The Help Island Sandbox

... is getting REALLY crowded. Is there a reason why there's a huge couch setup thing in the center? Or a big yellow duck vehicle? Or a fountain thingy? Or a gigantic Christmas house?

If we are supposed to teach newbies how to clean up after themselves after rezzing prims we're not doing a good job of it.

The Help Island sandbox can show newbies what can be done with SL tools, but its main purpose (as I understand it) is so newbies can play around with the building tools. From what I'm seeing, the overwhelming majority of stuff littered around there belongs to Mentors.

Please pick up after yourselves.

Is there also any good reason why mentors should be selling things there?

I swear, if I see any mentor doing that I WILL shoot...

This has been driving me nuts too. For the longest time, there was a copy of Francis Chung's car there, which was irritating on so many levels that my blood pressure went up just seeing it. It was on all the time, so the noise of the engine etc was annoying when close to it, it looked as though it would allow you to drive it, even handed out a HUD if you clicked on it, then wouldn't.

It seems to me that things like that are anti-educational, and confusing for new people passing through Help Island. If you put down a free-to-copy vehicle that can help new people to get the hang of how a car works, that seems fine to me. If you put down a copy of a car which is thousands of Lindens to buy, which confuses the hell out of someone who thinks that it is their stupidity which is preventing them from driving it, and not the fact that the car can only be driven by its owner, it isn't fine.

I would like to see a lot more organisation of the freebies and material left on Help Island. I think it ought to be controlled by a panel of mentors/greeters/Lindens rather than anyone being free to drop stuff all over the place. Some of the stuff in some of the boxes already left on the new help island build are my free to copies, which someone else has put in a box and made no longer modable. In the case of jewellery this makes NO sense...I make all my jewellery modable, whether it is buyable or free to copy, because avatar shapes and sizes vary so much. I hate the idea that people might think I was stupid enough to make jewellery no mod. I think that people should only leave items they have made which are fully copy/mod/trans on Help island, and they should mark them share with group to enable other mentors to move them too.

I am convinced that some of the "free to copy" items are the result of the perms bug...I could well be wrong about that.

I think there should be some quality control too, because some of the items are definitely shoddy.

My feeling is that the jumble sale/garage sale approach, which can be exciting for some people, giving them the feeling that they may find a bargain, is off-putting for 10 times more. It encourages people to fill up their inventory with useless junk, much of it likely to breed like tribbles.

The other gripe I have is about the different ways of getting stuff out of boxes...if this were presented by way of a tutorial...here you can buy for 0 dollars...here you can take a copy of the box and then learn how to get stuff out of boxes...here you can buy a copy of the contents of the box, which will be put into a folder in your inventory...it wouldn't be so bad or confusing, but having all these different methods just any old how in the same place is mightily confusing. I spent one session of a couple of hours doing nothing but explaining what it all meant to a series of new people. Either we should have a formal training section on boxes and their contents, or all the people leaving copyable stuff on Help Island should use the same convention.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest!
Happy New Year!
Cali

I fully agree with Cali: we need both a commitee supervising the quality and placement of freebies and definitely following some conventions. As I see it now, it is like every man for himself, and this kind of disorganization isn't good for helping newbies.

Funny thing, Cali... this gives me further justification to ask Fran (again) why:

1) Her car can't be muted
2) There is no guest pilot mode when the Owner isn't seated

Hehehe funnily enuff, I asked her these things awhile ago! But she's a good spirit and maybe we'll see those added at features.

More shareable vehicles in SL sure would be nice...

We have share vehicles at our Islands we had made custom by quite a few designers special. Please feel free to come try them. We have lots of items, but do not keep all of them out at one time. If there is some-type you would like to see here, let us know.
Sim names are Escape , and Enchanted. Boats, cars, formular1 racecars, go-karts, planes, jets, hovers, helos, hydrofoils. Just look around, they are all over. Also on Enchanted is a full sim racetrack. Enjoy, and by all means, if you know of some cool item, let us know, and we will consider getting it for everyone to play with. Hugs, Megz Xevious

Well that was my copy there that made your blood boil so Caliandris. So sorry
It was unlocked therefore the various options and demo modes could be played with as well as shutting it off so it wasn't always on and annoying you. It wasn't my fault it couldn't be guest piloted but I gave many a new folk rides in it and had a great time doing it.

No worries, it's gone as am I from the group. Good day.

edit to add: I am still amazed at how high the horses are, that a lot of you ride.

Sorry to see you go.
I thought that the new Linden plan to include a few "Evil Mentors" kind of spiced up the group a bit.

Uhm, thanks I guess

Just so it doesn't get 'spun', it was my decision after some LL faux paus IMHO.

A floating class area and other room (out of chat range) have been placed over the Sandbox.

The reason for the X,Y location was to automatically return noobie builds and to allow mentors and such to build.

The Z was to.. well keep it out of the way.

If you get a group of 3 or more noobies all asking about one thing feel free to hold a class.

Sorry Caliandris. I don't mean to get you upset

I've never been to Help Island before, so all I can say is that it wasn't me that left it there. :\

BUT, if there's noone driving it, and the owner didn't lock the car, you can turn it off by touching it and following the pop-up menu.



Okay, what I was thinking was this:

1) I wanted it to feel like a "real" vehicle as much as possible. You can't drive around your RL car with the sound muted - I wanted this to carry over as much as possible - I want people to think of it as a car as much as SL will allow you within reason.

2) You wouldn't want someone to drive off with your car when you're not looking would you?

....Although, that could be fun GTA: SL!

Wellllllll you know what I'll say to #1, but for #2, could it be a choice? You could enable it so ANYONE could drive, even if you're not around. And if that's not to your fancy, just switch it off.

Alrighty. There's a ton of good reasons to keep semi-perm mentor stuff there. Let's get it moved a bit though. The Christmas tree and the gifts are are fine where they are (so is Sim Invaders, IMO). Let's get the rest of the objects moved towards the edges and try to keep the middle of the sandbox clear. I'll get some hedges put up to minimise the number of vehicles landing in the bay, and perhaps we can make some room for newbies to rez a vehicle and drive it

Also, some of our more enterprising newbies are interested in trying their hands at bigger things. Let's give them the space to do that. Or at least room to walk without colliding with something

I noticed something for sale there last night. Probably not a good idea.

let's face it HI is still in its basic stage, there's going to be things happen and looked at and studied, its called growing pains

Well Lecktor, if you choose to take this personally I can't stop you, but I am confused because the car appeared to belong to someone else. That's weird.
Shan't name them as it was the general principle of having things that would confuse newbies about, which I was sounding off about, not you, your car or even that car alone.

I remember very clearly what it was like to be new in Sl and not to understand what I was doing. Opening boxes stumped me then for a while, if I were new, then HUDs and their variants would be one of the things I would take a while to understand. I don't think there should be things in Help Island which confuse new people - the whole point of it is to help, not to confuse.

Sorry if you feel that's a high horse. I think it is trying to make it better for the newbies so that they aren't stumbling around believing themselves to be at fault.

The other day I went to Help Island and found someone convinced that their English was terrible. I called for help and a Spanish-speaking mentor because he was convinced he was lacking in understanding. Turns out the ball was wedged beneath the table in Orientation Island. That wasn't anyone's fault, but it had convinced him that he was unable to understand the instructions and therefore that his English wasn't up to the task of being in SL. Surely you can see that exactly the same thing may happen if you put out things which can apparently be used, and then can't be?
Cali

I was the best substitute that could be found at the time for a Spanish-speaking mentor, viz. a Babelfish expert! I don't know who was more embarrassed after that event, me or the very nice newbie who managed to converse pretty well after the initial problem had been resolved.

I'm adding my voice to the ones asking for clarification all round. I feel extremely stupid when I tell a newbie how to open a box, only to find that the one they've chosen has been set up differently, and I am almost as flummoxed by suddenly-appearing objects with no explanations attached as to purpose or means of use.

How does it help new arrivals if we the helpers are floundering around like ninnies in treacle?

I agree. As Help Island develops, it seems to me to be a place that attracts mostly people who want a structured or in depth learning experience. The others seem to cruise on by. Perhaps the Help Island experience can be similarly structured?

I know that I have little time to mentor lately, and to hang out on Help Island feeling dumb and not knowing what to do is annoying.

I feel I spend my time more productively mentoring in the old WA at this point. At least there is conversation going on there and all the wild activities are a good place to start explanations about a variety of things.

As a one day-old newbie, I bought a pair of earrings which came in a box. I tried and tried to figure out how to take the contents out. I did manage to figure out how to wear the box on my head, that was easy.
After several attempts I decided to 'wear' the box on my head at the WA to see just how long it would take to get help without asking. I wore the box for about 5 mins until a mentor, Kevin Kline I think it was, came up to me: "you need help"? And we walked to a sandbox.
The first time I wore the box at the jewelry store, I was mortified, I felt like I had a neon sign which read: "noob, noob, noob..." After a while, I felt it was hilarious and the rest is history.
Nothing important about my post, just something Cali mentioned about our trials as noobs.

I 'write' fluent Spanish, if you guys need me and I'm in game, give me a shout.

My native tongue is spanish... i don't need no steenkeen babelfish LOL

If you need backup with spanish speaking users, gimme a shout.

I think the lindens should deed help island or at leat the sandbox and the tutorial area so SPECIAL TRUSTED mentors can get rid of junk that's not needed. Also i think there needs to be an AUTO RETURN TIME set for the Tutorial section.