Linden Lab CEO

Those guys in The Full Monty did pretty good for themselves. Why can't I?

I meant a RL business venture, but since the subject is on the table, I've been thinking about another SL business as well. I might actually do this one. I told Oryx about it and she laughed so hard her SL Viewer crashed, so it must be good.

Does SL have talking polar bears?

I think that's what I'd like to see the new CEO guy do, is bring in talking polar bears.

This system is so borked I don't think it's salveagable, so I'd at least like to have talking polar bears.

Then when you buy a 6,000 sex bed cause your online BF is coming for a visit, and you take it out of inventory and - POOF! - it vanishes in a cloud of pixels, along with your 6,000 linden...

Then at least you could still go talk to a polar bear.

I hope he reads this, the new ceo guy I mean.

Then maybe we'll get talking polar bears.

Thank you.

Love Poddy

Not me! He may take our jokes to heart and baninate us.

If he bans every PAYING member who's fed up with all the problems, I hope he turns the lights out, powers down the servers and shuts off the AC when he leaves the building for the last time.

No point on wasting resources on an empty bulding.

Love Poddy

What ever the heck you are going to be doing IRL Trout, I wish you the best. Running your own business can be very rewarding but also a pain in the ass.

From a marketing point of view I expect the problem is not just the newbie experience, but the entire experience, end-to-end.

Yes, we need to avoid the problems of people quitting on Orientation Island, but we need just as badly to avoid the problems of people quitting because there's nothing to do but chat and they can do that on Yahoo. (They might be wrong, but that means they're getting the wrong message, which is definitely a marketing issue.)

We need to deal with issues like - well, the example that I wrote about earlier this week and the interaction I had - someone who spends US$ on a character costume, like the cheerleader costumes I wrote about, and then gets told it's just for having sex in.

We need to get a final decision, once and for all, as to whether or not the corporatized Second Life - created either by real life corporations or just by the Pareto effect - is actually viable in the long term.

You should check out the Where in the world is Magellan Linden thread

One of the most frustrating things about Second Life for many new users, is that it's not really a game.. It looks like a game (MMORPG) it smells like a game.. but when you get in here, you can't "attack" anyone, or anything.

Many of the people who are coming to second life, are coming from Star Wars, Wow, etc.. Many of them are looking for guild, powers, weapons, and all the usual stuff that comes with "MMORPG's".. and then they're thrust into "the world's biggest chatroom"...

more than half of the SL economy is based on one of three things: The aquisition of wealth, meta gaming, and Chat enhancements.

Clothes, houses, and to a large degree cars, all exist to "pretty up" the chatroom. From sex beds and sex systems like Xcite, there are tools to help you "make sex chat". From prim genitalia, to fetishwear, it's all really just "set dressing" for the scene.

Cars are a form of metagaming, in terms of racing cars. At the same time, slingo, tringo, xghyugehdiuygedingo, casinos, etc were all metagames (or minigames) designed to provide the user with "entertainment". Unfortunately, orbiters, lolcubes and simnukes ALSO serve as a form of metagaming.

The rest, is about furtherance of "wealth" from banks (now banned mostly) to stock exchanges, from tools for selling items to "business in a box".. is all focussed on the desire of people to "level up" in this game.

On a lot of levels, a lot of the social problems in SL can be traced back to the fact that we have no enemies, no points, etc. So we revert back to IRC groupthink, and Drama and "Channel Takeover Attempts" become the daily grind. The Goreans become big in such a world, (and groups like them) because they offer a richly textured RPG with clearly defined roles and objectives.

While I personally loathe "Gor" for it's content, I must applaud the movement for surviiving as an institution, despite the ususal *D*rama that accompanies "Chatroom politics". Furries, LONG the denizens of the MUD/MUSH universe, have more to gain in SL than most, because they can truly VISUALISE their characters for themselves and others, and thanks to the retailers of modular furry parts, they can do their characters up without the historic need for help from an artist-for-hire. This is why Gor, and Fur and to a large extent, "the BDSM Crowd" are so entrenched in SL.. because we were on the internet LONG BEFORE housewives in Minnesota. (and may have been largely responsible FOR the initial success OF the internet, through IRC and Usenet).

Does that mean that SL is meaningless? hardly. Chat enhancement is big business. People LOVE SL.. even the housewives in minnesota. And each person who joins SL is looking for something that basically falls into one of those three big areas, and many of them are willing to spend some real dollars, for a little bit of fantasy.

But SL's appeal to gamers, is going to be limited, and that's unfortunate, because gamers are ususally the ones with the videocards that can handle SL, and money to spare. Engaging THEM in SL... I think, would be a highly successful move for this company.

How?

Well getting vehicles to cross sims might be one step, also a combat orientated viewer perhaps, reducing lag by somehow limiting the texture base so we aren't downloading the same brickwall out of a server with 5000 brickwalls, of which half of them look identical to the naked eye

I think you're missing out a reasonably important group. That group is, the people who would not enjoy a MMORPG (they don't want to walk around killing monsters) but who want an experience that requires the kind of social engineering that the MMORPG model accomplishes. The main reason why this group is so hard to identify, is because many of them don't realize that's the case.

The monster hunting model on MMORPGs is just part of the social engineering necessary to keep things there - to ensure that every person can potentially matter, to ensure that a person's own choice of role is respected, to ensure that there is always hope for more. Arguably it's far more the lack of these things in RL that people are "escaping" from than any experience that can be defined in sensory terms.

I took a look at SL to take a break from real MMORPG life. Been playing online games for almost 10 years.

I like the fact that this is basically a huge sand box - I can dress my avatar any way I want, shape that avatar any way I want, and basically just hang out with nothing to do.

I can explore without having the required levels, and I haven't been killed here - not even once !!

There is some achievement - at least for a freeloader like myself. Finding a decent camp spot to grab my little dribble of Lindens.

Camping has always been something done in the games Ive played - be it for a specific piece of armor - or just for spending money.

As to this Marcus Voom guy - yeah I've seen him. He nicked the 2L/20min camp chair I was heading for this morning - and I had to settle for the 2L/25min chair.

sigh...

The monster hunting, fighting group supports the other group by it's push for advancement, investing money inworld to do so, we don't need to bulldoze all the malls, clubs and campingspots, to make room for Halo & WoW type zones (hmm then again maybe we should ), there's plenty of room for all.

Seamless sim crossing might be a good start, I've never fallen through the floor in any other game since Duke Nukem in the 90's

Step one is the same step one for increasing the overall appeal of Second Life. Stabilizing and increasing the efficiency of the performance of the Grid. I used to complain about lag in MMORPG's I played until I tried Second Life. I had never encountered anything as laggy as Second Life and have never encountered anything as laggy since.

I think though that this is the heart of the wrong belief people seem to have - that we can find all the monster hunters, and put them over *here*, and then we can find all the chat enhancement users and put them over *there*, and anyone in the middle might just want to hunt monsters sometimes and chat other times so they're not really in the middle, they're just wandering back and forth..

But there IS a group of people in the middle, even if they don't know they are. They are the people who maybe even spend a lot of time making their avatars into superheroes or pixies or soldiers or models or princesses or wolves or children or ... and then find that it doesn't matter because they just get to chat, just the same. It's not a different life or world, it's just a 24/7 fancy dress party, and because it's 24/7 the dress isn't even "fancy" any more. Grinding is a mechanism MMOs use to prevent this kind of thing from happening.

Perhaps SWG is a better example of a game that used it for social interaction than WoW but the basis is the same. If you play a wizard in WoW or a dancer in SWG then people will need you to cast spells or dance for them because the game is designed that way. They can become wizards or dancers themselves too of course but they will have to grind, so there is a reason for them to deal with you instead because you are ready right now. On SL those are missing. Anyone can do anything so nobody has any particular value (other than content creation, but people can't 'work their way up' to that). When unique people are needed, alternate - and usually RL-based - selection methods have to be used because otherwise it's too easy for people to switch (the classic IBM Ballet example applies here)

I am not saying that SL should have grinding added. What's needed is something new. But it should have become clear that the idea of absolute freedom to do anything on demand, while it might seem laudable, actually utterly erases the ability to do many of these things in SL or for them to mean anything in the actual society, and I'm sure that puts off quite a lot of potential users. On a further note for SL to go purely into the chat enhancement market for consumers is a dangerous move because it risks bumping into other systems, like IMVU, which have architectures better designed for it (eg, on IMVU you don't have to pay more no matter how big your house is, because it's just a backdrop for chat, if SL won't enable people to use their houses as more than a backdrop for chat then it'll be offering much worse value relatively..) and because the market itself is unstable. There seems to be some tendancy for people to believe that only the "uncool" people use chat enhancers, because the "cool" people do not need to enhance, so they use regular RL social networking sites.

SL currently works pretty well for the everyone, except gamers, it's near impossible for gamers to use as a FPS platform, for RPG it sort of works to a degree, Havok 4 will help when it's bedded in and maybe mono too. Get more people gaming here and more people buy guns, clothes, vehicles, etc as most gamers want to play not create.