All Around The Grid

I’m going to take a moment here for a slightly more serious post.

I’ve been using the same account in Second Life, off and on, for three years plus now.  The one main consistent problem with the whole Second Life world is “user retention”.  There was a period where Linden Labs was touting how many millions of users they have.  The problem is that at any given time the peak number of actual user accounts is maybe 100,000 – 200,000.  Basically, it’s a small fraction of the total number of registered accounts.  Also, which accounts are “active” fluctuates constantly.

And what counts as “active”?  If a person logs on once for an hour then never returns, technically that was an “active account” for that month.  And how much consideration had been put into alternate accounts?  That is, people with more than one account, or people with bot accounts that they use as store models?  I have I think 5 accounts total myself.  I’ve seen text only viewers designed mostly for store model bots so you can run 4 or 5 instances on one machine without the performance hit.

The point is, “newbies” tend to get frustrated or lost and never return.  The problem is, that there doesn’t really seem to be any good clear resources for new players, despite that there are a ton of resources out there.  I suppose the other problem is that there isn’t an easy explanation to “what do I do now”?

Second Life is different things to different people.  Some people use it solely as a glorified IRC chat.  Their AV may look ugly but they don’t need it to be pretty, they are just chatting via text.  Others like the visual social aspect and will want a pretty AV so they can “dance” at clubs or even just explore interesting regions with friends.  Others use ti for building and creating.  I’ve been to several SIMs that were beautifully crafted abstract works of art.  Not just parcels or objects but entire SIMs that don’t have any other real purpose than to be pretty.

Regardless of what you use Second Life for, one thing that almost every user needs is money.  Specifically Linden Dollars (L$).  There are two main ways to acquire money.  You can buy it directly using real world currency.  This is easy and likely the way you’re going to get any sort of useful initial amount.  You can also build and sell in world good or services.

This tends to present the largest hurdle.  Truth be told, I sometimes don’t understand why other than it’s possible that, despite the supposed age restrictions, most of SL’s population isn’t old enough o own a credit or debit card.  For $10 US dollars, you can get yourself 3000 – 4000 L$.  As long as you shop around and are smart with your money, this will take you a LONG way.  It’s an investment I probably make once a year.

However I do have some added benefits that others don’t get that skews my money perspective in world.  You see, Linden Labs used to GIVE basic accounts a weekly 50L stipend.  At one point, the use of alternate accounts to funnel these stipends into one account became somewhat rampant, so Linden Labs did away with the weekly stipend.  I imagine their long term goal of ramping up the popularity of the world also made this free money less cost effective.  When they did away with the stipend, any account created before was grandfathered in and still gets their money each week to this day (provided they log in once a week).  I still get a stipend on my main account.  It’s part of why I keep my main account despite that I occasionally wish I had a better name.  It “seemed like a good idea at the time”.

Anyway, I can see why they did away with the stipend.

One thing I do wish they would do though is either get rid of the upload cost, or give each account say, 5 free uploads per month.  This would encourage creativity among new players.  Right now it costs 10L to upload an image, animation, or whatever.  I also see why this is in place.  These uploads cost storage space for LL.  With no cost to upload, people would upload loads of junk willy nilly.  Making it cost money eliminates needless uploads.  On the other hand, 10L is a lot for one account who’s primary source of income is camping chairs.  Sure, you can build all you want for free, but you’re unlikely to sell anything without a decent texture or animation attached.

An alternative solution would be to incorporate a “preview upload” function into the normal viewer.  That is, it uploads, but only locally and only you can see the texture when applied to an object.  I’m pretty sure that there are alternative viewers that do this.  Basically, the idea is that you know your texture will look good.  I was building a car once and only after I uploaded all of my textures did I discover that the alpha was incorrect and the whole thing was covered in ugly purple borders.  Great, now I’m out a ton of L$ with useless textures.  I had a mess of shirts once that had a similar issue where they turned out to be translucent despite looking proper in Photoshop.  Thankfully I had previewed these on my OpenSIM server where I can upload for free all I want.

There’s also the issue of making sure logos and graphics on shirts look ok when applied to a curved Avatar shape.  Something not easily judged in Photoshop.  The point is, textures are an important part of selling, and getting them right on the first try is tricky.  Trial and Error can get expensive fast.

Anyway, allowing a limited number of “free uploads” each week would allow new players to explore the process of building and possibly allow them the ability to sell merchandise to make money.  Or even just allow them to make their own outfits as opposed to buying them.  If it’s “uploads” instead of “free L$” it discourages the creation of alt accounts specifically for money funneling.

I’ll go ahead and wrap up there though I have other idea and suggestions of what could make the experience better.  This post is getting rather long however.