Welcome To Second Life !!!!!!!!!

When I joined SL last year, my first impression was how friendly and helpful everyone was. The "introduction centre" was full of "newbies" plus Newbie Helpers and Mentors. Apart from learning how to fly, walk, edit appearances and how to avoid wearing a box, we were given various Landmarks to free places, advice regarding interesting and fun places to visit, information about various classes for building, scripting etc.

In July of this year, I created a second avatar. This time, my time at the introduction centre was very brief as I tp'd straight away to the places I already knew. Recently I decided it would be interesting and useful to join a Newbie Helper Group and offer assistance and advice to any newbie who wanted or needed it. I returned to the "start" location and was shocked to say the least.

The location was crowded with people, many who were well over a year old. There were dragons, slave master complete with kneeling slave, child avatars, furries, one person with a "tag" reading "F*** Me Im Famous". Everyone was talking in open chat, bumping into each other and some were just being downright nuisances. At the edge of this crowd was a girl who had only just arrived in SL. She was obviously quite bewildered and overwhelmed by everything so I went over to her in an attempt to welcome her to SL and offer assistance. She told me she never expected SL to be like this and, while trying to persuade her what a fun, beautiful and interesting "world" it was, I was approached by a very weird looking naked fat pink avatar who, in open chat, said "Hiya Rayanna, wanna f***". At this point the "newbie" girl just said "Im sorry, this is not for me" and promptly quit !!! I wonder how many more newbies have had the same or similar experience ?

I am not criticising or judging anyone for choosing to be be a slave, sub, dom, animal avatar or those who want to cyber anything which moves (after all, this is SL and we can be and do whatever we choose) but I do think there should be a place designed specifically for the newly arrived, helpers and mentors. Their first impression of SL should be a good one, not one of complete mayhem and chaos.

We are all real people behind the avatars and we all have our own reasons for joining SL. Yes, some may join because they want to experience the "darker side of SL" and that is fine, it is their choice. But, some may join because they are lonely, housebound, disabled or profoundly shy in real life. Perhaps all they want is to make friends, meet new people or, in the case of someone who is disabled, do something amazing ....... such as walk and dance.

Do you feel there should be a specific place for those who have newly arrived, or do you think there is nothing wrong with the current location(s) ? I would be very interested to hear your comments and opinion.

Maybe they should fix it so that after you tp out of the welcome areas, you can't come back unless you are wearing some sort of mentor/helper tag.

That's how it works already (assuming you actually mean Help Island and not a welcome area like Ahern which was never terribly newbie-friendly ) .

Rayanna's main and alt would have ended up on OI and HI (now only HI) and if I had to guess she paid to a visit to Orientation/Help Island *Public* which is really just a free-for-all.

What *is* the default path of the newly-rezzed now? I know LL is trying to improve the new resident experience--especially that first hour or so--and that getting rid of the OIs was supposed to be an improvement. But what happens now? Is there a plan for further changes, already in the works? Does a new resident ever end up at one of the old Welcome Areas (such as Ahern) by default, or are they directed to Search for some place of interest before leaving HI?

(Just not that eager to make a fresh alt to test it out myself.)

I'll be the first to agree that the OP's description of the the environment at some of the public Welcome Areas is not an isolated occurrence. That's one reason why new residents are now routed directly to a private Help Island when they first log in, and why there's a concerted effort to have a Mentor there to assist and advise new folks before they move on to the chaos of the Mainland.

The private Help Islands are only open to new residents, Second Life Mentors, and Lindens. There isn't a guarantee that a Mentor will be present on every HI to assist and answer questions, but we try.

I'm standing on one of them (Help Island 223) as I write this, helping folks, and new residents are dropping in constantly as they log in for the first time. The Help Islands (HIs) have been tuned a bit to have more relevant information for new folks, and an extended selection of freebies is available (many more than previous).

The 'way to the world' from there is achieved by clicking one of several 'Enter Second Life' billboards - these will give the new resident a landmark to various places on the main grid. The 'next destination' is typically one of the Welcome Areas (Hanja, Morris, etc). Opinions vary on whether those are suitable for a new resident's first encounter with the Mainland, of course (my personal preference would be to send them to either NCI or the Shelter).

The situation is far from perfect. But rest assured that there is a renewed focus on LL's part on improving what they call the New User Experience (NUE).

I ended up in a newbie area a few times when my regular login sim wasn't available and I found the same situation as the OP.
No wonder SL seems to be attracting more bots than new residents.

I find it sad that the people who choose to make a spectacle of themselves in these newbie places have nothing more interesting to do in SL. Do they think they're impressing anyone? I realize that some people have some urgent need to show off their avatars and perhaps they think that newbies are a good audience.
But it's just downright rude to add confusion to an already confusing moment in someone's Second Life. Truly, it's a form of griefing.

I seriously wonder why there are still Welcome Areas. In the far past they were Welcome Areas, correction, Welcome Area. They have degraded over the years to be Anti-Welcome and a blight on SL.

I still work with new rezzies but for NCI. This reminds me of what the old Welcome Area was, not the stain on SL that they have become.

I went through it this week. The sign up page needs to be refreshed. I tried Scion portal first, but that web site was gone. On the second try I used the Linden Lab route. The menus for choosing a name have changed since the last time I did this, the check for duplicate names is more automated with Javascript. The last name menus are still giving partial lists, but the coveted Plutonian showed with a refresh.

The new avatar selections are simple to choose from the web site, but from inventory nothing showed as worn. That could be a bug in the RC, I was already in Help Island before I noticed that. This could be another RC bug, but the new HTML tutorial looked broken. There was no resize handle for the browser window that was too small, I had to scroll around to read the help pages and press the buttons. I hope that this doesn't happen to new resis on the release version.

Newly rezzed at Help Island, I turned my avatar to look around. The first closest object I saw was a sign that offered to take me away from there out to Second Life. The only destination offered was Waterhead, so that is where I went. Nobody harassed me or even said hello at the telehub pads, or even said a peep when I walked out to where the red couches are. Maybe the experience would be different if I were brand new and starry eyed, and engaged the indigenous circus freaks.

I thought the Welcome Areas were all PG. I've noticed that there are always a lot of ARs happening in the Welcome Areas when you look on the SL AR incident page. Nudity, inappropriate name and profile comes to mind as frequent offenses.

Thanks for the report. The most disturbing part was the fact that folks still end up at the Welcome Areas. I took a short tour to Waterhead and Ahern earlier, just to see what it's like these days, and indeed it's not a pleasant experience at all. Maybe LL plans to just AR to oblivion everybody there who's less than welcoming, but if that's the plan there's a lot of work remaining. If those sites are to be the dropping-off points for new residents, they really don't need to be home to voice and text obscenities and general hooliganism. They're fairly uninspiring spots anyway, so it's not obvious what additional purpose is intended for them beyond a safe haven and jumping-off place for other realms.

Guess I'm just lucky or something.


I skipped the whole 'pick a community' thing, and popped in at some orientation place.

Figured out how to use search, and ended up at NCI. It was smooth sailing from there.

This post spurred me to create an account just to go through OI and see where i would be dropped on the mainland.

Hastily I created Lost Burner. Logged in for the first time and(to my surprise) it dropped me in the entrance to the Burning Life sims(deep something). No OI, help island, or standard drop point.

It did give me a very simple "how to move and interact" HUD of sorts.

On a plus side, I now have an account with its "home" at the burn entrance. But I didn't get to do the OI tour I had planned...

I remember a while back that LL wanted to use an A/B testing for orientation, perhaps i just experienced a B.

I'd call that either a 'C' or a bug . But only LL would know for sure .

I made a new alt recently and at the help island I clicked on the big sign that gives out landmarks to the mainland. It gave out links to various welcome areas and telehubs. Braun, Bear, Korea, Idu, Ahern, Waterhead, Ambat, Hyles, etc... So people do get sent to various locations from the help island and quite a few of them are not populated by strange people. I think the current setup is adequate. The Help island should be the place where they get help from mentors and helpful people and after that... you gotta start somewhere. I think a lot of people end up hanging around WAs is because that's where they started too and they haven't changed their home locations and any kind of region glitch or ban or getting killed sends you back home.

I would rather end up in a welcome area than start in the middle of nowhere on the mainland with no one around.

Qie, have you read the transcript at http://vteamblog.com/2008/09/26/monthly-mentor-meeting-transcript-92608-10am/#more-317

(It would so nice if they'd just post the news in the blog in a coherent manner instead of using goofy inworld meetings and posting chaotic chat logs).

We will at least have an new acronym to use, NUE, and I think a newly formed Greeter group that has access to the new users.

It sounds kinda like restoring the OIs along with adding more requirements to be a Greeter than an Mentor. However I find it kind of hard to make sense of it in the chat transcript format.

I'm disappointed; I though when I opened this thread that someone might welcome me to Second Life.

Another part I didn't care for, they took away the choice of starting locations at that help island. About two months ago, they offered a list instead of one spot. They are still experimenting, so maybe it's part of their AB tests.

More changes are coming. The HIs will get more work, and there is a mentor change on the way, Greeters redux, with new hurdles to qualify. There still needs to be a better way to channel them to the right places at the right time, and it won't go anywhere unless the right Lindens get the resources to follow through and make it work. The WA problem is hard, new resis have to have somewhere to call home after they get through the preliminaries.

The welcome centers serve a purpose, even if they aren't very welcoming anymore. That rude behavior you witnessed? There are people who enjoy that, apparently, because they spend time there doing it. As much as I don't like the conversation there, I'll say this: those are real, live people. It's not very friendly, but it is social. And sometimes you can even find real conversation there. I often catch young Brits there in voice chat. Not my crowd, but they've found a place to chat. Good for them.

I made new alt this week.
I end up in Help Island and it was home for few days.
Didn't see anyone there and it was very laggy, I would have been very confused if I hadn't been here before.

I occasionally go along to Waterhead because it's a nice build and it's next to Linden Village. But among the newbies and normal people there is usually a collection of wierdos, some of whom are entertaining but others are decidedly annoying or even creepy. It's a sort of free freak show - makes me so glad I'm normal.

And what's it with all these people who have hostile, defensive profiles like "I don't do friendship and I hate profile stalkers f**k off" or similar? Profiles are there to be read - anyone who doesn't want to reveal anything about their SL or RL should leave theirs blank.

Thanks, Suezanne! I didn't even know that vteamblog existed. And thanks, Archimedes, for reminding me about the A/B testing, which I'd totally spaced-off, and which is also mentioned in that vteamblog transcript.

Yeah, I don't mean to suggest that they shouldn't have a place to congregate, but I do think that wherever newbies "land" in-world shouldn't be total social chaos. When they want that experience, they should have the option of getting it, but it shouldn't be thrust upon them in their first hour in-world.