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.
Continue reading “Second Life Has Always Been Disrupted By New Developments”