Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town? No, neither do I! Second Life has always had a reputation for being a ghost town, which is just as well as even if they employed Scotty from Star Trek, the servers wouldn’t be able to cope with the load if the sims were even a quarter full right across the board.
When we had more inworld shops and more clubs, people complained about there being too many inworld malls and too many inworld clubs! However there was a common theme of there not being enough to do and even in the good old days of yonder, people complained that the tier was too damn high!
Avatar Central, the first store inworld created by the Lindens opened in November 2003, more stores would follow, lots more and the reason stores appeared was because stores could fund their tier via sales. Not in all cases of course, some people just did it for the love of it.
As Second Life grew, more places opened, clubs, casinos, banks and more malls. Clubs have always been considered a money pit, banks and casinos have left this virtual world due to policy changes and more likely, real world laws.
Now clubs and other ventures used to rent mall space, we’re back to stores. These rentals helped to pay for tier for places like clubs, roleplaying yadda yadda yadda, we’ve heard it all before. The Marketplace came along and blew the house down, is the view of some. Personally I don’t think it has blown the house down, I mean we’re not in a Hissing Sid has swallowed Toad scenario, not yet at least. However it has damaged the social cohesion somewhat, but that was always likely to happen at some point in Second Life.
In Second Life’s history there have been other developments that upset social cohesion, private islands being one. In a galaxy far far away, Second Life was really just mainland. Private regions disrupted that, they weren’t joined on to mainland, they were away on their own in a great ocean with no sea faring route available, they spolied the immersive nature of Second Life and split the land mass, making telportation rather than foot or road travel, the popular choice of transport.
The Open Space fiasco saw land that should have been being used for busy rentals and commercial ventures, disrupted by land that clearly wasn’t intened for those purposes, but blind eyes were turned as they sold like hot cakes, once more we had disruption.
The Adult content changes split up neighbours, force moved people to the brave new world of Ursula, well it got renamed Zindra in the end, I still think Ursula was the better name. Everytime Second Life gets disrupted like this, we lose a piece of it, but we also gain new pieces in the process.
The situation where we are today, with The Marketplace rightly the popular choice for merchants and consumers due to its ease of use, is not ideal. Social cohesion is lost, store owners used to make new friends by renting in new lands. Shoppers met new friends when shopping .. or camping which was another piece of disruption really, both when it started and when it was more or less banned. The horse has bolted here, there’s no turning back, but it would be nice if Linden Lab would hire someone with an idea of building communities, we’ve lost good people in that area such as Robin and Blondin, although in Blondin’s case he certainly had his hands tied more than Robin, but someone who values communities would be most welcome.
One of the long challenges for Second Life has been user retention. This sort of challenge is not really helped by areas like The Ahern welcome centre, where I found myself this evening after taking a landmark from an object in Governor Linden’s mansion that was labelled as a place in Clementia, I assume that landmark is way out of date, but how about going somewhere nice? Ahern is not nice, in fact it’s bloody awful and should be taken out and shot. Seriously, Ahern is an awful awful welcome centre, it should be renamed the unwelcome centre.
Second Life needs creators and it needs places that provide people with something to do. The Marketplace greatly assists with attracting creators because it’s so low cost, although creators software products and time is certainly not low cost. People providing places for people to do something are still waiting for a Linden Lab initiative to give them a leg up. The silence is deafening at the moment, the conversations need to happen though.
I read your post with interest. I joined in 2008 and got busy with other things, and came back last March; quickly became interested in modeling due to the plethora of excellent clothing and accessory designers, and have had no trouble staying busy or finding things to do. However, fashion is a very specific industry and I think there is still an opportunity for other kinds of activity.
It seems like the single best thing LL could do would be to invest in servers that could handle the big dreams people have for activities inworld. I’m currently beginning to work on an event that seems completely doable in every way, except for the challenge of “what do we do when the lag hits?” There are some things we can do to alleviate it but it requires the participation of both performers and audience. Unless you come up with some very creatively simple ways your audience can meet your requirements, you will have very few people who can participate, which means less potential ROI.
LL can’t expect investors to light the fire for them – they’re going to have to make SL inhabitable by those who could impact its economy favorably. I hope they do this before SL truly becomes a ghost town… I love my little SL universe and would be sad to lose it.
Well you’ve got to have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true!
Lots of things in Second Life are doable, finding the right balance between costs and dreams is where the problem lies.
Second Life Fashion is a great area, avatar accessories are a great market and modelling is a lot more complicated than just throwing on an outfit.
On lag, I agree with you, I think there should be more information on ways to reduce it, people don’t really understand some of the issues and they get grumpy when told their hair is horrendously inefficient, nobody likes being pointed at so lag reduction needs to be done in a polite and educational manner rather than pointing fingers.
Good luck with your ventures.
Ciaran,
Reading your article got me interested. I think you’re going to be the catalyst for me in SecondLife to do some stuff.
The possibilities are endless. There’s a new version of SAM Broadcaster coming out for DJ’s
Land is great for building but the prim count might be limited on what you can place. Be a landowner ‘and buy and sell parcels of Land.
There are Stock Brokers that are still surviving. I have had my up and downs. Yes, the Banks going down changed the goal posts. Paypal is the go for funds transfer, both in and out of world.
The SL Marketplace has lots of freebies and you can deck out your avatar with everything you need.
I’m thinking, a forest walkway with information panels that link to the web will be my next project.
Cheers,
Rusty
The possibilities are endless, although a lot of them are tempered by the tier costs but there are a lot of things we can do, such as you suggest with DJ systems, that can be beneficial, that can be a benefit to a lot of areas.
Information panels are always useful, I’m not utilising integration to the web well with my own projects, I should look into that!