSIVE leap of pure imagination."

Stability doesn't count for squat if people quit moments after signing up saying "Gawd, this looks dorky! Why bother?" They won't care if there's stability or not.

They could have been saying:

"This looks really cool! What can I do here?"

People WILL put up with a lot of complexity and problems, if they believe doing so will be worth the effort.

Stability is worthless in a world that no one finds attractive enough to participate in. This isn't a situation where you can lock the doors and assume the current population is sufficient for keeping the world going, we need new blood bringing new money into this world for it to be viable.

A visual improvment is absolutely essential. Besides, population growth will always keep us up against some performance or stability boundary until LL caps the number of concurrent residents. And I don't think they will for a very long time to come.