What's Needed To For SL Be Ready For Prime Time?

Respectful discussion please:

What must LL do to make SL ready for prime time?

consistency in service and better customer service.

It's ready.

It's not what LL does that is so critical (though it can help) but rather what content creators do from here on out.

Taking grid stability seriously is a big step in the right direction!

While I admire the LL philosophy of openness and looking for the best in all people, I think they might have to lose a little bit of that San Francisco "Haight & Ashbury" philosophy if they want to be taken seriously as a platform for anything more than recreation. It seems to me that all too often mere slaps on the wrist are applied to people who are looking to cause real emotional pain and real life monetary losses to others. It appears this may be changing, but I'd like for it to change a bit faster.

While scalability and reliability are definitely improving (the 1.8 rollout was the smoothest I can remember), there is still quite a bit of work to be done in this area. If you think the jump from 10000 to 100000 residents was painful, wait for the jump from 100000 to 1000000!

Regards,

-Flip

Stability and functionality.

Everything that can be done, should be doable via automated means.

I would say there needs to be more obvious things to DO. Something that will keep people busy until they finally "get it."

I have so many friends that I've tried to get into SL, people that I KNOW would love it, but for whatever reason they didn't quite grasp what SL was all about. And without that understanding SL is the most boring "game" EVER. And thusly, they quit before they understand, never to come back.

Oh, I think they come back.

You play something else, get bored of it, and then read about SL. And you come back.

The different with other MMOs is that when you come back, you always come back to the grind. With SL - you're coming back to something new.

recently had some thoughts on this topic

Four challenges i see standing in the way of consistently great stuff to do at scale (i.e. lots of it across the grid)
* small current market (and yes, I think you need to have a market to move from a hobbyist world with a few cool things done out of love to a scalable world with lots of amazing things at your disposal)
* significant tier investment required for big projects (not even counting hours)
* social reluctance to pay for intangible goods like entertainment/services
* weak group and permissions tools which hinder collaborative building, land management, and money management

full text here and pham neutra responded here

They really need their product to run a lot smoother than it does. I play another online game where there is zero lag. I understand that with the building tools in place within sl it contributes to the lag but for that very reason they need to make it lag free. It is absolutly no fun these days to log in and not beabe to build. It's the only reason I subscribed to begin with. I am personaly giving LL 3 months to turn this around before I cancel all accounts. If I cannot do the one thing I truely enjoy then its a waste of money IMO.

mar

No, I think you're wrong. The friends I refered to, don't have any intention of coming back. They don't play MMO's, *I* don't play MMO's. SL is not the same, which is exactly what I'm saying.

If you want to go "Prime Time", you need to appeal to non-MMO gamers. And non-gamers, for that matter. I think SL is plenty capable of that. The problem is getting people hooked in the first place.

How many times have you talked to a newbie and they say something like "I don't get this game"? Yeah, that's about 90% of the newbies I've talked to. That is the problem.

Stability and Scalability are great, but if people get bored and leave before they figure it out, what's the point?

Well, sometimes you have to sleep on it.

The fact is, when you're friends realise that they can work more efficiently in a globally virtual shared environment - where are they going to go?

They're going to say "Oh SecondLife has that".

I don't think you need to be doing stuff inside of SecondLife to *get* SecondLife. Sometimes you could be doing something completely different and realise that you need it for whatever you're trying to do.

Fact is, SecondLife isn't going to live or die on whether we 'sell it' right. It's going to survive based on its own fundamental value proposition.

Which I believe it has - just need a little patience.

Naw once its done its done.

Well, I certianly agree that keeping people in the long term depends on the base product, rather than the marketing. The problem I'm seeing though, is that people aren't getting hooked in the first place. They never discover what the base product of SL is. And that's because SL is a complicated world, it takes time to wrap your head around it. If you can't keep people around long enough for them to discover that, then they'll never understand.

I think you give people too much credit about them coming back eventualy though. Once someone makes up their mind about something, it's very difficult to change that, no matter how much factual evidence you present to the contrary.

So, back to my original statement. There needs to be more _obvious_ things for people to do, until they realize that they can do ANYTHING, and start doing whatever it is that they really want to do. I'm not saying it's up to LL to make those things. The residents have made some really cool stuff that appeals to a broad range of people. (Although, there seems to be a lot less of that now than there used to be.)

I do, however, think that LL needs to stay on top of those things and make sure people know that they exist, especially the newbies. The "Top Picks" used to be a good way to do that. But of course, people scream FIC over things like that. Nevermind that it actually gave some HUMAN input into what is actually fun/cool/etc, instead of just meaningless dwell #s and classifieds going to the highest bidder.

I don't think SL can really become "primetime".

It's a realisation I had a few days back. People talk a lot about the nature of SL. But as I see it, SL isn't a game, nor is it a platform, nor is it a place, nor is it anything like that. It's a hobby. That's not supposed to be an insult - indeed, quite the reverse. Participating in SL is an activity on a par with "playing computer games" as a whole, not any particular game.

Stability is a big issue. So is performance - if I head into Guild Wars or something, I see how smooth it moves and then get reminded that yes, PCs can actually do this, they've been able to do it all along, it's just SL's client that slows things down.

More available social content for non-creative folks. I've seen casino games with "open hosting", which I think is a great idea. I'd love to see this go further - I've had thoughts myself of making an open theatre where, for a few L$ hire, anyone can take control of it and put on a show, even getting the event listed by proxy if they don't have land. Some folks might want to do this stuff for fun without having to commit to the particular RL time and duration that being a paid or "official" volunteer host requires.

I've half thought of having a little object you can attach that gives you a list of tasks to do and a "Level" number floating above your head, to ease in folks from other MMOs, but that'd probably be daft.

SteveR's right. We're losing people because we don't have enough obvious things for people to check out and do in their first few weeks. The Top Picks are sorely missed.

Second Life needs:

Island sims only.
Ideally, each resident needs to be able to have their own sim and the sims need to be much bigger. I feel Linden Lab are dreaming of creating a huge world that stretches for miles and miles, when everybody just wants their own paradise island.

Preloading of data.
No more streaming 3D. P2P has helped to make streaming 3D much more bearable but its still not ideal. Multi-threading may help to prevent the stuttering as the 3D is downloaded. but I still don't think streaming 3D is the way forward.

Support 3D Meshes.
Making nice organic forms out of lego isn't easy. So 3D meshes will help immensely.


I'm sorry to say that I think Second Life has gone too far along its current route. Its not really capable of giving us all the things that I've mentioned above. The saddest part is that Second Life is an incredibly sophisticated and complex program and it doesn't need to be.

Somebody could quite easily create a virtual world with all the features I've mentioned above. We don't need integrated tools for creating 3D or for writing scripts. There are already tools available that can do a much better job. Second Life is unnecessarily complex and its only a matter of time before a much simpler and more open world emerges.

I love Second Life and it frustrates me to see it walking futher and further along its path. I think its gone too far to turn back.


Lets pray that I'm wrong:

Dear Lord.

We are gathered here today in the hope that Starax really is a stupid retarded idiot who doesn't have a freaking clue what he's talking about.

Amen.


Now let us all join hands and sing like the little whining bitches that we are:

Regis!

Well, there's two words for that: distributed hosting.

It wouldn't be anywhere near as fun to fly around, though. Or to get places - without a map to navigate by it'd be like clicking on a server in GameSpy...

So what's to stop LL from tieing the distributed servers/sims into the main grid?

Security.

I know those words...but that doesn't make any sense.



Seriously, hmm...what's it gonna take to take SL primetime? I can't say I agree that SL is there, and I'm speaking as a relative newcomber, albeit one who has always wanted this kind of thing. But I don't think it's necessarily far off yet either.

What we really need is something to draw in the casual user...not Snow Crash fanatics or William Gibson-aholics...I'm not convinced that most people want to create things on their own the way many (most?) of us here do. That requires a lot of time and thought, and most people (when they come home from work) want to veg. They want to watch the episode of Law and Order they've seen twice before, have a snack and collapse.

Is there anything in SL that facilitates non-creative, low stress entertainment like this? Maybe the *ingo family? Beyond that, I don't know. We could use more amusement parks....the waterslides I've been on are fun, but they have not (generally) been part of a large scale amusement complex that is easy to find.

And that's another issue. When such non-demanding entertainments exist, they are often difficult to find. Maybe the owners and operators of clubs, parks, etc might want to form some kind of organization that fields reps to "Help Island" and the welcome areas to help shepherd newbies to various fun spots? Even a tab for "favorite places" doesn't measure up to having another user take you to those places. Maybe we already have this with the Welcome Area regulars, but they aren't really the parties most motivated to try and increase grid throughput per se.

Less lag
Better physics
Smoother vehicle driving, particularly cars and motorcycles. (a clear system of roads would be nice)
A free, LL provided library of highly detailed textures.
Simple, easy to follow directions on building, scripting, designing and/or an organized master/apprentice program.


-Kiamat Dusk

A freaking API and accessible net standards (XML-RPC out, HTTP(S) forwarding, etc).


And it needs to do my taxes, fix me dinner, and take me for long walks on the (real) beach every Tuesday.

The day we can play shuffleboard smoothly in here is a good sign. Very demanding game, that.