Direction, percieved unfairness, and the mainstream

How?

Well her story until now (or maybe it still is) is that other people, when learning, were given something that gave them an advantage in the areas of creating magical effects or performance arts and made use of those gifts to achieve something where as Yumi was not given those advantages and so far has used that as an excuse to give up trying it seems.

Oh, so 'luck' is 'unfair'?

I'd say 'random' if anything. As such, perfectly fair.

Thanks for explaining it/updating me, Gabriele.

Well, it seems Yumi is still waiting for someone to help her out of the river. Why? I duuno.

*throws Yumi a lifesaver*

Climb in. Don't try to eat it.

We all have to find out own way... nobody can lead us really.

you want to do something in sl... learn from the tutorials, wiki, etc...

Ask questions, but learn how to find the answers on your own... even if it means saying very very bad things at the screen while in a sandbox for a day working on modding something till you get it right.

Yumi,

I haven't read a lot of your posts, but in general you have struck me as one of the good people here. SL is just weird, I am pretty new and it's surreal, eh.

Indeed. I have RP'd literally dozens of characters in SL so far, some of them which were mostly ignored, some more successful. If you want to be a rockstar Yumi, then dress your avatar up like a rockstar, get a prim guitar hanging on your back, talk like a rockstar, and play some midi tunes out from the guitar. For example. Around the grid roleplayers will at least occasionally pick up your roleplay if you stick to it and start treating you like "that rockstar fox" (For some reason I see it working even better if you choose to be a furry, dunno, up to you), asking how your gig was, etc. You just have to make it what you are, and people will start treating you as that. Be consistent, stick to it, always have the rockstar attitude, a few funny stories to tell about what happened in the tour bus last weekend and so on.. Just be it. That's how I do it.

You might annoy some people in the beginning, and probably later on as well. So, so what, you're still a rockstar..

Where DO you find all those great ferret pics? You're a bloody LOLcat site all by yourself!

That one's a meerkat, and Yumi actually pointed me towards it.

I find them all over, thanks to the ferret underground.

Soooo.....how many threads....how many differently titled threads.....how many posts....how many pages......how many thoughts.....how many thoughts worded differently.....how much RL precious time and energy.....

......will it take to work this out?

Calculators handy? Ballpark figures?

Hey, I sent him that link (It's a UK advertising campaign for car insurance. Yes, they're surreal. Don't even get me started on the intelligent self-propelled telephone that plays the trumpet, or the talking nodding dog toy...)



And that sounds like good advice. But it seems difficult to apply to me, because most of the time there is just no-one around, and if I go somewhere to meet people that location tends to redefine it. For example, I meet lots of new people at NCI or WAs but there I'm usually there to help them, and I generally don't RP there because newbies tend to get very confused about what is RP and what isn't. Most other places with lots of people, though, seem to focus on howling or looking for sex.



Because another forum poster called me an "Eeyore" a few years back. And, well, I love Eeyore. In fact I have his plush beside my monitor.



Exactly the issue - it might be perfectly fair, but it's horrible to lose direction because of randomness.



But that introduces a whole new dynamic: when I get started, I can't RP with the people I really want to RP with, because since I haven't had any practice yet they're likely to be the people I drive away. But if I am deliberately selecting people I'm not that keen on that's a whole weird dynamic in itself.



Gabriele, please don't keep repeating that responsibility thing! SL has a responsibility to keep people in SL and direction is a big part of the attraction of online games.

If you're systematically driving people away then you're playing the wrong role. If you're AFRAID that you're going to, before you've even found a role, then you need to do what I do, sometimes, and just look for clusters of soylent green dots. If you're not flexible enough to change roles if it's not working nohow noway, you're not following the path of the ferret.

I keep repeating it because it is true, it is a truth you just don't want to deal with, yet there is no escaping the truth inevitably.
There is no "game" concievable that can give you the social validation you seek whilst removing the social aspect that give rise to the random servings of help and advantages which some get and that others do not.
Even the attributes you speak of such as levelling and being goal-oriented are not enough by themselves if you want "fair" and yet want others to validate you.

LL has no responsbilities such as you espouse here, they have only to do enough to engage the majority of people who come through the doors, you are not in that majority Yumi, you are part of a tiny niche of people whose numbers are so small that it is not in LL's best interests to worry about. If you were then SL would have failed long before now due to a lack of interest.

But that only comes up in the first place because the only gainful directions in SL are monetary income and validation by others (and arguably those are both linked).



The "majority of people who come through the doors" are _not_ engaged right now.

This is where you again are wrong, and so I have to repeat myself. People do things in SL for nothing but their own satisfaction at being enabled to do things that they cannot do elsewhere. This does not have to include financial reward or the approval of others, it is enough that they are able to do what they want to do. It is the freedom to do what they cannot do in RL.

OK, I should have qualified that further, the majority of people *who stay in SL for a significant time once here* find something engaging about it, you are clearly not in that majority at all.
The majority of people that you are referring to have the attention span of a gnat and once they try something for a short period of time have insufficient imagination to stay interested. They don't stay in any online or offline game for very long, flitting from one new shiny game to the next.
I doubt that LL is really pitching SL to those people either and that is a perfectly valid choice.

I honestly do not believe there are that many people who stay in SL purely for the joy of flying.

For the joy of creating? If you're not hoping that other people see your creations at some point, you could get that from Blender without paying tier.



Which is meaningless, because all it shows is that people don't stay with things they don't enjoy. It says nothing about the success of or quality of SL. "Our product sold well to everyone who bought it!"

I never said purely for flying.
However, there *are* people who stay in SL to *live* a rich, opulent life in a fashion that they cannot do in another other game or in RL, they pretend they are wealthy, live in big houses, wear rolex watches, drive yachts and fly. Sure they can do some of these in other games but not all of them together in a seamless fantasy. This is just one example of living a fantasy lifestyle that cannot be achieved in RL - really your imagination here is being very limited Yumi.
Even your point about blender is wrong. Here in SL not only do you get to create but you get to live in that creation - that is something you cannot do in Blender or any other purely 3D creation package. They lack the immersion necessary to live and play with what you create in the same way.
Not everyone needs others around to give them validation in order so that they continue with these things, they just do them without regard to if validation springs from it or not.
You are so far off base with your assumptions Yumi and you won't beleive it.

No, that is not what I am saying. Nothing can appeal to everyone, it is just not possible.
LL have (or had) a vision for SL, that vision is compelling enough to a large amount of people such that it can be measured as a success. Turning SL into something else just to cater to a few people who cannot find their own direction would not be high on anyone's agenda.
You are also making the assumptive thinking that the reason lots of new people do not stay is because of the issues you have outlined. I would disagree and say you need to present evidence for to back up this assumption. There are many issues that SL suffers from which result in a lack of retention, some of which LL could easily fix, some not so easily.
One of the biggest reasons for new people to leave is that their computer does not have sufficient power to run SL effectively and of course if the environment cannot be run well then people don't stay.

Yumi, as usual this is all going nowhere because deep down, you know that all this argument and counter argument is not really the issue. The real issue is that you need for there to be problems with other people and things so that you don't have to take responsibility or deal with it - it is someone elses problem, something they have to fix for you.
This is why you remain unhappy.

Not at all. The question is, do they do this _alone_? Or do they also hope to have others over?



And I'm not saying it has to turn into something else. I'm asking if other things can be integrated with it without changing the core of SL.

Yumi, why can't they be alone sometimes and have people over sometimes? I don't understand all of this alone business with you.

Because if you don't have social validation, you are alone all the time unless you give up the things you want.

Ok I'm really trying.....why do you have to give up anything to gain social validation? If you are with people of similar interests, I don't see the sacrifice involved.

Usually because
a) you can't find people with similar interests (ok, this is kind of inevitable);
b) you can find people with similar interests, but you can't engage them because they are all being drawn to someone else's house/RP/similar (I see SL's structure as contributing to this problem)

Oh behave, I still blame the group system for this, the limit restricts people.



The world is very diverse, I still say the biggest barrier to finding people with social similarities is the absurd 25 group limit, this stifles networking in a rather major fashion.