How much do first impressions count?

Ingird,


Do you honestly expect every new resident to search high and low in SL, under every rock, thong and whorehouse for the 5-10 talented people who might actually talk to them? Do you really think that is what the new user experience is like?


"Wow I just read this BBC article. I am off in search of Cory Edo so I can meet and greet some great artistic SL talent"

Reality is Cory is on a privat island working trying to meet a deadline and has no time to talk to some noob and the noob can't even see her online because she is on a private island. So they head to the Barbie Club and get a virtual BJ, cause the hookers are always available in SL, but they aren't free!

How hard is it to find a sandbox?




Since when is visiting Cory a prerequisite for anything? (not that I don't love Cory but she does smell a bit)

Thinkers, Digital Cultures, and weekly "church meetings" (philosophical discussion, but we do it in the Kirche) in Neualtenburg do it for me, aside from talking with friends... but understandably, that only works for someone like me who loves that sort of thing. None of those are particularly well hidden, though.

I'm currently involved in two collaborations. Neualtenburg, of course, and the Squidsoft Collective's SL projects... which, sadly, being in a state of construction I can't mention just yet. There I'll give it to you - Squidsoft is a bunch of friends and we're keeping it under our hats until we're finished.

secondlife://Sandbox_Island/128/128/36

I as using a simple example. It seems resonable that people may read news articles and decide to try SL based on the cool things written up about SL. *shrug* The majority of people who are in SL and aren't AFK are working on shit and usually don't have time for chit chat.

The few times I have been in sandboxes there has always been some disaster and I had to call a Linden. I wouldn't find that a great first impression.

We can just agree to disagree at this point. The average new user is not going to seek out a sandbox., How in the hell are they supposed to know about sandboxes? Using the interface they are likely going to check out popular places, and we all know what that list looks like.

We can pretend that SL is this great budding land of artistic and intellectual exploration and development when the reality is mostly pixel sluts and slots.

or are actively chit-chatting.



Hint: Orientation and the new Help Island, IIRC, have directions to the sandboxen.



Why one or another? Why not both? The Earth includes both Las Vegas and the Louvre, Yellowstone and Disneyland.

I own a gallery full of classical artwork in SL (and maps). I sell the paintings and maps for 40L$. All of the artwork I sell is public domain--either pre-1923 (and I check on each piece), or in the case of my maps and space art, created by a US government agency (NASA, CIA, NOAA, USGS).

Please explain to me how my gallery is "stealing" anything from anyone? If you can't, then I would appreciate an apology.

Are you serious? This is your definition of direction? This is a prime example of why the new resident experience sucks so freaking much in SL. You are using IIRC as an example of how to get information that should be readily available within the interface, and the resources on Orientation and Help island are grossly under utilized by the aver age new user.


I don't think it has to be an either this or that situation. I also think to deny the fact that the most popular places in SL, the places the interface point you to are not likely to paint SL in the best light. If we want to keep pretending they do, then fine.

He didn't mention you or your gallery by name. Guilt?

So I take it you believe that using art in the public domain is stealing as well? Why?

I'm not completrely disagreeing with you about this either. But the guy who wrote the article was pretty set on presenting only one angle. But it still is a great budding land of artistic and intellectual exploration for some, maybe not the majority. You either find your niche in sl and enjoy it, or find it pointless and move on like you have to WOW and like Kris Ritter has to Eve Online. Both games don't interest me in the least but I'm sure some people enjoying clubbing gnomes to death and flying in spaceships. To each their own.

and the great thing about Second Life is that you can do both. You can club gnomes to death while actually being inside a spaceship!


* offers Ingrid a teleport *

Just to clarify, I was perfectly at home in SL and loving every minute of it. Up until 1.6. Now it's virtually unusable for me, and support won't help. That's why I 'moved on'. It wasn't my choice. I didn't find SL pointless at all, and I thought it was very much my niche until it stopped being usable and I had hundreds of dollars of inventory content destroyed and a sim full of weeks of building work ruined for me. Although admittedly that DID take some of the magic out of it.

* clubs a gnome that got into my spaceship *

I like the potentional of SL and last year I spent a lot of my personal free entertainment time trying to make it a better place. Then I decided it was pointless because LL doesn't seem to really care about making SL a compelling place to interact with other people, they seem to just be chasing money with no vision and no direction. I still enojy SL just in limited amounts. I just feel that if people really don't start making an effort at making SL a better place it is going to die a slow miserable horrible death. Denying the fact there are some real issues doesn't help improve SL.


I like to kill my dwarfs with fire, clubbing isn't my thing

yeah that might do it for me too. Did you make HELL? If you did, I was cursing you as a newb, a friend tp'ed me there and I couldn't find my way out. It was really hellish.

Yeah! she tried to get me working down there. Why she chose me I'll never know. Like I'd know what hell was like.

Anyway, I thought it seemed a little too traditional for me. If I was to create hell. It'd probably be a white room with a TV playing commercials all day long.

Or trapped in the "Is SL a RPG?" thread!. OH MY GOD!!

Man, I see Eboni's and Ingrid's points both pretty well. (Especially about the part where I smell. PS: Its not just a little.)

I only have my own new user experience to draw upon, and this was over a year ago now. I logged in, got myself out of n00b clothes at Orientation Island, spent an uncomfortable few minutes at the old Welcome Area (uncomfortable because I didn't know anyone and I had never been in an online game before, ultra-n00b), and went teleporting to anyplace that looked like a tropical island. I found a place that was reasonably well-done (for the time period) and WOW lookit that, a fake penis. OMG it talks. OH HEY here I am doggy-style, that's kooky, ha ha. No people around.

Now - the only reason I knew to teleport places was because I poured through the old .PDF "user's manual" that used to be available. Is that even still around? If so, has it been updated?

If another person had had the exact same initial experience I had, I could easily see them writing off SL - especially if they had been in other online games/worlds before. For me, the astonishment that this was all user created kept me around and kept me addicted.

Whatever keeps people around is going to vary from person to person, and while there isn't any real way to make SL attractive to everyone within that first 5 minute time period, it might behoove LL to do some n00b testing. Grab 20 people that have never heard of SL, make sure they come from all backgrounds and skill levels. Pay them for their time and have 'em come into the office, set them up with a Linden at their side, and just watch them as they go from reading about SL to setting up an account to logging in, messing with the appearance setup, and wandering around the main grid. Write down their questions! Pay attention to their complaints!

All of us in here are coming from the viewpoint of the active (or formerly active) SLer. We already know the ropes, the backstories, the limitations and possibilities. Time to get the word direct from the fresh faces that don't know SL from squat to figure out how we can put our best face forward.

And if they still hate it, its probably not for them. Not everything is.

Yup. That was me

If ya wanna reminisce, I have some screenies here. There's also a subgallery with a few shots of the Waterworld sim I started building a month or so before 1.6.

Unfortunately, on the day of 1.6, all the pieces of my build reset their texture scale and orientations, and right clicking to edit them resulted in a client crash. And they still do! I have copyable unscripted prims in my inventory called 'Client Crasher'. And most effective they are too. Philip and Kelly have had copies of them since 1.6 too.

</offtopic whine>

Did I name you, Carl? Did I say a damned thing about legal stuff? No, I did not.

EDIT: Okay, I suppose "classical artwork" might imply that, but then... photographs have copyright, too; your stuff seems mostly okay, and you seem to try and use high-quality sources.

I'm still mystified by jumping to the conclusion I'm talking about you, Carl, when the only thing of yours I know of is your builder's grid.

Probably a very good idea.

PS you still smell though

SL is a shock to most.... they come from places that have set goals to achieve. Since SL has no set goals many are lost and confused. We can only explain this to new rezzies but it takes their own realization of how SL is.

I remember my first day, believe it or not the WA was empty I just started to explore, try things, read the old manual and finally ran into a few people. All were very helpful and made me feel comfortable.

SL is different for each individual, we can only help by telling new rezzies of our own experiences.

That explains everything. It is clear that God decided to smite you for making any reference to that horrible movie.

When you start throwing words like "stolen" around you are saying something about legal stuff.



I'm not selling copyrighted photographs. Copyright law requires some degree of originality for something to be copyrightable. A photograph of a public domain image--that exactly reproduces that image--is not copyrightable. Otherwise owners of artwork that has entered the public domain could enforce a de facto eternal copyright by claiming copyright of the photographs of the artwork. Please see Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.



It ought to be. I've gone to a great deal of effort to:
1) Use the best sources I could find,
2) Only upload images that were clearly no longer protected by copyright,
3) Exactly match the proportions of the prim the image is placed on with the proportions of the artwork,
4) Use as high a resolution as is practical given the limitations of the SL client and asset server,
5) Explicity label all artwork with the name of the artist, the title of the piece, and the date of creation (though this is not always avaliable for every US Government image), and
6) Price the artwork reasonably (40L$ per piece--a whopping FIFTEEN CENTS US).

I did this because I love art and wanted to provide an alternative to all the places selling ripped-off artwork from living artists still covered under copyright. I don't make a huge amount of money on my galleries. Were it not for the strong sales of my builders grids, I doubt I could make them worth the money. (We will see, I've put one in a new mall without the grid.)



You cited "uploading low-res JPGs of classical artworks and selling them" as an example of theft. As far as I know, I'm running the only gallery dealing in that sort of thing.

You're so not.