SL, A Sleeping Beauty and Blue Mars

pah.
mafia wars.

been there, done that, lost interest after a few weeks.
my 3rd rezday was last month.

mafia wars is something to fill 5 minutes when you're slacking at work or the asset server barfs on you.

can i have your stuff?


...the blue mars "beta signup" thingie doesn't even have an autoresponder, and the web form inserts random dots in the email adress... or maybe thats why i didnt hear back from them.

even if i migrate i would maintain a sl presence. but i would not be investing any more $ into it.

Blue Mars doesn't appear to be the same kind of product as SL, at all. Blue Mars will undoubtedly suck a lot of people out of IMVU and There.com and ActiveWorlds, because they have the same two-tier community and external building and restricted scripting.

while some feel the bm model appears restrictive, i see it as bringing needed order to the grid.

Fair enough. If you're looking for a different kind of product than Second Life, and you didn't like There or ActiveWorlds, Blue Mars might be right down your alley.

Have you tried There or ActiveWorlds, by the way?

I'm real unhappy with Linden Lab, everyone knows that. I'd love to see a real competitor show up on the scene. So far, none have.

A real competitor would have to have:

1. Good customer service and communication
2. Low entry and low carrying cost
3. Stable rule set and consistent enforcement
4. Allow adult content (HOW they allow and regulate it is debatable. All over, a designated area, whatever.)
5. A working economy. Ability to both buy and sell the game currency
6. User content creation (either in world or with external tools)
7. Intellectual property protections
8. A stable and reliable platform. Service that's predictable

Anything else...shadows, framerate, bandwidth, voice, megaprims, you name it...are bells and whistles. Nice to have, but not a requirement.

So far, LL has 4,5,6,and part of 7. So there is room out there for improvement. I don't see Blue Mars as being it.

i was on -there- but its not 'grown up enough', and didnt have the hook that sl has.

I don't think they are either. My biggest concern is it doesn't seem like it will be very consistant. Buying a hat, and not being able to wear it in another city, for example. That would bother me.

Bring on the competition. A true competitor (which does not exist at this time, however promising anybody may view any grid of their choice) can only make SL better or cause SL to die. If it does turn out to be an SL killer then that's a good thing too as no competition can kill SL unless it's time for SL to go away.

there.com is neither here nor there.

too graphic for a messenger, not graphic enough for a virtual world.

Yep, and I don't expect to see anything like the variety of "hats" being available. There isn't likely to be any horsing around in Blue Mars...

I think a lot of it is seasonal. Second Life is ALWAYS slow in the summer; in-world hours drop, land prices sag, store sales fall. When the weather is nice and people go on vacation, they just don't spend as much time in front of their computers. The seasonal trend was clear in the detailed data spreadsheets that LL used to release; the only exception was 2006, when the exponential growth that SL was experiencing masked the season effects.

If the pace fails to pick up again in September it will be time to worry. For now, get out your copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide and let the large friendly letters (DON'T PANIC) comfort you.

I suspect that there won't really be a competitor to SL. To get to where it is now, SL had to evolve. This was a painful process for LL and for the people involved. No new platform would be able to go through the same process, because it wouldn't be able to compete with the evolved SL. But if a new platform tries to start from the point SL has evolved into, it will also fail because the process of evolution was necessary. A _lot_ of the well-established content in SL was built before the current environment evolved, and even more was inspired by content of that type.

For example, SL has sculpties now. So a new platform with full 3D modelling would work fine, wouldn't it? No, it wouldn't - because without having that period with only prims, people haven't been able to start from the basics and learn their way up.

There is one note, though, which is the hardware requirements issue. SL's hardware requirements are still disproportionately high for what it does, and they're amplified by the fact that the SL society apparently expects people to be prepared to hang around online for long periods while they're not doing much. All that time, even if you're not doing much, the SL engine is still running and your PC and in particular your cooling system are slowly wearing and tearing away. (Heaven forbid that you edit scripts in the SL built-in editor.. even if it's maximised, the 3D engine carries on running! Why!?) So lower hardware requirements or higher intensity could help a competitor on those terms.

Blue mars doesn't have content creation. Therefore not worth migrating to.

I don't think it's the summer slow down this time.
In the story of sleeping beauty a wicked fairy puts a spell on the Princess that she would prick her finger on a spindle and die but a good fairy cast another spell so that she would only fall asleep and could be awakened by the kiss of a Prince that felt true love.

There are several spells working upon our poor Princess sending her to sleep :

1. Increasing HS prices causing a stalling of the land market which will last until grandfather prices are abolished.

2. Traffic bots falsely boosting the popularity and visibility of mediocre creators and merchants. All we're going to get is more mediocrity. This is so bad for SL

3. Copybot used to terrorise and menace creators and the economy

4. SL sims are too small and too expensive to contain the grandeur and beauty that virtual worlds should portray.

5. No big prims yet, no big sims yet

6. Sim border crossings - yuck !! they hurt the immersion, they hurt the dream

7. No mesh import - this is a real biggie. Still can't believe SL doesn't have it

8. Ageing avatar mesh

9. Almost no promotional activity on LL part to draw in users from the main stream

10. Anonymous creator accounts reeking havoc on the economy - product dumping, dollerbie products, biz in a box, full perm builder packs etc

If SL sleeps her way through the next year (because of the above), it will be too late, even if her prince comes and hacks his way through the thorny vines and finds her in her thorny tower and kisses her awake, even if there are shadows, less lag and windlight skies, it may be too late for SL to maintain it's position as the number 1 virtual platform.

Let's not forget, any big games company could produce a UGC type virtual world platform in probably less than 24 months using new technologies. They have the funding, the people etc

Actually I'm starting to think that there is a V.2.0 SL but they're just not telling us about it !!
They can't just be putting band aids on this 'small sim size' SL to scale into the future.
It not the stuff that dreams are made of.

Leslie - I must tell you that BM has content creation

In BM you could create 100 ft contiguous single skin, UV mapped sea serpents, shoals of them, with artificial intelligence or you could make some lovely handbags

LL/SL sorta reminds me of the SciFi TV channel. They added wrestling to their lineup a couple years ago. Wrestling. Nothing against that but.. er.. wrestling on the SciFi channel?

They've also cancelled some of their best shows and now they're changing their name to SyFy.

They seem to have been taken over by some marketing droids who know nothing about what their customers are looking for.

there are too many examples of the opposite being true though.

i know a few people (some are top creators in sl) looking at the blue mars dev kit atm, i dont say the sky is falling, but to believe no one will leave sl to go to bm is just naive ^^

LL screwed up again and again, so a load of people lost the "my world, my imagination" feeling long ago

I don't think that's necessarily the case. If you read the information on their website, that sort of scenario is the exception as opposed to the rule. From their website:
-----
Can my Avatar travel from city to city?

Absolutely. Each registered user has a universal Avatar ID. Your character retains its identity regardless of the city you travel to. Although there are some items and pieces of clothing that are city specific, many items can be carried with you everywhere you go.
-----
So I can see some content being created where the designer explicitly doesn't want it to leave their playground, but a hat? I can't imagine anyone being silly enough to sell hats you can't use anywhere else. Consumers will dictate how this works. Obviously nobody would buy something like that. It's the free-market in action.

Another interesting tidbit.... when I first read an interview where Second Life was mentioned, the response from Avatar Reality was "we are not competing, we are a different service and think we will fill another niche". Now if you look at their website they've added *this*:
-----
How is Blue Mars different from Second Life?

Blue Mars offers an experience unlike any other virtual world. Our high end graphics, massive concurrent user support, system wide participation based rewards program, support for industry standard content creation tools, next generation NPC intelligence, simple LUA scripting support, and breathtakingly realistic Avatars are just a few of the compelling features that set us apart from the competition.
-----
So it seems Second Life is "competition" to them now.

Really?

http://rock-vacirca.blogspot.com/2009/06/creation-tools-second-life-v-blue-mars.html

Rock

So , pretty much everything we've been clamoring for in SL

As far the somewhat restrictive building as compared to SL, someone once told me "Just because everyone can build, doesn't mean that they should."

Perhaps a tighter reign over who makes content is a good thing for the economy.

And BTW, Blue Mars will have Flash...

Still waiting for that one Linden.

There hasn't been much added to the SL experience since voice / windlight / sculpty innovation.

Don't get me wrong, I still root for Second Life, but it seems very backwards that now all of their efforts are on keeping the new users and improving the first hour, and that is great, imagine if SL had a million concurrent users? But when 40 people in one area causes the legs to fall out, what the hell is the point?

Does it work that way in RL?