What causes SL's high dropout rate?

Just as a follow-up to the earlier thread I thought I'd ask if people would give general opinions on this.

Honestly i question the high dropout rate..since for every avatar theres ten alts?..Id say the actual population has increased maybe 10 k per year and alts outnumber mains.

~Lana Tomba

Yes, I have to see some trustworthy numbers before making that claim. The usual "well I know 10 people and 7 have quit isn't enough." Is someone who signs up but can only log in occasionally due to RL committments constitute a dropout? I bet if you could sift through the Alts, bots, and griefers , along with the "Journalists" who spend 5 minutes in world and declare it a failure, you might see slow growth, not the big numbers LL likes to throw out.

I agree with Brenda. Without hard numbers it is impossible to know what the dropout rate really is.

For those that do drop out there could be any number of factors.

They may find out SL really is NOT a game to win or lose.
If they don't choose one of the sponsored entry points, the LL provided orientation process is a dismal experience at best.
Jumping out of the initial OI/HI and right to a mainland "Welcome" (I use that term loosely) area and meeting grief and verbal abuse rather than a welcoming atmosphere.
Requirement for a very high end PC in order to really be able to do much of anything in world. Not everyone has the RL budget to just run out and buy a new quad-core gaming system.

I'm sure there are nearly as many other reasons as there are people who drop out.

I'm not voting cos these are missing ...

1) I joined SL with the expectation of easy money.

2) I joined SL for the sex. But where is it? I joined and all the girls turn me down.

3) I'm lonely.

4) No one around speaks my language.

5) I have zero imagination. Spoon feed me like the baby bird I am - what I have to make an effort?

BESIDES the place isn't declining anyway. Poppycock! I'd be interested to see what happens to the numbers if bots are done away with somehow, though.

Well I'd been in SL for quite a while and one day I went to create an alt and was very tempted to quit SL after being tortured in Orientation Island. But that may partly be because I was an experienced user that was being forced to jump through hoops.

They should just rez the newbies into the sandbox and let them figure it out on their own. It's all part of the fun.

Or if they really want to use Orientation Island then they could put a sign in the sandbox letting new users know that there's a place that'll teach them the ropes.

The ordeal should be optional.

That too.

It used to be...."optional" that is..at any little jungle sign the option was always there to teleport out to the mainland...at any time.

~Lana Tomba

People tend not to read signs. Especially not when they're blank gray textures.

That's how I left the room to get a drink and some evil little git put me on a piece of dungeon equipment so that when I came back ... I never actually USED the tutorial when I signed up

Not true, I am running a 3 year old processor maybe 4, 1g RAM and a Low-Mid Range video card. I very seldom have any problems, certainly not game breaking ones. My freakin ISP gives me many more problems than my computer does.

I almost stopped playing after a few days. Luckily I met someone that told me if I gave it a week I would find something that would keep me playing.

/me remembers back to the sweet days of all textures always loading..never seeing "image missing" or "gray textures".

/me then remembers no nice skins...or primd hair ...or primd clothing or attachments and then decides to tolerate the occasional gray texture

~Lana Tomba

seriously though I created an alt recently and wasn't even subjected to an orientation island..why'd i miss that?

I'd really have to say the unstability of the SL client!

I've been tempted on many occasions to throw in the towel.. But,, I continue to put up with all the issues mainly due to the wonderfull friends I've mad in-world, I believe the Lindens realize that this is one of the top reasons people continue to hang on!

I checked out the Onrez viewer little bit ago and I must say if the viewer made the SL experience even harder if I hadn't known how to use SL.
I couldn't figure out lot of things for long, long time.
It was really ghost town in 2003, hard to do things... Yet for some reason I did return
3 years later for some odd reason.
And when I returned it was really difficult in 2006, I probably wouldn't have stayed long if I hadn't made any friends that I had.
It still often feels like ghost town full of lag,etc. but at least I have some friends to make it worthwhile.

The biggest point that I heard from a friend who tried SL and left was "It's fine if you can make textures and build and all that, but for someone without those skills, there isn't that much there for them. And it becomes very expensive if you don't habve the skills to earn L$ in-world." .

That same friend also had a lot of trouble trying to explore SL. He wanted to travel around in a boat or on foot, but kept running into ban lines or sim crossing issues (which repeatedly sank his boat) or other technical problems that made general exploring very frustrating.

He also noted that as a person who wasn't interested in pixel-sex encounters, he found it difficult to just go out and just meet friends. Sort of like someone having trouble doing platonic socializing when all the social scene seems to be singles bars and dating places.

The high hardware requirement was another sticking point. I have other friends who might like to try SL, but their systems just won't manage it.

SL has a high learning curve when you start out. I'd bet a lot of would-be players get frustrated and leave because the user interface and the skills needed to be constructive take so much effort to learn to use. It's not like a lot of on-line games, where the weapons and armor are a simple set of choices and simple to use, and the objectives and working controls are pretty simple.

I do wonder, Ceera, if the influx of people who had played The Sims Online and/or The Sims 2 and could deal with the camera controls had anything to do with it.

It wasn't a big deal to me, moving round, but I suspect that did have to do with the Sims.

Myself it's been sort of polarised. Of people I've met in-world, the biggest complaint for newer users who left was that they didn't like having to spend real money, and for older users, it was either inventory loss, griefing, or content theft. Of people I've met in real life who have tried Second Life, the biggest reason was, "unless you're an artist, it's just a talker".

Apologies for slightly going off at a tangent ......

A couple of months ago I was in some random bar watching the world go by, and I ended up talking to some people nearby - one of which was a girl with a really unusal Avatar name - the sort of name that sticks in your head.

Over the weekend I went to a Live Music Event, completely randomly, different place and so on, and there she was, sat on a wall watching it!

At the time there was about 56,000 people logged in.

It struck me as really wierd that I should bump into this one random person again with all the thousands of people out there.

Therefore I conclude that there are only actually about 40 different Avatars in SL and we are all tricked into thinking that there's thousands of us. It's like a big Conspiracy Theory.

Oh yes, she was reading The Catcher in the Rye too.

Ok .... back on topic.....

I say newbie experience. The other night I created an alt. I was dropped on some Brazilian welcome island.(I am from America and speak only English). I wandered around there for ten minutes since I couldn't seem to tele-port to my main's home. Finally, some kind soul had pity on me and sent me to an English one.

When I arrived there, I was still lost,there were no signs in the drop off area,I had to travel pretty far to find the TP to orientation island(which if I were a true newbie,I would have never found). When I got there,all I heard was people role playing sex games. Some guy dressed in a scary grim reaper av,was helpful...but scary. Finally managed to find the help island TP,went there. The place was less than helpful....

I remember it was much more organized back in August when I first came. If I had that experience the first time,I probably would have just given up.

Well I’ve heard the retention rate for new users is 15%. I’m sure you can point at any number of reasons for that but the biggest I believe is people log on for the first time and SL simply is not what they expected, or what they’re interested in.
But we are losing long time members too. There was a drop in Premium members since the June 07 high, and its been a slow process to replace them. I became a premium member shortly after I joined. I wanted to buy land and had no idea about private sims and the option to rent land without being a premium member. Now I see little benefit in paying the cost of membership and have seriously considered downgrading. There needs to be some major improvements to the Mainland.
Most telling is the fact that new accounts continue to increase but the online average is flat. Instead of the 45 to 55k per day it should be pushing 100k. Maybe SL has finally found its limit.

I think there is a high dropout rate, for many reasons—however, the strongest reasoning, to me, would be not just the learning curve, but also the target audience in general.

Second Life—and all metaverses for that matter—try and target all audiences, but the truth is these kind of applications/games are more geared towards the ‘hardcore.’ Hardcore what? Hardcore gamer, internet user, computer geek, techhead…Although everyone, in some way or another, can appreciate the depth and breadth of Second Life, many are intimidated by the platform as a whole.

Some people have trouble signing up for an account, let alone navigate a three-dimensional virtual environment. And even though I think LL did a pretty darn good job of walking ‘noobs’ through Oi, I still think the learning curve and concept is quite a lot to grasp for someone new to these kinds of platforms.

OK, so what about the people that get in, are savvy with the concept of an AV and VRML…why do they stay, and why do they leave? I think SL, no matter how vast, may bore some people. There isn’t enough action. There’s no goal for them to achieve…at least not on the surface. They may have ADD as it is…they certainly don’t want to ‘search’ for something, and then as far as they see it…stand around and chat with people. Oh boy, that’s fun…a 3d chat room—this is how they see it, not me.

Of courses it’s true that graphic designers and 3d modelers understand immediately the implications of SL. You don’t even have to explain it to them…they are on top of it before you can say user-created content (OK, bad example). Not to mention the added bonus (necessity for some) of a pseudo-working economy…a market place. Done and done.

SL is a niche platform…at least for the ones that stay and fashion a unique identity here. It takes a pretty hardcore gamer, designer, techhead, or chatguru to stay for more than a few hours. And if you can get past the urge to search by popularity, and realize the best content and environments require your own sleuthing, the gravitational pull of SL may never let you go.

Jumping back to the early posts in this thread, I've no idea what the dropout rate is, but I do think it's very high. My reason for thinking it is that even after only a few months of being in SL, it was unusual for me to see people who were older than me. The continually increasing numbers have no bearing on the dropout rate.

There must be many reasons why people drop out - so many that a poll in unrealistic. If I'd dropped out along the way, it would have been for one of two reasons, although the last straw would likely have been at a time when they coincided. They are boredom with SL, and system instability.

I'm sure some people sign up because their friends tell them it's truly amazing and then when they get in they just think "what the fuck!" and leave. I've noticed a RL friend drop out due to this LOL

SL only has a high learning curve for people looking to create anything.

I wonder if it might be better to have a streamlined viewer without all the Prim editing tools built in to reduce the "perceived" high learning curve.

Plus it would stop people from wrecking their houses so much.