Is Linden Lab wasting its time on the existing Second Life population?

We don't exist unfazed by the actions of the Lab.

Maybe they should ask us before it's too late.

When did pleasing your current customer base become bad business practice?

The Lab is comfortable, they make money. The system crashes with less than 100,000 users logged in at once. If it was *actually* popular with the types of login numbers as WoW or Facebook it would crash and never come back within a few minutes.

So while the Lab is trying to look more appetizing to new residents, the world itself can't hold any more. So even if all new registers stick around, the system fails and only the hardcore main residents will stay through days and days of bogged down asset systems.

Remember the CSI NY/ SL tie in? So many new users joined that SL was lag city for a few days. How do you think their first experiences were? Not able to teleport, spend money, and being told in dialog menus not to do anything important with any non copy items for chance of losing inventory. I'm sure they were thrilled with this new world.

LL needs to stop manicuring the lawn and rebuild the house before the roof caves in.

Second Life vs. WoW: Our basement dwellers can kick your basement dwellers' ass.

A huge part of the problem is that Second Life is not what any self respecting company would call a "finished product". It shouldn't even be called "beta" software, let alone a final product.

SecondLife, as it currently exists, is a proof of concept. It lacks any of the professional polish you'd expect from anything more than that. Unfortunately, LL long ago saw they could throw this proof of concept out the door and make a bit of money. So they stopped development in areas where it really matters.

The content creation tools were never finished. The appearance editor lacks avatar height information, and simple proportions guides. The result of this is that SL is full of ill-proportioned giants. Combined with camera placement not featured in videogames since the late 90's, everything in SL is woefully oversized. In practical terms, this means that SL's sims are effectively half the size their size measurement would have you believe, as all those double-triple scale buildings fill up every bit of space they can.

This also means SL is capable of less impressive graphics than it can technically produce. Afterall, a bare-bones 20x20m room is going to take about four times as many prims just in structure (floors/walls/ceilings) than a 10x10m room. Meanwhile, an avatar scaled down to realistic size (by SL's own measurements) with the camera moved closer to eye level (easily done with an attachment, more easy for LL to fix right in the viewer) will find a 10x10m room every bit as spacious as your average 8' avatar with the default camera will perceive of the 20x20m room.

This is just one tiny example of how LL has dropped the ball. When you add up everything, LL has not simply dropped the ball, they have kicked it far across the field, and then began running in the opposite direction.


The new user experience is a mess. Bland, ugly, and in some cases downright crude starter avatars give new users a very poor first impression of what SL can do in terms of avatar appearance.

Equally poor new user environments hammer that home. And the moment a new user begins moving their avatar around they're treated to animations that wouldn't pass a first year art school project, let alone make it into a supposedly professional product.

LL doesn't seem to think these things matter. They're making a costly mistake, there. Graphics are a large part of SL. Poor graphics reflect poorly on it, and drive people away in large numbers. SL's orientation areas, new user spots, starter avatars, and base animations need to look like they were made by professionals. Not software engineers who dabble with prims in their spare time, or the "not worth selling" freebies of SL's content creators (don't get me wrong, a couple of the new ones are nice, but overall they're pretty poor examples of SL avatars).

The default animations need to look good, too. They don't have to be particularly fantastic or memorable, but they shouldn't be so bad that users are pretty much required to get an AO not to look like an idiot whenever they start moving.

With their new user orientation, and SL's Linden owned in-world infrastructure as a whole, Linden Lab sets the standard for what people expect out of SL's capabilities. They set the bar extremely low.

And that's just harping on the graphics LL presents new users with. The actual orientation is atrociously bad. Some time after they opened up the current orientation for new users I created an alt just to see it for myself (Something anyone should be able to do, without creating a new account.) Besides the poor graphics, the big thing that stuck out at me was that several of the tasks you have to do to complete the orientation were broken. As someone who'd been in SL for years already, I could work out how to get around that. A new user probably would log out, uninstall, and never come back.

Once you get into SL, there's no direction at all. Yes, yes, "use your imagination, seek out and create your own fun", all well and good, but not how you're going to get a confused new resident going. A significant number of residents who've been in SL for years seem like they don't know how to use Search. That's a pretty crippling problem right there, if you expect people to seek out their own fun and explore the grid.

Speaking of Search, it's no wonder people are confused by it. Each specified search tab has it's own quirks, not all shared by the other specific tabs. "Search All" runs under its own set of rules, different still from the tabs. This is not at all intuitive. It's downright off-putting to someone who has no idea what they're doing to begin with. To top it all off, you can't use meta tags, search only goes off the name of your place, or words in the description. Search all is kinda the same, but also includes items on your land, and some other funky things.

The social tools are a joke, and when you realize how important social interactions and groups are to the entire SL experience, there's no excuse for this. You can only join 25 groups? What if you're a content creator, and you need to be in a land group for every location you place vendors. Sometimes multiple groups for each location. What if you run a social area? You generally have to head up several groups for that. At least one for the staff and a different group for the visitors. Not to mention networking with other content creator groups and locations. Not to mention there's no real options for sorting contacts, and our profile options are horribly limited.

And we're still at the tip of the iceberg as far as SL's problems go. Sadly, nothing I've written in this already lengthy post is considered a problem by Linden Lab. Some Lindens have gone so far from reality as to suggest that one or two of these problems are things the open source community should fix.

Did Phillip leave his fiddle behind for M to play? I don't think the sky is falling, but LL set the cap for SL's success by letting mistakes like these flourish. The only reason they're still in business at all is that they happen to have gotten more things right than anyone else so far. Maybe no other company will even get this much right, but that won't make SL any more interesting to the broader market. It just means SL won't go down overnight.

To put it more briefly, no. LL is not "wasting their time" with current residents. The problem is that they take their current residents for granted. They are doing nothing to improve the SL experience (other than stability, where they've made huge improvements since 2006-2007).

LL needs to do all the things I mentioned, and more, to improve the SL experience. This will help them retain their current userbase (something LL's metrics show them to be failing at) while also making SL more appealing to a much broader audience.

No hangovers in SL or driving home, either :) Only problem is staying up too late at the keyboard!

Been there, done that...almost died in the process. For old farts, the appeal of virtual bacchanalia is great.

When the Millennials get cubed inside an office, Scott, they'll start sneaking online to play after hours.