SL: what it is doing right, what needs to be improved.

Here's a brutal example of what happens. The following is a simulated IM and no innocent noobs were harmed to produce it...


New player: Hi

Des: Hi!

*several minutes pass*

New player: I like ur area!

Des: Thank you! I'm honoured

New player: Can u tell me ur rates pls I want land

Des: of course! here's a notecard with rates! we have a waiting list, I'll add you if you like!

*gives notecard*

*several minutes pass*

New player: I don't understand

Des: how can I help?

New player: what are prims


So there's a totally legitimate person asking totally legitimate questions.

This person simply wants a bit of land, and to know costs. At this point he could care less about waiting lists, what prims are, if I have to get a sandwich, or if I'm already in four other conversations. Yet to answer this simple query will take easily ten minutes, in shortest form.

Animom *really* nailed the problem. If casual content creators and land barons can't handle their business well, how might a metaversal megacorp get by? Imagine being the human face at the front desk of such a business, and getting one new IM per second. We need some tools, here, for the metaverse to work beyond 'casual conversation over the backyard fence' level.

IM's are serialised forms of communication, agenda-driven by the asker, not the replier. If in-depth grid knowledge must be deconstructed from 'what are ur rates' then so be it, as far as the asker is concerned.

I'd do FAQ's and notecards, but here's the irony. I have them, I've tried it, and they generally don't get read.

People generally want me to find the information and me to type it, on the spot, and then want me to explain whatever it is they don't understand. Even if it's a factor of 100 slower for me to type it.

Some of this must have to do with people being unfamiliar with finding notecards in their inventory. Although it still happens with people whom I know *must* be advanced users. Some of it may be habit - Google search, Desmond search?

I'm guessing it's a bit of RTFM syndrome - for instance, it's so easy to type to a live concierge staff member rather than dig through a knowledgebase, right?

But I do business on the grid, and it simply doesn't matter 'why' - this effect is a business reality. For the metaverse to take off businesswise, there will have to be a metaversal communication solution to this somehow.

Here's what might be one: I would LOVE an IM queryable, knowledgebase-to-text 'bot' inworld - a sort of "Ask Jeeves" that really had a Jeeves bot standing there to ask in virtual person.

Is such a thing hard to create? Could we do it ourselves, without leaning on the grid gods? An honest question.

If I had my way I would totally scrap IM mode and replace it with an email system.

If you've been in Second Life for over a year then you naturally become known by a large number of people. So instead of spending your time in an immersive 3D virtual world chatting with the people/avatars around you, you spend the entire time staring into a dull gray Instant Message window. What's the fun in that?.

I started to spend so much time in Instant Message mode that I eventually gave up chatting avatar to avatar and started to hide away on my own land with ban lines up. I then decided that I may as well as go build in 3D Studio and chat with people in MSN or AIM. Same thing, right?

I suppose in the old days, IM mode was essential in order for the Lindens to communicate with residents (Basically, it made their job easier). But now that they don't do that sort of thing anymore, I think they should release us from its evil and imposing ways.




To sum up:

IM mode=Crap!

I think this sums up the problem with IM mode perfectly. It's only because you're so available that the person is messaging you with trivial questions. It's much easier for them to throw out a single message and hope for immediate feedback than it is to RTFM. Linden Lab have realized this and this explains why they've had to change their customer support and also drop Live Help.

Instant message mode tends to make people expect an instant answer. We all do it - we send a message to a friend and then sit staring at the window waiting for the "Mr Fathead is typing...."

We're all guilty of expecting that instant response.


I've said this one before - Perhaps we need to change the name of Instant Message mode to "Delayed Message" mode.

It has already been done, but not in a way that I'd expect you'd find useful. Someone had created something called "A.L.I.C.E." which listened for questions, sent them to an off-grid ELIZA-like server and llSay()ed the response. It was slow and hampered by the blip-speak of chat. Given the LSL primitives, I don't think you can do much better than this.

My diatribe on e-mail above made me think more about communication and its central - but poorly executed - role in SL. I started thinking about what the iPhone capabilities are. E-mail? yep, Browser? yep, Text messaging? I imagine so, etc. Yes, it was designed as a communications device but, But, *BUT* the bloody thing runs on a 0.6GhZ ARM processor with 128MB of RAM.

If I may dare to speak for you, when you said "IM queryable" you really meant something more like "in game facility that makes finding information as easy as a search website". If SL had a browser in-game you wouldn't even have to ask your question.

I suggested this to Robin Linden once. I think she thought I was crazy.

I even wrote a Q&A system myself.

http://desktopmates.com/AI/answerpad.html

I've not touched the thing in years. But it's open source and anybody is welcome to teach it all about SL and sex balls.

I find it distressing how, if you wait long enough, the gray textures are occasionally replaced with a confusing mishmosh of brick and wood and bark and other such environmental textures.

Lag is the single biggest issue. It impacts every aspect of SL, and is in a horrible state.

What kind of lag? Is lag caused by on the user's end- i.e. is the lag caused by textures and other content not taking into account average broadband speed? Is it lag caused by by a LL "bottleneck", i.e. LL not being able to provide enough bandwidth for average broadband connections to maximize speed? Is it renderlag caused by either not having a sufficient system to handle SL or from content that is too demanding? Script lag? Physics lag? Inventory and communications (teleport and update) lag? This is an example of the problem in communication between LL and its customers, and the problem goes both ways. On one hand, customers want SL to run smoothly nomatter what. On the other hand, LL and content creators desire maximal creative potential. Masking both of these issues are vague ideas about what the source of the problem is, and how it can be corrected. LL, besides being a company, is a group of human beings with abilities and flaws. In order for SL to move forward as quickly as possible not only do the developers have to be on the ball, but the users have to be precise and specific in their language about what they want changed.

Many problems users have wouldnt need us to call customer support if we could deal with the situation ourselves. This would free them up for when they are actually needed.

Examples:
1. Ability to return objects partially hanging over our land. At the moment their center has to be over our land.
2. Personal abilility to "mute" seeing the objects of another
3. A land setting to "mute" seeing objects of another so anyone on your land wont see the ugly billboards next door, so making your shop a much nicer place for your customers

Two months ago I would've suggested that you wait for LL to release the sim code and then you'll be able to host your own sim. But it's looking like this isn't going to happen because LL is making far too much cash from hosting and overcharging for sims.

So I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree with you and say that the features you've suggested are definitely needed. But the features are unlikely to happen because seeing your neighbors crap is what encourages you to go and buy a sim from LL.


God, I'm so cynical.

That puts an unprecedented onus on the customer. I'll use the old Hackneyed Automobile Analogy to show why.

Suppose I take my car to a mechanic and say "when I try to take this to highway speeds, it only goes 50km/h and the windows tend to fall off". If the mechanic were to say "you have to pick speed or window adhesion for me to work on" or "can you tell me why it doesn't go fast, is it the fuel injection or the exhaust system that is in error or is it the fuel pump isn't supplying enough?" you would rightly laugh. The mechanic is the expert and is expected to understand diagnosis and repair; you aren't in the same position.

Here's a some less abstract concepts. LL knows that the physics lag is a huge problem. This is why they've been saying that they need to update to Havok 2 since 2004, but they haven't found the time for it. They know that the LSL VM is slow and flaky, thus their move toward replacement with Mono which has no sign of ever seeing release.

Customers (with no access to the server source) have reasonably speculated that asset errors are likely caused by the sim servers being written under the assumption that database will never return an error indication thus edit snap-back and inventory loss. We don't know the true cause of this because we can't. Regardless, all evidence available supports this hypothesis. LL - or at least their blog - knows that this is a huge problem. But they are the ostensible experts, we aren't. Yes, LL is composed of humans, but they are humans with a privilege we haven't; it is simply not the customers' failure to be specific that is the issue.

It's the difference between saying "hey, there's problems with the world and here's my take on them" vs saying "they don't care and are laughing at us."

Animom did a great job of summing up hir view of the world without sounding like a spoiled child. Others have done less well.

I should probably just stay away from the forums on Wednesday..

everything works fine for me, you must be doing it wrong...

Everything works fine for you, huh? So I must be doing it wrong then?

Then you must be very special or maybe you haven't been reading the thousands of complains filed in forums across sl about everything that has been happening with tp's, crashes and many other things going wrong in sl.
Not only reading but going thru' all the messed up things that constantly plague this game on a daily basis or maybe, you only visit these forums and not sl. That could be a reason too,

Yeah, everything works fine already, same as you're way of thinking, right? try telling this to all who get frustrated on a daily basis over the way the game is acting up.

im in world for 4 + hours every day for the past 6 months,

sure every now and then the client crashes and i just relog

other then that

everything works perfect, yes i read these 1000's of complaints and i dont understand them

you say 'nothing works at all'


if that were true why would you even log on again?!?

Second Life works Perfect for ME cuz I AM PERFECT i guess....

and you make perfect poops.

For the landmark thingy, I would love to see that as a seperate window or function. Having it in the inventory is so 1990s.

What LL and the users of SL most need to do is to get together and decide which direction SL needs to move in.

At the moment, LL are repeating their marketing mantra, that SL is "a platform for building virtual worlds". Unfortunately, a number of big companies just arrived in SL, used the platform to build virtual worlds... and watched them sink. Would those virtual worlds have done better if they were viewable in a web browser via a link from the companies' own servers? Very probably so, yes.

Yes, SL can be used as a development platform, but it isn't as simple as developing "a virtual world". You can't just develop ANY virtual world in SL and have it turn out meaningful to have used SL (as opposed to VRML on Multiverse or AW or anything else). Also, most of the actual users in SL aren't developers - it used to be that 75% weren't, but now the percentage is probably even higher.

With the uncontrolled "do what you will" freedom, SL has kind of bounced around trying to find what will appeal to those non-developer users. No matter what the actual structure of SL is, SL will be seen and evaluated by many visiting users as a single continuous experience that we all work together to provide, and we need to think about what experience we're going to provide and how it can be made more appealing without losing the aspects of SL that many people enjoy and profit from.

SL has found a few things that people like in the experience. Unfortunately, amongst those things were sex and gambling. LL have already put their hands on the reins by banning gambling, but I think it's time for them and us together to decide which way the horse ought to be going, instead of just telling it that it's going the wrong way all the time and watching it spin around confused.

/me puts on cat's ears in honor of an excellent post from Yumi.

/me takes them off as they suddenly made her want to lie around all day.....

Still, nicely stated.

Off topic... but: I've found where the Grid Monkeys have gone to!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6959209.stm

I agree with Yumi. The Town Halls need to come back in force. What'd I'd like to see is a series of structured Town Hall meetings, designed to discuss SL's future. This would be the ideal but I doubt it would happen because there's always going to be 20 losers who want to know why X isn't fixed, who would disrupt the meetings with their own agendas.

Some of us want to go left while others want to go right.

We can't go left and right at the same time!!

I don't think LL is directionless. They're heading the way that they feel will make Second Life the most "successful". They're obviously going to take a wrong turn some days.

Maybe a new horse will come along soon. A big white one that can run faster than the wind!! Shadowfax World!!. YAY!!!





No!

The thing is, the freedom aspect is one of the core aspects of SL, and one of the core aspects of LL's philosophy regarding SL. LL didn't "rein in gambling" to pacify those people in world who didn't like its proliferation -- LL did so because of a federal statute. It seems misguided to me to think that the user community can all get together and sing kumbaya and agree upon restricted freedom to please some members of the community at the expense of the wishes of others. Not only would that be impossible, it would also be a very bad thing for SL because it would take away one of the central aspects of the experience for many users: freedom to to basically anything, with only a very few limited exceptions. Broadening the exceptions seems very much the wrong way to be going, in my view.

The high minded concepts that SL was founded on are all well and good, but the reality is still grounded in the real world.And real world issues are going to permeate SL, whether we want them to or not. The utopia envisioned for SL is not practical given human nature, or even really that desirable in my opinion. Uncle phil may have envisioned one thing for SL, but it has evolved into something else. it is now a business venture for LL. And they will make decisions based upon what they see as protecting it, from a business and or legal standpoint. We may night agree, but I'd imaging that if one of them were to take the time to tell us the truth they would say that a SL that is a bit more restrictive than originally conceptualized is better than none at all.

Sounds like an SL version of flipping the bird... "telling the ruth"

I agree with you Brenda; I'm sure that SL was designed as a place for people to romp and frolic, and it was, at first. But now it's big business, LL has a bottom line and mouths to feed. It's in LL's best interest to get stuff running smoothly, and to add new functionality. For now, it's growing pains.

Well... we have to start from very first principles. People like to say that SL gives you complete freedom to do whatever you like, but the truth is that it doesn't. Or rather, it does, but only in an oblique sense - you can create, and make your avatar be, whatever you like, but nobody is going to find an engaging solitary experience in SL. You can be a king or queen and build a castle and.. sit in it... or you can be a pixie and.. fly back and forth between flowers.. but to have any kind of engaging experience you're going to want it to be social, for other people to be involved.

And when that happens, "freedom" becomes very, very difficult. Because of the principle of freedom, we can't force anyone to participate in your experience. But the effect of that is that you lose _your_ freedom to have any experience other than one that others will participate in. Now you might say that's a good thing - we don't want people to be free to try to play out anti-social experiences. If they want to do that, they can go and do it with NPCs in Grand Theft or some other single player game. Other online "games", like WoW, have a "turn taking" system for this - you get defeated by the lord today so that you can level up and become the lord tomorrow - but adding that to Second Life would also be anathema to the idea of freedom anywhere and any time, so that's not any either solution.

But we have to accept that in deciding on that, we are not preserving our absolute freedom. We are choosing to give up one freedom instead of another. We're keeping the freedom to not be forced to obey the king - but we're giving up the freedom to be king or queen ourselves, ever. A fair enough tradeoff. But still a tradeoff, and _not_ absolute freedom. Many new folks, when they hear about SL, think they're going to have absolute freedom and quit when they encounter that tradeoff. Again, fair enough, SL isn't for those people. But then, who is it for? Or moreover, who is it _ideal_ for?

The problem is that classically the main reason for having an experience in a virtual world instead of RL is that the experience is antisocial. Without that, they're left with very few experiences left that can actually be better in SL than in RL. Why do you think sex is/was so popular in SL? It's because it's a social experience (ie, both participants gain, so it is possible for it to take place in SL) but at the same time is something that people can't, or don't want to, do in real life (or at least not to that extent). The same applies to socialising in costume - the idea of being something other than you are and socialising - but for a lot of people this falls apart quite quickly, because in many cases the alternate life has no depth and so they fall back to talking about real life just to have something to talk about; and quickly realise that the beautiful cyberpunk avatar they paid for doesn't mean anything when they're just chatting about how their real-life children are doing at school, because what does their cyberpunk have to talk about that would interest the other person? Even dedicated roleplaying areas tend of have exactly that problem. Again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it wipes out SL's gain compared to just using a plain ol' chatroom.

And this is what we need. SL is a place for creativity, well, this is what we need to create: social experiences which SL can do better than RL. SL already does have many, but we need more (more, more, more!!) and we need to help people get involved in them as easily as possible. We need to think about scaling, too, so that we don't have the problem of someone getting socially left out simply because of bad circumstances - because remember, that social involvement is going to be the appeal of SL for them, and if they miss their chance, all they'll know is that SL isn't fun for them and they may not stay around to wait for another.