Hazing Newbies

Tonight, I wanted to go to Eternal Creations, but the region was unavailable at login. I found myself in a Welcome area at Hansa on what the Second Life Wiki calls Mãebaleia. It was a pretty piece of architecture. It was quite crowded and it was in the middle of nowhere. There were no stores nearby, no housing, no sandboxes. It was a no-rez area on top of it all.

The building was a cross shaped structure placed on the diagonal and the newbies stood around under the archways and that was it. They talked and went nowhere. I called out that I was heading southeast and that any one who wanted could follow me. No one did.

I started walking. I knew from my time on Active Worlds that one of the hardest things to do is cross an empty featureless expanse on foot, even if that expanse is green. There was not even a trail of stones and for a while, there was nothing but green rolling land with a few tussocks of grass in any direction.

Eventually, I reached "civilization." The neighborhood I entered was home to some kind of reality TV game where they voted people out. Eventually, I found a store. It had a few boxes of freebies. They were featureless boxes. Whoever would be buying this merchandise would do so sight unseen. I sell freebies on XStreet and when I put them up for sale it is with a lot of marketing including a photograph and ad-copy.

A poor newbie who had crossed trackless green as her first long walk, would not even be able to see merchandise before accepting it. This not treating the newbie like a customer. Even Subway which charges about $5.00 -- $6.00 for a meal asks you exactly what you want on your sandwich and puts it together while you wait. Even those without a lot of money can receive a small dose of consumeristic pampering in real life.

I did some more walking. Eventually I ran out of road. I knew that off road I would hit ban lines. I played newbie a bit and ended up on what was people's homes. I did not see many stores or other public establishments. I wondered what it would feel like to see ban lines for the first time. It really bothered me, but I spent a lot of time on a MU** that prided itself on being completely walkable. I found the grass trail where the road should be because I knew that was safe. I managed to find property owners that offered passage to the water (a river). Water like roads is safe for travel without obstruction. A newbie, howeer, would not know any of this.

I did not orient in a standard welcome area or even spend more than a minute or two on Help/Orientation Island. I figured out how to use the search engine and teleport and went to join a friend who was orienting on the NMC Islands. The NMC Orientation Island which any one can visit is in some ways a much better model for a way to handle newbies. It is walkable, full of landmarks and items newbies can manipulate. It also allows rezzing and building though it is not a sandbox. I did my first build on a piece of sidewalk at NMC.

The downside to my NMC experience is that it was very lonely. I was often the only one logged in. It was late spring/early summer, and that's intersesion at most universities and colleges in the United STates. NMC is run by Virginia Tech. There were and probably are still big holes in my socialization.

There has to be a better way to socialize newbies than either the lonely but well equipped academic islands or the pretty structure in the middle of nowhere with no amenities for what feels like miles.

I think we're hazing newbies. I know I should take my concerns to the Lindens or to someone in the hierarchy. I have some ideas on what would make the newbie experience better. It still would not help those who don't seem to do well with an immersive graphic interface, but for those who do arrive here and are ready to climb the learning curve, they just deserve so much better.

You're preaching to the choir, sweetie.

I can't really relate to the newbie experience. It bothers me that newbies tend to ignore the tutorials, TP to a welcome area, and ask inane questions that would have already been answered had they followed the tutorials.

When I first came to SL, that's what I did: I learned. I didn't ask questions. I read. I watched videos (THANKS TORELY). Granted, not all newbies will be at the same level of inquisitiveness and LL shouldn't be blamed for that. I knew that when I came to SL, it was not a "perfect" place where ban lines did not exist and all roads led to a worthy destination. I knew the world was made up by people and would be just as disjointed and varied as people are. When I first started, I was obsessed with flying around the mainland (funny, I don't do that anymore). Why? Because I adored the chaos of all these random builds done by random people. It never had to feel like a place of order for me. And, I appreciated the fact that LL didn't treat me like an idiot and left me to my own inquisitiveness.

There's a lot to learn when starting SL. I won't deny that. Sure, LL could improve the newbie experience and I gotta say that with the new help island and the new web site, they're on their way. But, once a new person TPs out of the help island area and into the main grid, they should already know a thing or two about SL. If they don't, it's their own damn fault.

I hand out a basic tips notecard and basic freebies to newbies. I've been known to usher the polite ones around, a while, give landmarks, answer questions.

Should be people stationed at those places to do the same. Give newbies a free translator HUD (being a 'newbie' who can't read or interpret most of the chat or text in world is even worse). Give newbies a basic 'newbie kit' so they can change clothes, and a note card on how to do the basic things: Change clothes, open boxes, open inventory, use search, use IMs, and teleport. Oh and "how do I make money" is a frequent question from 'newbies', too.

This forum has some basics in it, etc., but not everyone is going to think to find the site or the forums. (I've suggested it to some and always get something like "It's all I can do to just do THIS right now" - i.e. try to learn to walk around in-game and open inventory, learn what the folders mean, how to wear only one hair at a time, and not a box, etc.) So something they can refer to on their own in-game when they want/need to refresh memory, would be helpful, I think. (And not five notecards a mile long - talk about overwhelming, again.)

Being 'newbie' is overwhelming to a lot of people. They are gonna feel stupid, oftentimes, and give up. I know because I've caught a few who were thisclose to doing so, and told me. After a day or two of (their) being in the game. It can be exhausting at times, (depends how quickly people learn and how into trying someone's patience on purpose, at times) but worth it, to be tutor/tour guide for an hour or so if that person sticks around - and maybe does the same for some other pixel puppet some day.

It's partly cos I spent two days bumping into things and lost for what to do, myself, then quit for two YEARS because I just didn't get it. I know what it feels like.

Orientation Islands, help your newbies out with a note card to keep. Put it in simple language. Include just the basic points. No one can remember all the stuff thrown at them as they rez in and walk through quickly to get into the world.

People ignore tutorials, we all do at times. It's work and you have to use your brain.
I think this is borne of the way of the computer itself. How many people even know of F1 and if they do, use it?
It's a "Hit OK and lets get on with it world" even if the text on the box says "Install this virus".
People will never change.

I didn't say tutorials. Those are already in the Welcome areas.

Er, if that was to my post. Lol.

I was lucky, that my first landing out after leaving Help Island, was the infoHub in Plum.

I walked down the pier, seeing the "information givers" becomming less and less helpful. Telling me what an infohub was, how to sit on a bench (I couldn't sit).. and then down the ramp was a sandbox.

Had that sandbox not been there, I might never have stayed in SL. As cruddy as the sandbox in Plum was (with it's vague autoreturn mechanism back in those days).. as littered as it was, and as overrun by griefer gangs of "ninjas" and "armies"..

it was the place where I rezzed the freebie jetpack for the first time. The place where I started tearing it apart and building my own model.

Had it not been for that easy-to-find sandbox in my early days.. I would never have made my first jetpack, and from there.. who knows what might have happened.

I hate to break it to you, but you are the first person I have heard of who, upon joining SL and discovering they could fly, went for a walk instead.

That said, I feel ya. When I joined I spent half my first day on Help Island. That was back when they had the castle. I learned how to fly, how to change my appearance, how to switch textures on my clothing and my hair, even how to take "snapshots", before I left the island.

Soon as I got out, however, that was that. I landed at Waterhead, filled with the brash and condescending tones of youth. I left, in a hurry. I figured out SL on my own, and if I wasn't previously acquainted with online environments I'd have been a lot more lost than I was.

I know LL is seriously looking at improving the "first hour experience", but that may be part of the issue. SL has a steep learning curve, and it takes more than an hour to learn even the basic stuff. I think they should definitely bring back that castle.

When I joined, I went through the help island tutorial...then logged off.

Read blogs...the second life book at borders...flipped through forums...

A few days later, logged on and TPed straight to NCI, already knowing enough to be dangerous.

A few days after that, started posting here, and have never looked back.

I know that what I did is not the norm. But now, I try to steer any new people I see to the populated helpful places like NCI or The Shelter. Much better than lonely wandering, or the infohubs.

I certainly wasn't the norm either. I have yet to see a newbie come off HE looking like anything but a default avatar. But this leads to something that I've always held to be true: SL is for smart people. I can't imagine dunderheads who find their way into this place staying longer than a few months. They either learn how to incorporate their SL into their RL by building, coding, designing, running a business or socializing ... or they move on when they find something more "fun".

There's a certain advantage to that learning curve.

My first day a friend gave me a bunch of textures and a LM to Cordova and left me to get on with it. I spent 12 hours playing with prims and in the end built a chair. It was pretty good in hindsight. I then spent the next week building in Cordova until hooked enough to purchase my piece of first land. Didn’t edit my Av or go exploring or do anything other than build. My friend knew id like that the best so didn’t bother introducing me to any of the other features of the game until later. I was already hooked by then.

I think this would be a good way to introduce noobs. Create categories of interest like building, social, Fashion scripting etc etc. When a person finishes orientation they choose a category that most interests them and pop, they are sent to orientation area 2. This place teaches and demonstrates the specifics of their chosen interest. So if their interest was building then tuition would be focused towards that. Give them access to the outside world but also give them access to return to their orientation up to 3 days after birth.

I think herding a noob towards a chosen interest in the first few days would improve LL's retention ratio rather than just releasing them into the wild to find their own way.

My, that's genius. I'f I had been shown more about building that first day I might have done just what you did, instead of wandering. Not that I didn't enjoy the wandering, but I would have found the building more fun.

I spent virtually every waking hour of my first two days in SL on Orientation Island, messing with the clumsy camera controls and generally doing what a good number of other posters did - changing appearance, finding my way through inventory folders, playing.

On my third day I logged in and found myself dumped by the tracks near the hobo encampment at Calleta, which is a place I often return to out of sheer nostalgia. The first person I tried to talk to was the prim ghost that still floats around there. I forget her name but it goes to show what a raw newbie I really was.

The first avatars I met were a pimp and his trick, swamped in bling which I now realise was why my graphics card was limping along the trail behind me on this my first happy-go-lucky day out. As it happens I should have stayed talking to the ghost because the pimp asked me if I'd ever been shot when I approached the pair with the intention of striking up a conversation.

The next avatar I met was a strange transgender kind of geisha character who found an empty house and took me back there to pop my cyber cherry. This was mid-summer 2007 and MLP wasn't quite as commonly in use as it would seem to be these days: I recall the bed was smothered in poseballs.

Interestingly enough, my two days on Orientation Island did aclimatise me to some of the smaller niceties of dealing with other avs and also provided me with some basic skills before I essayed into the big wide Grid. By then I knew enough to at least introduce myself and check that I wasn't intruding when I came upon another avatar: just this morning a newbie wandered into my home and, without so much as a word of introduction, set about inspecting/selecting items as I stood there watching her.

I demonstrated "Right-click > Eject" for her benefit.

These days newbies are so raw that I hesitate to help them out. Where do you start when someone is just a few hours old and they can't even follow chat or operate their camera properly, let alone observe a few basic social graces?

The whole experience you relate sounds like a dream.



I did that, too, sorta. I flew around a bit, but kept hitting ban lines, and so walked instead. Found a deserted mall where I kept falling through the floor and getting stuck under buildings.

That's what made me want to stay.

Kidding of course, but I quit logging on until after I'd read a lot of the Knowledge Base and seen several of Torley's tutorials.

I don't think there is one sure path for helping newbies. I didn't care about building and still don't. If someone had tried to show me how, I would have run away.

What *did* hook me was the clothes, the idea of changing shape and skin and hair (I didn't get to eyes until way later)... and I thought I could play Stargate.

Helping newbies is an interesting experience, and often just showing ppl how to search is all it takes for them to disappear and go elsewhere.

What did happen to the castle? Your experience is similar to my own in May 2008. The castle was a good start, and in retrospect needed work, but it was friendly. Next came Waterhead and walked out of there pronto [still prefer walking as part of an immersion experience]. Thanks for the memories.

Laughed-out-loud.

Everyone learns in different ways, and a lot of them refuse to learn, period.

But NCI and Caledon have got the best answer I've seen yet. Last night, I checked out Caledon Oxbridge. They have four "colleges"...buildings...with VERY well thought out tutorials. Clear, simple, easy to follow. Spend an hour or two going through them and you will graduate as a Non-noob. Even *I* learned something !SHIFT+arrow makes you walk sideways!)

There are additional facilities. Free "student dorm rooms" for those who initially rez there. A nearby campus with more advanced courses. An adjacent village with real people and shops to explore. And of course, the builds themselves all have the high quality and attention to detail that is a hallmark of Caledon.

THIS is how Orientation Island should have been done. THIS is the "improved New User Experience" that LL has been fumbling.

I can't praise what Desmond and Carl have done here highly enough. I will be handing the landmark for Caledon Oxbridge to every newbie I meet from now on.

Lindal - great advice! I'll go check out Caledon's newbie set up and grab an LM myself. I've got Lucrezia's new resident kit that I hand out, and also have set as a freebie in the shop. I'll add Caledon's LM to it. Thanks!

Has Lucrezia got a version later than 2.8? I may need an update.

I don't know - I'm still using 2.7 because I stuck my own freebie outfit in the box and didn't want to use her automatic updater thingy. Maybe I'll swing by her place and check it out. I'll send you one if so.

Oh...and for the record...

Hazing is wrong and should always be discouraged.

Why didn't I think of that?

I like that spot a lot, but never thought of sending newbies there.

One of my alts calls it home, since I tp'd there from Help Island.

The only problem I have with it is that you don't land at the beginning of things, and there's no sign of which way to go. I suppose I could make a landmark for the starting point, but if you just search for "Caledon Oxbridge" you don't end up there.

Desmond Shang said it's that way because it's not really open yet, but as far as I can see it's fully functional.

Also, there's an interesting set of avatars to choose from.

As I recall, I spent most of the first couple days of my second life touring help island, browsing the knowledge base, and watching Torley's tutorials. I also recall wasting many hours messing with the system hair and my initial body shape.

My first time off Help Island I was completely lost. I remembering finding an airplane and wanting to fly it but it wouldn't let me. After popping up search, the real fun began. I recall flying around an abandoned outdoor mall, being amazed that the music changed ever so often and not knowing why, running into ban-lines, figuring out how to get into what I thought was a club because techno music was playing (but it was probably a private residence, I couldn't tell).

I visited a skin store but I didn't have any money so I just looked around. I didn't completed understand how it worked anyway. Some guy was there buying a skin and he said "hi" and told me he was training to be a wrestler (he had an exaggerated muscle man shape). He "friended" and I never heard from him again after that day.

Then came the insanely bizarre alchemy known as AOs. I recall getting the free Zhao AO, but I also had the wetikon one in my freebie package. I did manage to buy a couple walk animations, but I never figured out how to get them to work with the AO huds. I ended up buying a basic packaged AO from Vista Animations and it worked so I was happy.

I remember going to this jazz club where people were dancing and I thought it was awesome. I started to say hi, but nobody would talk to me or carry on a conversation so I left. Later, I found an outdoor coffee shop with a ton of people sitting around it, so I sat down with them and started talking. I remember getting very frustrated that everyone seemed AFK. I didn't know anything about camping or bots back then.

Aww, the story got long and twisty from there on out, but I'm sure some of you old timers have even longer stories.

...which is not the right name.

(It's Jeogeot, or the Korean continent. Mãebaleia was what one Wiki editor made up, to be the best of any knowledge)

Ive always felt that the Hanja welcome area was incomplete. It's a carbon copy of Ahern's welcome area, but without the scant content of the other.

And what someone else said about this, you're preaching to the choir. We're with you. Thankfully, there are places inworld that do it a bit better than that.

--

My own first experience: I did the orientation island, well.. most of it. I adjusted my avatar, changing her purple shirt into a green shirt, changing her appearance a bit. I met another McCann, briefly, then headed down the hill to talk to a parrot. I walked into my first river (my computer was actually below SL spec, so much movement was impossible for me). I was unable to cam around the sign. I never could pick up the beach ball. Somehow, though, I got out of there and went to the mainland -- Ahern welcome area. No one really said much to me, and were all in their own conversations. A RL acquaintance of mine ended up TPing me to her, an helped get me started for real.

Just for lulz, this was me on day one. I hadn't left newbie Help Island yet. This is also the only picture of the castle I have.