Fantasy Faire 2011 is over, and it ended with a bang because I went to an event on Sunday only to find they’d locked my chief Elf in a magical prison and were demaning bail money for her to be released! I toyed with the idea of leaving her in there. However this was bad timing, because at the same time I received a note to inform me that the Pirates wouldn’t recognise the new Queen and had occupied the lighthouse, then a dragon upset a unicorn and I found myself looking at a pool of blood, which looked like it needed CSI to investigate, a mermaid swam past too ….
Yes I was back on my RP sim to catch up on all the happenings, and really, I go away and they let lots of things happen, which is great. However I’m also finding myself enthused about doing things in Second Life again, I’m just not sure what!
Building is usually a soothing inworld hobby, until prim drift strikes. Clothing creation is not a soothing inworld hobby, and really, clothing designers, how the hell do you have so much patience, even photographs for vendor boxes are a pain in the arse. Scripting is bleh, I like scripting but it’s not soothing.
However I’m going off on a tangent here because what I really want to talk about is events, or rather a lack of easy to find good information about events in Second Life. Basically, events promotion is pretty rubbish. The reasons for this are many, spammy event listings meaning people don’t find the official events list easy to read, a lack of an events forum on the official site, and really, we should have an events forum on the official site, the current one is to discuss events, not to promote them.
However what’s missing really is a feature rich events listing, due to the nature of Second Life, a What’s on Guide isn’t that useful, although that’s what we need, if I had the time I’d try and produce a What’s on style blog, but it would be extremely time consuming, as Hamlet Au points out over at New World Notes. I agree with Hamlet that a good events guide needs to be mechanised, but how one goes about doing this is problematic, maybe if LL would let us tap into their events system and get some sort of feed out, that would have potential.
The thing with events is that they drive the social side of Second Life, they answer the question about what to do next and whilst the events system functioned, LL decided fixing it was low priority and many would agree that in terms of priority it’s low compared to lag and performance, but, it’s a very important area of Second Life, people need to be able to find out what’s going on, when it’s going on and how they can join in.
So anyone got any good ideas on promoting events, or know of any good blogs, inworld magazines or huds that promote events?