Void

The biggest problem with mentors (and the half dozen other programs tried) was that they all started with promises of dedicated support, but were then just dropped... never monitored, never supported, never really given any tools or education...

all of them started off quite good, but then people just got burnt out, and BS creeped in and was never addressed or stopped. The ones that last and still do a fair amount of good are monitored and supported, but people have to discover them rather than being pointed there to begin with.

as for the "under 30 days" freebie vendors, and the idea of extra cash to customize a starting avatar? same problems... people must discover that vendor network, instead of being paired to it from the start.... first thing you do in most customizable game environments is have the opportunity to set up how you look... before you even start interacting... SL needs something like that to help drive identity with the avatar, giving them increased attachment to their character.

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- These eyes can do more than see

ac14hutson

Han Held

You're not alone, trust me.

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Drama is easy
with eyes closed
misunderstanding all you read

Penny Patton

I really don't see how mentor system can scale to replace an automatic tutorial. That's one paid person you need for every new user, from the moment they start the "mentoring tutorial" to the moment they finish up and leap forth into the grid (until the next time they need help).

I think LL should support an initiative like that, to compliment an automated tutorial, not to stand in for one.

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The Digital Pasture - SL from a cow's point of view. When the cow is also a designer.

bubblesort

I think integrating the marketplace with the new user orientation would be great! Let them make their own starter avatars. Have them age verify or not right off the bat and give them access to the marketplace with general, mature or adult access, whatever is appropriate for their age, then let them create their avatar with goods that are between a certain price range.

Of course, I see two major problems with this:

1. Merchants will game it by making alts.

2. Whoever is in charge of the marketplace is a complete fuckup. They would probably hurt the new user experience more than help it.

If the marketplace team was as competent as the team that is making the new LSL functions then this could work. It would be impossible with the people running the marketplace right now, though.

I think that dumbing down the new user experience by limiting their options like what ac14hutson described is a horrible idea, though. New users love customizing their avatar. They don't mind learning the system just to get a good avatar. It really is a situation where the new user's desire to look good overcomes a lot of learning curves.

Ann Otoole

I would consider a "Wingman Program" where LL gave some sort of non monetary compensation for LL assigning a new resident on request. And you take them aside and show them the ropes so to speak. Not a mentor program. Something like that anyway.

Mentors were just vultures sending people to their stores.

Misty Harley

Problem with any mentor program is that it's official. It creates a hierarchy in the mind of those who are mentoring (not all, but some and they ruin it for everyone else).

They really need to go back to letting the helping be done by those who have set up land just for that reason and have their own volunteers 'working' that land who want to help and assist (because anyone else is quickly discovered and booted).

And they need to promote those lands as 'first stop places' because those volunteers will and most definitely do help the new arrivals on all aspects and that includes teaching them how to shop, take the box off of their head, dance and find things that interest the new arrival to help retain them.

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Brenda Connolly

What I would like is a good basic hands on tutorial at first rez. Something that gets the essentials down in short order. Add in good documentation that can be read at my leisure. That's all I would need. You can have other options as mentioned already, but that is the minimum.

I'm not one for mentors or buddies personally, I like to learn on my own as I go. When I joined in 07, I spent about an hour and a half on orientation island and then just went inworld. I'd wander around and find quiet spots and figure things out, as well as ask people questions that I would meet. The old LL forum was also helpful for both information and making friends.

I realize I may not be typical, so there has to be more than one way for new SL users to get acclimated. I don't think there is a one size fits all solution. I would hate a rigidly structured intoduction to SL myself, but for others that would be what they need.

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Ramen Jedburgh

Side note, I would love something like this in game for apperance editing but I think it wpuld take too much work by creators.

Sort of a preview mode to appearance, and I (or the creator) can tag items by type. Like, I could tag my various hairs and shirts and shoes, etc, then go into some sort of "outfit editor" and see little preview thumbnails and then preview them on before commiting to an outfit.

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Ramen Jedburgh
Abusively Cute ^_^

ac14hutson

Im not talking remove it entirely. but just to get them started and learn the concepts of attachments and customization in sl. showing the marketplace can come later.

If you just give people the marketplace and say here you go they will get overwhelmed and most likely will not be able to find what they are looking for.

Plus you have the problems with assholes gaming the system or noobs buying "QUALITY CLOTHING VALUE PACK" or something from a shitty merchant and it ends up being just boxed freebies.

Argent Stonecutter

They could do what Amazon does when they have specials on eBooks and simply not pay the merchant.

Only half kidding there. Amazon really does that.

They could allow merchants to tag specific products as "for new chums", and get new-chum credit for those sales that can be spent on things like higher placement in the marketplace.

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Argent Stonecutter -- Skyhook Station -- Coonspiracy Store

"And now I'm going to show you something really cool."


The previous is a cybernetic datum published - in direct contravention of DoD Regulation #229RR3X3 - as being conducive to the physical, psychological and/or social well-being of the population.

Argent Stonecutter

You're not the only one.

I made a button once that read "do not press this button", and if you clicked it, you got a dialog asking whether you really wanted to, and if you said yes, you were about two billion meters up.

Left it in front of my store.

I didn't leave it out for long, but after I took it down I had a bunch of people complaining that it wasn't there any more.

Brenda Connolly

It really annoyed me when orbiting became such a capital offense. Fucking Nanny Staters, ruin everything!

Jolene Benoir

I think back to my very first days in SL. A friend had mentioned it, and off I went, just to check it out.

I was dumped into the tutorial, which I ran through pretty quickly. Get the torch, run and jump a bit. I then somehow, (I don't remember) got dropped somewhere, in which it was ultra dark (they didn't teach you how to set lighting), sounds of frogs and such, and I thought, okay, "Time to get out of here."

So I thought, "Hmm..I know NOTHING at all about this world, and it was my first experience at all with mmorpg, so I truly didn't have the first clue. I typed in trivia into the search area, and finally got to an area with people. YAY.

It wasn't the prettiest of sims, and looking back it was hideous. At some point, I met someone who introduced me to motorcycles in SL...so, I was introduced to SL physics. Someone else introduced me to scripts, particles and such.

Then, I met folks in anthropomorphous avatars, and questioned them as to how they got them. Then followed a LONG period of bopping about the grid customizing my avatar in most everything that I could think of. I remember camping, because I didn't even KNOW that I could buy lindens. I thought that was how everyone got money in this world, doing something that created lindens. I didn't have a clue what the Lindex was.

Ultimately, I met people who are still my friends, and that is what has kept me here ever since. I've tried my hand at building. I suck pretty much. But I try. I can spend hours trying to build something I see in my mind. I attended classes in hopes of learning how to build properly, and I did learn much. Bless those folks who selflessly teach the noobs.

I learned how to dj. I learned basic building. I learned basic scripting. I learned a whole lot of culture.

But still, it's ALWAYS about the people I know.

What could have been better:

Better introduction to how to change your avatar, be it thru tutorial, going directly to an avatar editing screen, or directly to locations likely to have what you are interested in, based on some selection.

Not ending up in no-man's land, or dumped into an infohub. While some are good, places like Caledon or NCI would be better suited, imo. I think that V2/3 has helped with this greatly, in allowing folks to pick sims that interest them. The only drawback there is that it would be user generated. I think it would behoove the Lindens themselves to create some interesting locations.

Better starting avatars. That's a given.

Better links to knowledge, built in. Again V2/3 has helped in this area, but I think it still lacks. Too often, learning about SL means stepping outside of SL into Google, assuming you ask the right questions, or getting info from your more experienced friends. Almost everything I learned about SL came from my fellow users, or me being interested enough to google, NOT LL. That's a negative on LL. Granted, they tend to have a hands off approach, but from a new user standpoint, I'm sure it leads to much loss of users.

Argent Stonecutter

If all orbiters worked like mine, it wouldn't have happened.

[Random Griefer wants to launch you into orbit, is this OK?]

Penny Patton

I'd say the new user experience that included the HUD was LL's nearest miss.

It as a horrible failure because it was so unreliable. You needed to perform each of the activities to proceed to the next and eventually leave the tutorial sim...but often things would just break.

A vehicle you needed to ride would be missing, or the scripts in it might have died, needing a reset that you couldn't perform. The HUD wouldn't register a task you were supposed to perform, even id you did it perfectly, even if it was as simple as standing in a specific spot.

This should have shown LL, way back then, that the tools for content creation were woefully underdeveloped. Instead of using the experience to improve those tools, they dumbed the whole thing down to a series of signs.

Argent Stonecutter

The HUD should have been self contained, not requiring you to be in any specific place, and it should have been interruptible and restartable.

I really think that for all its problems the best thing they could do would be to bring the community starting points (or whatever they called them) back.

Ramen Jedburgh

How about random monsters? People like WoW, maybe SL could be more like WoW, everywhere you go you have to fear being killed by giant wasps. Also, a reward system based on collecting trinkets. Want new hair? Go collect 25 spherical prims.

Tyabela

But but but

In the WoW starter areas these days NOTHING will attack you. SO now newbies there do the starter quests with no danger at all. Take 3 steps out of the starter zone and get flattened.

Lutrai

You kid, but it'd be a great idea. Make five different prims, NPC gives a reward of your choice of clothes. Dodge some mobs frogger style and get another reward. So on and so on, it'd also demonstrate what you can do in SL if you want to.

bubblesort

The biggest problem with a dumbed down system is that you hide content and decrease functionality. Older residents see the marketplace as a cluttered mess to go through to shop, but new users see it as a directory of amazing content.

To contrast old and new users attitudes here, consider this:

Earlier last week I ran into an ancient ('ancient' is a term she self-applied). I won't name drop, but this person is a bit of a legend in SL. She was here since the very beginning, invited by Rosedale himself. SL would not be the same today without her. She seemed like she had not logged on in years though, so she asked me to help her shop. She didn't know about mesh and a few other things so I helped her out. After a while she gave me $L2000 and asked me to just go get an outfit for her. I normally wouldn't but given her age I did it. She did this because she saw shopping as a chore.

New users are totally different. They don't mind spending hours in the marketplace because they want to see ALL the content. They love making their avatar. When professors run students through SL in a classroom they usually have to tell them to stop shopping after the first week to get them to move on, and even then students keep shopping in class stealthily, like they are text messaging or something. This is not because the marketplace design is great, it's because they love working on their avatar. Think of grand theft auto IV: You know the Lotus you can find in the one part of the city? I used to spend all kinds of time to drive across town to get the lotus to drive it everywhere. It wasn't for points or because of the car's performance. It was just because I loved that car. Others probably have their own favorite cars they would go out of their way to get. A car in GTA is like an avatar in SL. You want your favorite look. This desire is what drives noobs to shop. After a while that subsides, of course, but at least for the first week or so noobs love shopping.

After they go as far as they can with shopping then they start building to make what they want. SL is about manifesting visions. I mean, there is more to it, of course. I wouldn't discount socializing and other aspects of SL, but at the same time there is a natural progression for new users to progress from shopping to building.

So I don't think noobs get overwhelmed by content. I think they get drawn in by it.

Making noob-friendly interfaces is really bad for the learning curve. What you do there is you cut back on the functionality, which will frustrate the noob, then you create a second learning curve when the noob progresses to a full viewer. This is the problem with the 'easy mode' viewer LL put out a while back. Instead of a smooth curve leading up you get a curve going up then a dip or a plateau then a second learning curve when they transition to a full viewer. That makes more problems than it solves.

As it is they already have multiple learning curves because once they get past a certain point they will change to a TPV.

While helping this noob out (the one in the post that started this thread) I changed to phoenix to help her out for a little while so I could see what is on her screen and I am not changing back to a V2 based viewer any time soon because search in phoenix is simply too good. I use V2/3 viewers for mesh and pathfinding projects so I haven't been on a snowglobe based viewer in a very long time. I forgot how much cool stuff there was in SL because the V2/3 search is so goddamn horrible. I know the Phoenix search is going to break someday. I'm still going to keep using it until it's broken.

Also, when the noob was getting frusterated I changed her to pheonix and she loved it, right off the bat. I know we complain about the V2/3 viewer quality so I'll try not to rant about it too much but really, years after the launch and even noobs are telling us this viewer is broken is a sign that LL needs to totally roll back this monstrosity and back port all features to it, or at minimum get rid of the current V2/3 search and go back to snowglobe search. Anything less shows me that they simply do not care.

The merchants selling freebies to noobs situation is not the kind of gaming of the system that I'm worried about. That is exogenous. It can not be controlled. The gaming of the system that needs to be controlled is merchants who make an army of noobs to buy their stuff to drain LL's bank account.

Joshua Nightshade

I wish you would, since I've been in SL since its beta and I don't have the slightest idea who you could possibly be referring to.

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bubblesort

The automated tutorial could be great but I found out last night that the automated tutorial system but it does not rez. The noob I was helping could not see it so it was totally worthless. LL should have made those textures local assets so they were pre-cached and ready to go with no load time.

bubblesort

That would be a great solution to stopping merchants from making multiple new accounts to game the system. If it takes them an hour or so to go through a noob game to get enough lindens to buy something from a merchant's shop then it won't be profitable enough for them to spend time making noob accounts.

Lucifer Baphomet

give them notecards telling them how to join steam and get Gary's Mod

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