Transforming the Second Life Experience with Big Spaceship

Well shucks. I guess being honest is against the TAO of Linden?

Personally, when I got into SL with my original account (yeah, this one IS an alt, so what?) it wasn't the viewer that I was worried about. Lag didn't bother me THAT much, though it was and still is a pain (naturally), it still doesn't bother me THAT much. Crashes, I can deal with some of those, mostly mine were due to high graphics settings with a small amount of RAM installed. I added more RAM, I'm good to go.

My first hour experience was getting used to the controls and avatar appearance, which I did with excitement. No big deal there either. So it took a while to look under the hood, that's what I do with EVERYTHING.

Problem for me was when I got in world, I had nowhere to go, and I knew nobody. So the first thing I did was search for a strip club. Of course, that's just my thing, but I did find at least a springboard into the rest of the world. Point is, I needed more than just an Info Hub with people spamming me.

People I've known since my initial sign-up have come and gone for various reasons. It was RL concerns for many of them, lack of direction and purpose for others, and bad social experiences for still others. I could really not possibly care less about all the complaining about the OS stuff, so aside from saying that I don't care, I have nothing to say about the matter except this: this isn't the thread for it. The OS issue alone isn't the cause of every so-called "bail out" from SL.

Back to me - because it's all about me - I stayed in SL because of the people I met and some of the in world experiences I had (good and bad). I plan to stick around, too. I build a little, I tinker a little, I explore a lot, and I buy a lot of the content other residents create. Mostly though, this is a social experience for me.

I think that the attrition rate of SL is high because people simply don't know what to do when they get in world. They are strangers, they're faceless, and they don't know it yet, but they look ridiculous with the default animations, shapes, clothing, and skins.

Giving noobs some direction when they get in world is, in my humble opinion, the best way to get them to stick around. Say, for example, LMs to some of the more popular clubs, and that sort of thing. One little line at log in about what to check out, I don't think that works. You'll need to pimp some of the in-world places.

(Just for fun, Bishop ducks around a corner and looks for Dianne Davies and other haters to come flame him and call him 'yet another idiot')

All this said (holy crap I talk a lot), I LOVE Second Life, and my experience is always getting better.

I've often said that the first 10 minutes in-world needs to be so much better and a little more "Hollywood-ized" as a draw for the potential residents. Even if it's a false first statement for what SL is and does...

Having said that, I'm not blown away by BS's portfolio. Maybe their flash site click-around experience will be helpful but I really hope you guys at LL aren't paying too much for their services. I expect their helpfulness to be mediocre at best. Perhaps with whipped Distraction and a cherry on top?

~Lefty

P.S. DON'T click the "Documentary" link on BS's homepage... Their self-awesomeness video clips might induce vomiting and a sweet sick feeling in your tummy. PR nor Image-consulting are their strong-suits. I REALLY hope that movie-making isn't listed as an "expertise" of theirs. *gag* Can you believe they let a 3rd-party website SELL you video clips of their "creative process" as "Training?!?" holy-hell. They prolly *eat* Creativity for breakfast... Go throw some more Frisbees...

@ Bishop - I totally agree with you. Most of the fun to me was the challenge of learning a new way of negotiating my way around the tools and navigation.

... and yes - for me, I got as far as Korea and wondered for days whether this was the only thing there was - then found the map and just teleported some place - then wandered around trying to find someone - anyone - to talk to. Or something - anything - to see or do.


My feeling is that LL are concentrating on getting newbies in - sending them off to their new mainland continents with all the pretties - and make them think that this is all they need, so they buy there. Which equals more money in Linden pockets.

At the rate that I've seen people dumping their OS sims (which for the most part are the beautifully constructed themed or art sims on the grid) there will only be mainland left for newbies to explore anyway.

With the latest LL f**kup decision with OS sim prices - I've been exploring OpenLife, and most of the people I've met up with there - which has been a lot - are in the process of transferring their LL businesses to OL (as am I).

Second Inventory are doing a roaring trade.

So wait, was this why lindens wanted to scale back the RX office hour? Because they knew our resident input would be mattering even less? We had three lindens there who (erroneously) claimed "there was nothing more to talk about," meanwhile they were sitting on this. < sarcasm >Honestly, thanks for keeping the interested community in the loop < / scarcasm >



We've only been discussing this for how long now?

Here are things that I think would improve things for new users.

Better avatars. I like the suggestion of editing that someone made above (and that others expounded on). I would also like to see a new layer for tatoos and a layer for hats. I found it particularly silly (yes, way back when) to have to become bald in order to wear decent hair. Luckily some shop owners had good explanations in their shops about that.

Your front page really touts buying land (no, I'm not going into that other discussion). I have always found it difficult to figure out from the land search whether something is rented or purchased. I think there need to be 2 main categories - private estates vs mainland and within those rentals vs buying. Maybe people don't do it anymore, but my 2nd avatar ended up renting some mainland from someone. Didn't work out well, so I didn't do that again. But it's hard to figure out which ads to ignore.

The places to visit kiosks/notecards at the initial island (at least 2 years ago) helped me with somewhere to go immediately. Sounds like from what other folks are saying here - that they are no longer there?

I think you need to stop using traffic. Perhaps this new company can figure out a better method for the intent.

Get rid of the bots. (At least the majority of them.) Keep the free to play. Maybe the new company can figure out how to do that.

I like the idea of having the viewer start with a simple mode. Then, the person can change it in preferences once they are used to things.

Bring back more human interaction near the entry areas. Encourage communities to help the new residents. Monitor and eject the griefers that are bothering new residents in the entry areas.

Have a better explanantion for land as part of the orientation - the web thing you go thru (could be a quick overview with notecards with links to the official explanations). You explain mainland quite well, but it looks like people don't quite understand private estates. Personally, I think it would make things easier if owner of land always meant the person paying tier to Linden - even on private estates.

People have posted some good ideas.

It's nice to see that this is actually a discussion.

Firelight

Outstanding.... that did make me laugh....

...Back to new residents, the problem I see,
is they hit the ground running, pop up here and there and have no idea how to do the basic things after all.

Its nice to help the noobs but what about helping the rest of us? This isnt the economy for raising anything. Is it better to raise the prices and loose 50% of the people OR lower the prices (at the very least, keep it the same) and keep those people? Greed is what got the RL world into this mess, Greed will have the same effect in SL, eventually.

Please keep this thread on topic.

There is a separate thread for discussion of Open Spaces, and if you'd like your comments on that topic to be read by Jack and other Lindens concerned about Open Spaces, I strongly suggest you post there, as this thread won't be read by Jack.

Thanks!

Have you tried to _read_ their website?

Even with a new widescreen monitor, the whiteish text on that black background in that really really thin font is hard on us over 20 crowd... but I guess you aren't targeting us as customers.

Sorry about posting again, but I forgot the other point I wanted to make.

There have been a number of posts here pointing out that LL would have been better and more economically served if they'd put the call out via the Grid - enlist the expertise of some of the people who:

1) are already providing services to newbs

2) are more than capable of developing any sort of interface which can be used by the people at 1) - I draw your attention to Ann O'Toole's suggestion.

3) are intimately and fully familiar with SL - the tools, the navigation, the places, the problems, the workarounds, the societies, the dangers and the frustrations.

I'm not surprised by LL's immediate thought being to go to an outside company who are totally unfamiliar with the SL world - it happens ALL the time with this company.

They have a history of spurning the knowledge, understanding and enthusiasm of the very people that make their precious Grid a wonderful place for us to play in.

I went to www.bigspaceship.com and I found their site almost totally unuseable.
The site is very slow to load. The tiny dark gray on black street address at the very top is impossible to read. The tiny red on black fonts are difficult to read. I put on my reading glasses and pressed my nose to the screen. When I click the Second Life news story, I get a message Firefox has prevented this site from opening a pop up window. I have to click my mouse all over the page to discover where the links are. When I click on Launch, there is some glitsy animation starts... near white lines dancing on a white background.

All this glitz gets in the way of the content and makes the site very difficult to navigate.

The existing Second Life website works much better than the bigspaceship web site. I only wish Linden would make it easier to find the download button on their home page.

I am confused - why not put this out to tender to the SLDEV full service list we all have a vested interest in the platform, have experience of the onboarding (and Reg-API headaches) plus some of us have experience in this particular area.

For once I am lost for words and have nothing more positive to state.

This is certainly an interesting move, maybe a bit of a gamble - I hope it pays off.

I can see there certainly needs to be a slight shift from current the current direction the UI has gone down - especially if you are aiming at larger mainstream adoption. I can see there being a lot of resistance to a change in the UI because its taken us so long to learn and get used to this one! I'd be interested to see if this is an "evolution" or "revolution" in terms of approach.

Is the brief "we need to start all again" - or "can you tweak what we have and make it better?

Finally, will all these changes be made available to the opensource viewer community?

thanks!

I thought that having a Flash-only website with dubious rendered text - particularly one which could very very easily be done in HTML and _absolutely should be_ - was something that went out in the early part of this decade.

Apparently not. Or at least, it was not sufficiently beaten into the heads of "design" companies that this was a terrible idea and made them out to be fools.

I click through to Big Spaceship's web site and am confronted with a huge Flash monstrosity and no alternatives. This does not fill me with confidence in their ability to function within the limits of their chosen medium. My web browser is not a Flash player, and neither is Second Life.

Coughs Accessibility.....

@Charlotte - no, these people won't be creating content - because you can bet your last dollar that they've got absolutely no or very little expertise in building in SL - and I'd be surprised if they'd even ever been inworld until LL approached them to 'come on board'.

In the 2+ years I've been in SL I've not once seen LL call for major project input from the residents - the people who have the expertise.

It would be illegal were they a company in the UK.

Honestly, though, what is the point of all of this? Random splurging of money on consultancies who have no experience in the area for no apparent reason - when there are dozens of really obvious things they should be addressing and know they should be addressing - is the sort of practice that companies who are _deep in their own delusional worlds_ engage in.

Yes that website is a big DDA fail but they have an impressive portfolio. I still don't see how this will do much unless they're adding inworld content unless it's just the web signup window they're engaging with ....which is going to be problematic if they produce something that isn't accessible.

Actually my point wasn't on content - it was the opposite - some of us full service devs have huge experience in large scale web projects / accessibility / usability and so forth.

My point is, Linden have people in the SLDEV list with that background with a proven track record on knowing the platform too, including content, including COMMUNITY within a very unique platform so whilst we can make that first hour experience dazzle we then know how to embed the user to RETAIN them. That goes from the current website through to their full residency in SL into an experienced user.

My post holds little use, but it's interesting to see their approach and it's very telling.

Oh, I quite agree. But we have long since gone beyond the stage where contributions from the "community" are welcomed.

ROFL so true ...
and i hope this addition wont kick us on a later date, and they start talking about increasing some other fees to cover the expenses, I HOPE NOT