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.<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n