The leader board, dwell, rank, & other old stuff

What do folks remember about how SL worked in 2004?

There was a leader board, we had ratings, there was dwell, and developer's income. I think dwell was the old name for traffic, if I remember correctly. Seems like dwell was calculated in a somewhat manual manner, and would sometimes not get calculated, and folks would get upset and post their complaints in the forums. Developers were disparagingly called "dwellopers" by some. I don't recall what the categories were in the leaderboard.

Anyone have screenshots of the old UI and website, particularly those that show the leader board?

I've looked a bit on the web and not found much. I haven't checked the Internet Archives for this particular question.

I remember being something like 72nd in "net worth" or some such category at one time. How times change!

Yes, UI, anyway - I'll dig them out.

If I looked on my archive DVDs it's possible I might find something showing leaderboards, but I doubt I'll look that deeply into it.

There are old pictures on my Koinup, which has a "Golden Age of SL" group.

Remember how different editing was? You can't see it here, but much less was hidden about other people's objects, which helped us all learn.

teleport hubs and clean region crossings...

now we can direct teleport, but we lost security in region crossings under the newer model.

I don't recall a "Leader" button at all.

I do recall being able to see more about other people's objects.

Won't be too long before there will be lots of mesh content that will be even more mysterious to newcomers than current content with hidden values made in the inworld editor.

I'm thinking that maybe "Leaders" was an option on the View menu.

2004 eh? Well that was before my time, but oddly enough, I have a starter guide for SL that Linden Labs made back in June 2004. I'll host the file for anyone interested!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1728235/Second%20Life%20starter_guide.pdf

The leaderboards and stuff were on the (very black background) website, if I recall, and forums were similarly themed.

Now we have that powder blue 70's leisure suit look.

A very big deal was the website auctions, at the time ~ you'd bid on various properties via the site, parcel by parcel. Linden Research actually cut the parcels nice and small back then.

Also, if you wanted First Land, you *asked* for it, in a forum thread, stating your preference: PG or Mature. Then they assigned a parcel for you somewhere, and you could pick it up for $L 1/meter.

Anshe, Adam and others were very active on this forum. Eggy, Enebran, Ulrika, and Darwin. People like that.

This was a time before:

~ Private regions (except maybe Krittania),
~ Anshe's Dreamland
~ Azure
~ Any continent other than the Old Mainland. Not even Heterocetera
~ poseballs of any kind
~ world of warcraft online
~ No Caledon whatsoever, not even Neualtenburg (though it was in the works)


This was a time when:
~ you could put a WHOPPING detailed texture on a surface, if you wanted
~ No camping
~ VERY few bots
~ Rating parties (you got $L 1 per rating of... what, Avatar, Building, and Behaviour?)
~ You got PAID if you attracted traffic to your area. This ended in March 2006
~ you could pay tier with $L DIRECTLY (2004ish) though the exchange rate was terrible
~ there.com was taken seriously as a competitor
~ you could exchange Therebux and $L via Gaming Open Market

And,

~ you could gamble the night away,
~ sexual ageplayers were blatant and in your face
~ you could invest in 'banks' like Ginko all you wanted
~ your alternate accounts could scrape up first land like nobody's business and resell it
~ you could build spite properties, hack up terrain, put up giant signs all you want


Also, people forget how "new" things were, and how untrusting of "purchases on the internet" ~ a hangover from the 1990's. A few brave pioneers, like Nephaline went all out and set up avatar clothing stores in spite of technical issues that would make any one of us today give up and curl up into a fetal position, crying.

There was mandatory downtime each Wednesday, any griefer could release replicating objects and shut down 90% of the grid *at will* and often did, and regions could be crashed easily enough to write words in red, downed regions on the map. Good news is that the mainland was so small then, the best that could be done usually was "LOL"

That's all just off the top of my head. There was a lot more.

It was just a normal part of the interface.

I remember poseballs as of late 04...

I also remember live chat... for EVERYONE!

and sit hacking your way into any closed space.

oh and no free accounts... $10US for a basic account, one time fee.

(although as of 05 I remember running the numbers and seeing that you could completely crash the economy simply by creating tons of accounts, grabbing first land, and selling it back off along with the combined stipend... for a modest outlay of around 10kUSD... in about 1-2mos tops.)

Before "First Land" it was "Land for the Landless." I still own mine.

This alt is early 05, my other is an 04... and i remember all these BUT the leader boards.

The huge outcry when P2P Tping came out, cause all the *best land* was around telehubs.


Getting in a car and driving across the whole mainland with NO CRASHES on sim crossings...


Events that came in drop down menu's


Rating parties and the dwell....

Lindens that actually roamed the grid and would stop and talk....


NO sculpties, no flexies, no windlight, no voice, no MLP's engines.. if you wanted poses, it was poseball for EVERYTHING. At any time, 24/7 you could find Tringo, SLingo, Pizza, Blood 21 games all over the grid, with real people, and things...

Life has changed.... Some better.. some worse. Its a whole lot prettier... but the lag....

You'd think that as they upgraded the platform, they would upgrade the servers.

Well, from the time I started vehicles never worked and region crossings were bad. If they were ok before that I can't know.

I sure don't miss having my shoes and hair in my butt.

I think the first proto 'pose ball' was actually a pool chair sort of thing, that you could 'lie down' on, even though you were just sort of standing up sideways or something.

It's been a LONG time.

As my Gran said, "It's good to look back, it's best not to stare."

Keep the future coming. The past is a dip in the road.

I bought my first private sim back in September of '04, at the time, there were on 30 private sims. Amazing how many there are now.

I remember buying some mainland that had been "given up", either due to no tier payment or the owner left SL, whichever, but I remember buying the land for 1L/m. This didn't last long, selling dumped land for 1L/m, I think shortly afterwards LL started the auctions that included land that had been taken back by LL.

My first mainland purchase was in Wichi, and I bought it from Anshe.

I remember the leader boards. Ace Spades was usually up at the top for "Appearance", BigJohn Jade was at the top for recuiting new players. Also on the leader boards, was a place for who own the most land. I believe it was ownership of the most mainland, not including private sims, but I could be wrong.

I remember the rating parties. Usually the night before we were paid our stipends, you could find almost everyone at a few of those parties.

I remember my little shuttle from Cubey, that I flew everywhere, because I hated having to tp(and sim crossing were horrible). I hated the telehubs, they were so laggy and all that was there were shops. I think that Anshe owned a lot of land at the telehubs(this was before she was in Business Week and before she bought all the private sims. At the time the most expensive land was around the at telehubs.

I remember that every Wednesday the grid shut down for an update. LL always said it would be for a couple of hours, usually turned into half the day, and it would take a couple of days for the update to settle enough so that you could actually enjoy SL again. Most people would log into the Preview Grid on Wednesdays.

People complain about the problems after updates still, but 1.7 in December '04, had to be one of the worse there ever was.

Ahhhh, memories........take care....

I didn't come to SL until 2006, but I remember there were still land developers then - people who bought land, built something on it and sold it on. I witnessed this process on a parcel next one I owned at the time.

But when I joined, the cheapest land was about L$15 per sq metre and rising rapidly - so I reckon land flipping became more lucrative than developing. Now, of course, land can be bought for about 10% of the autumn 2006 prices and there are so many good pre-fab builds available there's probably very little call for developers.

Thank god we can turn off push now. Used to be kids with guns would come in and blast you into smitherenes, unless you were sitting on a prim. This terrorized residents and caused huge disruptions in SL events.

ah yes... I forgot the whole wild west mentality.... a gun was one of the first things your friends would equip you with.... and you'd pretty much have to hang out in groups so that when some griefer came around all you friends would gang up on them and blast them 3 sims away...

I remember I was dating someone who wanted me to be a 'battlechick' so I got a set of blackwidows that had a "nuclear' bullet. I didn't realize it would actually nuke (crash) any sim you fired it in, until I did it.