Transforming the Second Life Experience with Big Spaceship

How about this?

Menu->View->Builder View

If you select that, you get the Build menu, the Build button, and so on.

Otherwise the Build button is Appearance, the other menus are simplified...

Also, APPEARANCE NEEDS TO SUPPORT ATTACHMENTS.

Sorry for shouting, but the more I think of it the more I think it's critical. They're part of the appearance. I don't mean taking attachment editing out of Edit, I mean making Appearance include attachment positioning, lists of attachments in extra tabs. Like, below the clothing tabs, you have "Attachments", and that gives you a list of attachment points, and you click on Nose and it highlights the attachment you have on Nose with the positioning tool. BUT it's not the full edit tool, it's just Positioning, and clicking and missing your body doesn't remove the highlight...

I first joined SL in 2006 when a friend invited me there. I was on dial-up at the time so just downloading the client took hours. My first visit to SL at the time basically consisted of looking up my friend and saying a short hi and looking around despite everything being grey.

Fast forward a year and I get DSL. When I do practically the first thing I did was hop onto SL again, despite the miserable experience with it which was more than a year ago.

Now today. Two paying accounts, land owner, mentor, involved in various other things in SL (helping newbies, officer at one place, planning events, building content, working to clean up my area of the mainland, contributing to the in-world economy, etc).

The point is, the people you *want* there will make every effort to get there despite the difficulties. The first hour experience is meaningless if they honestly want to be there. Why encourage them to leave while replacing those numbers with ones who are unknown quantities?

Well, a flashy new website or tutorial may get the folks to stay who like to see bobbles (like windlight). I don't actually care for the new browser features. They're flashy, shiny, and they make everything glow. *laughs* More spam for me to have to download. Which it doesn't matter to me since I run a T2 connection. But I've run regular before. And that's the headache, and on a single core machine with a less then fantastic processor.

I can tell how a lot of people would log out and never come back. Especially, when signing up one of my alts I got a lot of "cyber?" "Cyber?" "CYBER?!" screaming newbies around. Or the best one I heard. "Anyone know where the sex is?"

I have a suggestion... I've seen it in a few online games. Why not a newbie area that isn't connected to anyone else. You more or less play it offline but you're still online (you can get IM's and stuff.) But you have a small area that is the tutorial area that's offline that way newbies can get aquainted with the controls without being harrassed by other newbies or new alts.

I didn't even run through the tutorial I just tried my best to get the hell off that island and find my friends. The most horrible experience of SL is... Newbie Island!

Edit:

And the whole thing of a "free" plot of 512 land if you're a paying member...

Why not take all that land that's Govenor Linden land and parcel it out in to 512 squares. Don't put it on auction, but put it for sale. And (here's the kicker) don't allow purchases from people who have land already. Because land barons have bots to buy up all the land when it comes on sale. So, making a restriction on it would have a little land for these newbies. I mean... Why not? When I first went out to find myself my first 512 plot. I got ripped off. I paid hugely for it and it was a horrible spot with garbage all around, but I wanted to own a piece of the pie.

I know land barons would hate this idea, but I think it's only fair to let newbies who want land actually have the chance to find some.


Ugh... And if you want to add a feature. Why not add a feature like "hide ban lines" or something. So, when you look outside over someone's house who only has groups set the option of not seeing those lines? Or only seeing them when they're like 2 m close or so?

You want to know what the most frequent complaints are that have heard from friends of mine who have tried SL, and given up on it? Most of them had nothing to do with "first hour experiences".

Number one was that "if you are not a creative type, like an artist or a programmer, or willing to work in cybersex jobs as a stripper or escort, there's almost no way to make money in SL, and therefore it quickly becomes an expensive money pit.". They acknowledge that someone like me, who can do textures and scripting and building, can play for free, or make a profit here. But for them, it's a steady drain on their finances to do almost anything. They percieve it as a huge mall, where you have to pay for virtually everything and every activity has a cost associated with it.

Number two was "if you're not looking for sex, and aren't particularly good at socializing with strangers, what is there to do in SL?". It's difficult for new people to find the activities that are not sex-related, or that are not geared to suit people who are already very sociable and gregarious. There are plenty of places like roleplaying sims, in-world games and activities, beautiful places to go sightseeing. But the average newbie has no way to find them. The perception is that most interpersonal interactions here revolve around sex and dating.

Nunber three was "I wanted to explore, but everywhere I go, I ran into ban lines and security systems and other barriers. I couldn't sail a boat or drive a car or walk to get anywhere, it seemed.". So many people in SL want their privacy at home, that it is very difficult to randomly explore the grid, except by flying at more than 50 M above the surface, or point-to-point teleporting. The lack of public roads and walkways and waterways between privately owned areas makes it extremely difficult to explore.

Number four was "Why doesn't a wall or a closed door ensure privacy?". Many of my friends are amazed that it is so easy to cam into a closed area, or to bypass walls and other barriers. Most private land owners wouldn't care if an explorer walked across their lawn, as long as that explorer couldn't walk through a closed door, or peek into a closed bedroom, or listen to every intimate whisper from halfway across the sim. "Walls that act as real walls", blocking vision and muting sound, would go a long way to improving the SL experience for everyone.

Number five was "Why do I have to buy a whole sim to have privacy? Why is it so expensive to meet that basic need?". This is one reason why so many people "Abused" the OpenSpaces sims, after the prim count, and avatar limits were increased, the prices decreased, and the ability was granted for placing them on the grid in a spot not connected to any other sim. Before those changes, it cost $1295 setup and $295 per month to have privacy. The revised OpenSpaces sims made that possible for $250 setup and $75 per month. OF COURSE people flocked to such sims and built homes on them. Privacy is a very primal need for most civilized peoples.

The high cost of obtaining and maintaining land was also often cited as a problem. I have quite a few friends who base their avatars out of my home, simply because I am generous enough to allow them to set a home point in a skybox on my 1/4 sim parcel. Few of them could afford land of their own.

Far behind all of that were issues with the learning curve for movement and wearing clothes and other avatar activities, or the hardware requirements, or other aspects.

I seriously doubt that some PR company who makes fancy Flash websites for corporate promotional sites, and who have zero experience in SL, will be able to do anything positive for the SL "First Hour Experience". And if their own website is any indication of their user interface design skills, I don't want them anywhere near the UI change process in SL.

But like many Corporations, you seem to think that a high-cost outside consultant can magically come up with the answers to all your problems. Good luck with that. You'd be far better off getting the in-world developers and content creators to help in that process. But you don't want to hear that, so I sometimes wonder why we even bother giving you feedback at all, since you usually ignore us and do whatever you please anyway.

Doesn't make sense does it. Sign up for free but everything you do you must pay for, hmmmm.


Not a whole lot!



Yeah, why doesn't it?

I've just registered an account and I must say its easy peasy lemon squeezy.

How moronic does linden expect their sign-ups to be if the have to hire a company to improve that?

The old help island exercises in lifting a ball, flying, sitting etc are all gone -you had it three years ago -just re-enable it and stop being so damn daft.

REAL issues - improve the graphics engine -hexagonal boobs are not acceptable anymore
broken arm and leg joints = poor visual experience
Dumb looking avatars staring into space -give some personality.

The new bodies are a major improvement over the 'Ruth'
so add some more basic kit for noobs.

Have a few open sim sandboxes that are easier to access and monitor them to stop griefers.
The volunteer helpers are sorely missed and noticeable by their absence.


Summary -improve the lot for existing residents -I've lost 90% of my friends to apathy with SL.
Rats and damn blast.

That's a great idea, if you had some way of telling the difference between a newbie and LandBaronAlt Frogmouth.

Because open source is the devil, remember? Well, Open Source and OGRE and OpenGL Monitor and, well, if it's downloaded to the client you can see it. To fix that we need private spaces and zones, the way other games do it: when you enter a building in a typical video game, you enter a new 'zone'.

You don't need money to have fun in SL. You don't need to be a builder, though it helps.

Heck, I don't think of myself as much of a builder. I can script like the devil but it takes me a huge effort to make anything that looks like anything... the one thing I built that I really think looks good, Mehve, took me weeks and I see people like Satch Flan toss a few prims together and make a one-off avatar just for fun and it just makes me realize how far I'd have to go.

Just modding an avatar or clothes a little isn't "building". And there's so many great freebie outfits and stuff that really, unless you're a mad avatar addict like me, you don't really need more than a few RL dollars at the absolute most to kit your avatar out to the nines.

Argent, while I agree that thers's a lot of reasonable-quality freebies out there, the fact remains that what you can do with just freebies and no L$ is pretty limited, compared to what someone can do if they have a lot of L$ to spend.

Try finding good dance animations for free.

Try finding good couples animations for free (sexy or g-rated).

Try finding someplace you can call your home in SL, when you can't afford to even rent land...

Walk through any mall in SL, and look at what is offered for sale, and then try to come up with free versions of the things that interest you.

In most cases, especially if you're new and don't know where to look for that high-quality free Human skin, or that nice furry avatar that happens to be last year's model, so the maker is selling it for L$10 to help newbies get started, or... Well, you just don't know where a lot of the neat free stuff is, so as far as you're concerned, it doesn't exist.

Sure, you can log in wherever you last logged out, change your clothes under a lake or high in the air, or otherwise run around with no home and few posessions. But when you compare what you have to what others who have L$ to spend have, you'll feel like you're just not getting as much out of SL as they do.

But like Ceera said, what do you do with the Avatar once it's done? You're all dressed up with no place to go. It does seem that the easily reachable places are either Sex related, nothing wrong with that, or places for the outwardly social. Again nothing wrong. But a lot of people ae in SL because they AREN'T socialable in RL. There are so many great places to explore, but a new person doesn't know where they are. Someone who isn't experienced in building really won't know what tools are available to begin to learn, he won't even know to take a class at NCI. And even if he does, where will he practice. Public sandboxes are a joke.

I'm the type who likes to figure things out for myself. When I came to SL, I spent maybe 4 hours total on the Island, on 2 seperate days. Then I hit the streets and just learned as I went. I wandered, explored, and things took care of themselves. I also had the thought to come to this forum, where I learned most things as well as made the majority of my inworld friends. But not everyone will do that.

I would: Give new people a good starting inventor and avatar. Put a good collection of freebies in the Library, cut down on some of the initial hunting.

Have a REAL Showcase, not a Friends of Linden Club, where new people can find a real cross section of what SL has to offer.

Create more public sandboxes, and POLICE them vigorously. I sometimes go to them to open boxes and stuff, since I now longer Lease Server Space, and they are a joke.

And I would give each new player a 512 on specially designated sims, free of charge. They can practice build on it, they can use it as a home, whatever. But, they can't sell it or add to it, if they want to move to a bigger space, they return it to LL so it can be given to another new player.

In any event, I would not be outsourcing this. Whatever the cost is for these Flying Saucer people, I would rather spend it in house.

Ceera your post is terrific. I strongly agree with everything you say.

A consultant is someone who borrows your watch then tells you what time it is. I suggest you send your post to Spaceship, then they can forward it to Linden

Let me add a couple more observations:
1) I know 2 newbies who were enjoying SL but quit because of difficulty with dance animations. They finally got up enough nerve to attend a dance site, make new friends and socialize. Their nervousness changed to embarrassment when they could not stop the dance animation. A TP to another site and they just keep dancing. It is humorous, but people don't like being laughed at. It should be easy for the viewer to call "Stop All Animations" function during all teleports. At least make this button easy to find. Most newbies don't know it exists.

2) My screen space is valuable, so I am always annoyed with those tooltips that pop up as my mouse travels over objects across the screen. This is a big distraction, especially for newbies who don't understand this is useless information to be ignored. They try to read every one and try to figure out what they are being told. If anyone wants this, it is available through the INFO menu. I would say get rid of this all together, or at least make it an optioinal setting.

Douglis, I seem to recall that LL did recently change things so that a TP does call a "Stop all animations".

I disagree, SL is an expensive place, whether you like building or not, sure you can pick up freeby clothes etc.

Sooner or later though it starts to become tired, and people want more from their SL experience thats when the cost starts to mount up, buying quality clothes, vehicles homes all costs if you don't enjoy building,
Uploading textures, sculpt maps etc. costs if on the other hand you want to get creative.

Example from my own experience.
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I enjoy building, but only for my own benifit, uploading textures costs a fair bit for good ones, my sculpty creator cost a fair bit, my land tiers cost a fair bit, sure I could have used a sandbox but I like to enjoy the fruits of my labour, for a little while before I start on the next project.
Also I don't like to be harassed while I am working.
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I have a Sand box of my own open for any user to come and use, I even give out some of my own textures along with others I have selected, all for free and know of many other places that do similarly but new users never get given landmarks to these places by LL.
They find them through word of mouth or trolling laboriously through the search.

The same is true of users wishing to visit places of beauty in SL, or clubs with live music etc.
All of these places although free to visit are costing a great deal for someone to maintain, the user soon feels the desire to create their own personal beautiful space though and straight away their costs start to incline dramatically for the dream to be realised.

SL is a big drain on most of its users.

They put a "fix" into the viewer that doesn't really work. It's actually worse than before, the animations stop for you but for others they can still be running.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-6744

I don't see that. Really.

It *can* become expensive if you're interested in shopping as entertainment and don't want to depend on freebies, and I have over the years probably bought a few thousand Lindens worth of clothes... but these days my coolest clothes are ALL freebies. You don't need land. I don't do my building on my land, I have mostly done in public sandboxes because I enjoy the feedback I get from people. I also test on the Preview grid, where uploading is effectively free, and don't have to pay for real uploads until I'm ready.
Some. Not most.

"Big Spaceship will employ a user-centered design methodology to develop innovative solutions for streamlining the complexity of Second Life"

I love you folks, and wish this venture well. But I urge you to STOP and look at the marketing pablum that this announcement contains. If you don't, it will infect the entire effort .

Many of the other suggestions here are good - but for the sake of LL - for the sake of all of us - UNTIL YOU FIX THE SHOWSTOPPER TEXTURE TRIO OF BUGS, NOTING ELSE YOU DO MATTERS. Worse, every new user you add just contributes to your own self inflicted DDOS attack due to viewer bugs. (see the bottom half of http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-8503 ).

Here are Linden Labs own statistics for texture loading :
About 80% of the time 512x512 images take ~20 seconds to download.
About 15% of the time 512x512 images take ~37 seconds to download.
About 5% of the time 512x512 images take ~4 seconds to download.

All the dazzle and flash in the world will not retain new users until that changes. SL texture handling is busted. You have been told time and again that this impacts the user experience more than anything else. When will you believe it and FIX IT?

David Ogilvy once said "The consumer is not a moron." So let's look at an often overlooked truth - people (new users) will care if you offer them something they want. If you are concerned about "creating intuitive and elegant branded experiences " you will fail. If you are concerned about making their visit smooth and glitch free- you will succeed. Looking at a vast gray world and cloud avatars after 30 minutes of standing still dooms new users, dooms SL , dooms US, and dooms LL.

View->Hover Tips is optional, no?

I'm sort of a newbie and I can share some comments from a newbie's point of view. First off, this is an alt. The account I normally use is about a year old, but I've really only used it since about September. I signed up over a year ago, spent about two weeks in-world, and didn't really see much use for it, couldn't find my way around, wasn't all that thrilled with the appearance or movements of my AV.

I had a car accident this September and I was bored, so I logged into SL and got hooked. I'd been logging in for about a week when someone made a comment about my AV and my "walk" and took me shopping for a new skin, shape, etc., explaining that the default AV was a dead giveaway that I was a newbie and that it could be improved upon GREATLY with just a few items.

So my biggest suggestion would be for LL to at least improve the default AVs so that people don't walk around SL LOOKING like newbies. I'm lucky that someone took pity on me and helped me (and I have since done the same for several newbies I've encountered in my wanderings), but I have seen others ridicule newbies. Had that happened to me, I'm not sure I'd have stuck around.

The Palace chat dumped new users into a "Practice Palace" where they could not only "practice" but had several areas where they could find new avatars. Perhaps SL should do the same and start new users right off in a place where they can obtain free skins, shapes, clothing, etc., with a little more pizzaz than the default inventory.

Obviously, there's a pretty big sex RP community in SL, and that's sort of where I ended up and it had me hooked for awhile. Then I made a friend who introduced me to some other experiences (base jumping, go-kart racing, horseback riding, skiing, dancing, etc.) and that has made all the difference! So another suggestion? I think I remember from when I first logged in over a year ago that there was a newbie island or something that was my starting point - perhaps some "billboards" for those types of things...or "tour guides." I have read on here about mentors, and I wonder what happened to those.

The ideas expressed by others - allowing users to create (or change) their own last names, allowing accounts to be "pre-made" for users so they have more than just the default AV and inventory - those are great ideas!

I can't really speak much to the OS issue or landowner issues, etc., because I don't know much about either of those. What I do know is that there are a lot of very creative people who have made SL what it is, and some of the things I've read on these forums seems to indicate that maybe those residents' contributions are not being given the credit (or VALUE!) that they deserve from LL.

I've visited some very beautiful and wonderful sims, places that have helped me to escape the stresses of RL, even if just for an hour or two. I've also found some amazing inventory items (bought a horse recently and I won't even get into the beauty of some of the clothing...being female...well...haha, let's just say some of us never outgrow playing with Barbies and leave it at that, and while I thank LL for the software I use to experience it, I have to thank the sim owners/artists for creating the experience!

LL's best bet would be to keep those residents (the owners/artists) content, and the rest (retention of existing and new residents) will follow.
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Rubi

They did that already... they've refreshed the default avatars twice now... once since you got your original account.

Giving people more guidance on how to switch to the other avatars in the library would be a great idea. And fixing the viewer so when you select a folder in the library you can wear the avatar without having to copy it into your own folder or drag it onto your avatar would be big advantages.

Maybe adding an "avatars" pulldown to the upgraded appearance editor I've been babbling about?

This has happened to me! What makes it worse is when the animation isn't appearing on your own screen, but everyone's laughing at you or making comments and you don't know what they're talking about until someone finally has the decency to take a snapshot of you and (spending 10L for it) send to you so you can see what they're talking about!!!
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Rubi

That may be so, but the new ones aren't so great-looking either from what I have seen...
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Rubi

i accidently clicked cancel and i dont want to do that what do i do so that my account is not cancelled i dont want to pay the bill when i still want to stay in second life.. please help

I can see the value IF THE GAME WAS STABLE ENOUGH TO NOT DRIVE THEM OFF once I invite them. Most the folks I have convinced to join have quit, some with unprintable opinions of LL...I no longer ask folks to try SL. To me, hiring this firm is another 'cart before the horse' setup Katt.

Rather than pay these high-priced spinmeisters, how about spending that cash on the technical back end and fixing the following?

* Since last update, my client just suddenly freezes without warning for 1-10 seconds.
* In a sim with 40FPS, .99 dialation, I could NOT send a single group IM and the ones I got were out of order (but personal IM's were fine). This was last night.
* Open inventory and try to search for an item, and have it take 2-3 MINUTES to fully enumerate my inventory. This started 2 or 3 updates ago, I forget which. Sometimes its fine, other times, forget it as it counts items at a blazing 1 per second.
* Empty sims that are at max FPS and Dilation, then without anyone else in sim, drop to .1 dialation and stay there until rebooted by an admin or they crash.
* Failed ports, took 4 attempts last night to port from one (seemingly) lag free sim to another that people present told me was not lagging (and was fine when I got there).
* When you crash out or the server goes down without warning 'Account unavailable until XXXXXX PST'. WHY? Other online games do not freeze my account until their screwup clears?

Please pardon the language, but how in the nine hells do I keep people I convince to play to stay inworld with these kinds of things happening on a regular basis? All the flash, fluff and candycoating of the newbie experience does NOTHING if, shortly after getting in the game, the flaws are so common and so frustrating, they return to WoW or whatever else they played online. Basics, Katt, stop acting like an all-volunteer open source project working on whatever is amusing and become a product-focused company...get the basics right THEN worry about the glitz...sure I want more customers, but I'd like them to be LONG TERM customers, not here today gone tomorrow customers.

Maklin

Compared to the originals? Hell, compared to just about ANY avatars in 2005 or 2006?

Look, there's always going to be people making better looking avatars than the defaults. They'll never be able to improve the defaults to the point where they're as good as the best. At least they have them improved to the point they're decent.

If you think you had a hard time finding a good one, imagine what it's like for me?