Grazing?

Joseph I totally agree with you that SL is about the people and that's what makes it so interesting. It would be a huge mistake for us to use NPC's to do tasks that are way better done by people such as sales and event hosting.

But I disagree with the blanket statement that ALL NPC's are automatically bad. What do you think of our web controlled avatar known as DTV? The real point of DTV is to give non-SL'ers a window into the world so they get excited and want to sign up and log in.

She's been great at streaming SL events to the web for casual onlookers and people who can't get to work. Her video feed is also often fed back into SL so people can watch an event from another location.

While the concept and practice of streaming SL out onto the web, and even back into SL itself is interesting and could quite easily lend itself to a number of creative functions with valid, viable uses, using it to entice people may not be in and of itself the best idea. While I understand the technical limitations involved in such an endavour, I also immediately recognize the limited view of Second Life DTV offers. As it stands, DTV is an avatar shaped television camera and cannot properly convey the amount and type of intereaction that SL is based on.

SL as it stands is already littered with "revolving door" residents. People who see it somewhere or hear about it in some form, show up, look around, and leave. I fear DTV may be another outlet. People may view DTV amnd believe they are looking into a non fantasy version of Bethesda's Oblivion, or an Online GTA knock off. A Large percentage of our resident numbers is composed of people who get interested, sign up, and log in......and then vahmoose after a few visits.

SL, I believe, is a platform that should be approached by those who know exactly what it is and exactly what they're looking for. And that's something that that I feel is accomplished by research and consideration. DTV is a great tool for touching the curiousity and feeding one's need for entertainment....but how well does it function as an informative as to the structure and "world" or Second Life?

Personally i wud place money on the fact this thread

/327/7e/154126/1.html

and this thread

/128/59/150018/1.html#post1375774

are in someway related to LibSL yet again, i have put links from this thread to others so draw ur own conclusions but its the libSLs group MO well some of them anyway

Go figure

Peace

I fundamentally disagree that SL is a place for the ELITE kewl kids who have done their due dilligence. I call shenanigans. This is a place for everyone.

On top of that, the rate of people coming to SL is not going to slow down, so my goal before I turn SL 3 (August this year) is to help make Second Life more mainstream friendly.

I think DTV provides a great window into Second Life, you can chat back and forth from the web and enjoy social experiences. Check out an event like this Tuesday's 4 Eyed Monsters Event to see what a good experience DTV can actually be from the web. People will chat back and forth from SL to the web and can ask questions and overall enjoy the event. Some may have tried SL and left already but are big fans of the Sundance Channel will tune into SL and check it out (we saw this during NBC events).

It will be even better when residents can schedule DTV to show up to their own events, then their will be less "dead air" or more showing off the intersting possibilities of Second Life.

This NPC debate has been going at least since 2004 and at the first SLCC, Cory O asked the crowd who would welcome NPC's into Second Life and almost everyone raised their hands. Cory was noticably stunned.

Retention rates will get better. How many people started and abandoned blogs years ago only to come back around and regularly blog today? The tools will get better, and residents will continue to come up with creative solutions to let new users find fun things to do.

If I understand what DTV is, and from what I know of libSL, the two are incompatible since libSL can't draw what it "sees" so you're still stuck with the official SL viewer for that.

Using NPCs for tasks doesn't appeal to me either. When I walked into the new ETD build there was someone greeting and offering help which is a nice change from most other stores, but only because I know it's a real, actual person. If it was an NPC avie, I'd find it just as annoying as those "helpful" flying robot thingies that swarm around you and follow you around some stores.

If LL doesn't want to add an llInviteToGroup() for whatever reason (possibly spam) then using a different method to achieve the same thing isn't helpful, but working around something that was never meant to be possible.

I didn't say that. I said it should be approched by those who know what they're looking for and what SL offers. It's nothing to do with being "elite" or one of the "kewl kids". A person looking for a great multiplayer first person shooter might want to invest in a Halo or Battlefeild 1942 or some such....not Everquest. Someone looking to go on long, rewarding quests with like minded Adventurers, slaying mythical beasts and reaping the rewards of such may be better suited to said Everquest or World or Warcraft. I don't believe either of those people would find what they seek in SL, same way they wouldn't find what they're looking for in the counter mentioned games.

A lot of transients come thru simply to see what's what. They show up, have a look around, say "Cool...but not my bag." And move on. Others come in, stay a while, try to figure out what to do and how, then leave, frustrated at the notion that there's no discernable goal. Making SL "more mainstream" isn't a matter of exposing it to a wider audience as Video games and comic book movies both have commercials that run in prime time, yet nether video games nor comic books would be considered mainstream. Making SL more mainstream in essence, would have to start internally, changing around the way it works and it's primary function. Once people can access SL and use it to quickly and easily find information on a variety of subjects from astro-physics to anime theme songs...then it will become more mainstream. As is stands, SL is by and large a massive online community, with it's own ingrained set of rules and codes of conduct.

The internet as a whole, by and large, functions as a mainstream entity because it has a sole purpose of the retention and distribution of knowledge and information quickly and easily to anyone who has access. As a side effect of sorts, online communities spring up in the form of forums, chat rooms, massively multiplayer online games, MUDs, so on and so forth. As it stands, SL is inverse to this, as it is at it's core an online comminity, with a side effect of users being able to sometimes discern knowledge and information about various subjects from others. And while I may be completely off base and soon proven wrong about the subject, I honestly cannot see a way in which NPCs can help make SL more mainstream. Can they help get the word out? Without question. Can they help increase sign up numbers? No doubt. Will they help SL become more acceptable and ingrained in the daily lives of society? Doubtful. Extremely doubtful.

A massive knowledge of something does not in turn make it mainstream...only it's acceptance by and usefulness to society as a whole. We currently have 2.4 million residents with 844 thousand having been logged in within the last 60 days. Not even trying to shave the numbers to account for various alts, that's about what? 27-30%? Let's say in the next 5 years SL's population increases by a factor of 10. 24 million residents, 8.4 million per 60 days. Let's even increase the retention ratio to an even 50%. So you now have 12 million users in logging into your system at least once every two months.

According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm (provided I'm reading the charts correctly and the numbers are accurate) there are over a billion people who regularly use the internet. At 12 million regular users, that would still put SL as only reaching 1% (give or take) of the world internet population.

If that's what's considered mainstream......fine. But with the way SL is designed and structured now, I don't see it as being the type of platform that goes mainstream easily. I can see it becoming massively popular easily, but mainstream? Not so much.








(Upon finishing this post and re-reading it and all my babble...I figure I shout shut up and get back to the question(s) at hand.)

1. How will NPCs make SL more widely accepted?

2. How can NPCs enrich the SL experience?

1. How will NPCs make SL more widely accepted?

it wont. as stated earlier by another poster it will give griefers and the more "first person shooter types" escuses to shoot at people and use the "i thought it was an NPC" blanket to hide under. imo, SL is a place to create, build, and the like. if people want NPC's then go back to WoW.


2. How can NPCs enrich the SL experience?

unless it can be used to inform, teach, help or enrich ones SL experience, its just data base clutter. cute, but serves no purpose this is not to say who ever created them is just makin a mess(were they on a farm like sim? a ranch?) but to create NPC's for the sake of creating them then abandoning them for others to discover is as i said earlier database clutter. NPC's are basically used as target practice, imho.

as for SL becoming mainstream? lets see if it can handle the numbers needed first.

if you really want to see how nps change things look at activeworlds
when bots came to AW it changed everything, ballbot was reveloutionary!
im sure there are things ppl will use them for that you can never imagine yet,
maybe as police to eject ppl that are shooting on your land for example....
NPCs are not only moving targets...
-LW

I disagree, because it's very difficult to know what SL is about before you try it. Before joining in, I had read the information on this website, a couple of articles, and browsed through a few blogs. I had a rough idea of what it was, but the experience in-world was... well, much better than what I expected.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure other people, after reading the blogs and building their own expectations, were disappointed on trying it. Maybe some were impatient, or some had read misleading articles... but more simply, some realised it "wasn't their bag". You can't really know whether SL is for you or not if you haven't tried it.