Virtual Worlds – Page 271

October 4, 2011October 4, 2011

NPC’s Likely Next Year

Rodvik has blogged with too much bold and spelling realise with a Z. This from a man who likes curries and football is not good, he needs a visit home! The blog post is a chirpy upbeat post reporting the best number of new signups for four years in August and that Linden homes are now at record levels too.

Other news includes trying to improve service response times with expanded staffing, which is good news and viewer changes to merge advanaced and basic modes, which is a hmmm we’ll wait and see. The biggest positive about this post is that it didn’t include and price rises or majorly bad news, although traditionally they come at the end of October, full sim price rises were announced near the end of October 2006 and The Openspace fiassco kicked off near the end of October 2008, not until we’re well into November will we be able to breathe a sight of relief!

The big news for me though was the talk of artificial life and NPC’s, although testing won’t start until December on this, it’s something I’m keen to see.

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October 3, 2011October 3, 2011

Beware Of Geeks Bearing Gifts

Controversy continues to surround Stroker Serpentine’s full perm release of his Sexgen V5. There are certainly grey areas when it comes to intellecutal property rights, with three other creators involved, Corsi Mousehold, Briggi Bard and Craig Altman.

Craig Altman has commented over at SLUniverse that he has not granted permission for his animations to be released full perms:

“The animations in this item of mine are being used against license, I have no agreement with Stroker for them to be given out in copy and transfer perms.”

Corsi Mousehold talked to The Alphaville Herald the other day and suggested his animations shouldn’t be part of the package:

“I could DMCA but in SL things can spread like wildfire. I would have to DMCA every single person I find that is giving it away. That’s a nightmare.”

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September 30, 2011September 30, 2011

The Wonder Of You

TechRadar has a fairly balanced article regarding what happened to Second Life and where it’s heading, which you can read here. What I like about this article is that it doesn’t end by saying Second Life is going nowhere, it also has quotes from people like Tateru Nino and current Linden Lab CEO RodVilla Humble.

The article is realistic, there was too much hype, big brands thought they could come in, build something and people would come. I have long maintained that the big brands should have intergrated more, I understand that this is tricky in a user generated content world, they lose some control and maybe didn’t want their brand side by side with a store with a huge phallus on the top of the building (I saw stores like this when I first arrived and they made me cringe). However brands should have been looking to sponsor more gigs, sponsor art galleries, plant adverts in sims, generally engage with the Second Life public.

Then there’s the issue of the learning curve and whereas more experienced Second Life users find it hard to understand that the learning curve is steep, it simply is for many people. I joined Eve-Online earlier in the year for a while, they have superb tutorials, they email you with more tips when you’re new, Eve-Online has a steep learning curve too but they do try harder to keep new users engaged with those tutorials but in a user generated world where Linden Lab have less control than the creators of a world like Eve-Online, it’s harder to guide people.

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