Phoebe Avro

Depending what AV a person picks during the sign up, I would have different themed welcome centers, so if you picked the goth AV you would land in a Gothic themed welcome center!

Now if LL asked me, for a small fee i would build them a low lag great looking welcome center with space to put their blurb^^

Adeon Writer

The tutorial I had when joining had me customizing my avatar's appearance, learning how to search inventory and equip things, had a basic building tutorial, learned how to use the world map - there was even a quiz at the end to make sure you understood these concepts before you left.

That was 2007.

The current tutorial does none of these things. That's why you find newbies these days why have never opened their inventory, modded their avatar, or rezzed a prim, even though they are 4 months old.

I was scripting at 2 weeks, dang it.

Ramen Jedburgh

I wish there was more data on these numbers. I don't know what really, maybe time in world and ip addresses, etc.

10-20k a day is a LOT. Where the hell are all of these people? SL always just seems deserted when I travel around.

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Ramen Jedburgh
Abusively Cute ^_^

Adeon Writer

You can verify this by making a new account and just watching the newcomers rez in. (The starting island is instanced though, to spread everyone out, but you'll still see some peers drop in as they cycle around) Given that information, they do come in pretty rapidly. You can end up with small crowds on Saturday US evenings, as newcomers begin talking to each other instead of entering the tutorial building. I've even seen trolls there.

Lance Corrimal

how many of those are just spambots signing up because the script is too stupid to recognize that the SL website is not just another forum?

and how great are the chances that LL actually knows that, but still keeps the 19000 spambots in the statistics to look good?

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Adeon Writer

I don't think signups are valid at all. I used to make at least one or two alts every time there was a new batch of last names.

The fact that they don't do that anymore makes perfect sense that signups would take a hit.

armozel

Most of the signups have be bots, obviously.


That would require a rewrite of the architecture that defines SL (from the simulator up). Good luck getting LL to find more capital for such an expensive investment.

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Yippie yay! There'll be no wedding bells for today.

DoctorZen

Cris should charge a fee for every "This is what's wrong with SL and/or LL" thread. He'd never have to worry about server costs again.

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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." — Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Ramen Jedburgh

So I suppose a better statistic would be "first time log ins" since a spam bot wouldn't download the client and log in.

Also, numbers like "logs in a day later", "logs in a week later" etc.

Tyabela

Walk into the linden realms thing by accident before the starting area has even fully rezzed - Check

Have no idea how to move around or do anything - check

Start poking in menus and hit Teleport home thinking it will take you back to the starting area - check

Land at an infohub and be immediately threatened and cussed at-check

If I hadn't already had family in SL I would have quit right there.

Darien Caldwell

Throw in "Basic Mode" and they couldn't do many of those things even if they wanted. They did get rid of basic mode, at least. Thank god.

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[H]arsh Styles

Kara Spengler

One of the times a Camp Hardknock sim crashed I wound up in an adult welcome area trying to get back.

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Trasee Darkwatch

The Community Gateways were a great starting point for new members. When I first joined in July 2006, I saw nothing and no one. I don't remember if there was a welcome area. All I know is I signed up and started exploring. I got bored quickly and left.

When I rejoined in July 2009, I entered the Faerie Crossing Community Gateway. It was a very nice tutorial walkthru with helpers there to greet new people and help them get acquainted. It was that personal touch that helped me to stay the second time around, and have been here ever since.

I've said it before, LL needs to bring back the community gateways. Give SL the personal touch that is needed for the new residents.

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Adeon Writer

Missed this post.

You will always be redirected to a telehub of the highest rating you have set yourself to able to visit. This is so an explicit nude avatar will never be redirected to a General telehub. While you are a child avatar, set your preferences to forbid adult sims (or restrict to only General, to taste) and you will not be redirected there.

Wildefire Walcott

The huge majority of those people never leave the welcome area. Also...

That was my first thought too. But if they were bots, why does concurrency decrease month-to-month, rather than increase even a little? Why make a bot account that never logs in?

As far as I know, the "Scripted Agent Status" that a user can optionally set on a bot account only affects parcel traffic calculations, and I have strong doubts that the majority of bot owners even bother setting that flag.

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Autumn Osterham

Bloodlines players making alts to suck the blood out of them and make a soul they can sell to other players. Big Business. As of a second ago when I checked there were 179472 in Curse Guild alone and that's just the non-aligned group, doesn't count the other groups.

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Andromeda Rage

Yeah, that's what I remember too, from creating my first account in 2007. Various interactive tutorials including how to move around, how to chat, dragging the torch from your inventory onto your avatar (with whom you also just learned how to wear the library chainmail -- one of the telltale signs of a freshly-baked noob back then was a chainmail-clad avatar running around with a torch in hand ) Heck I think there was even a section on the orientation island where you could hop in a car and drive around a small city block. You had to complete the important parts of the tutorials (I think the car thing was optional) on the orientation island before you could move on to Help Island, and then on to one of the infohubs when you were ready to move on from Help Island.

Ramen Jedburgh

I remember having to talk to a parrot on day 1. And pick up a ball.

bladyblue

I tried to escape from the parrot because I couldn't figure out how to shout.

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Ramen Jedburgh

You can't escape, he is the president os Secone Life.

EricCastanea

I imagine many of the sign-ups don't even make their first login. Will the official viewer even start on a 5 year-old laptop with integrated graphics? And even if it did, imagine what it would like trying to navigate around.

Cincia Singh

It's likely most new sign-ups have budget laptops with integrated graphics and are on a marginal WiFi. Having a smokey avatar is going to be quite common. It's probably also fair to assume most new sign-ups don't have stellar keyboarding skills so the text chat in SL will be a slow and tedious process for them.

During the login process the new sign-up person is first going to be confronted with the window about connecting to voice, they won't read it (no one seems to read much of anything) and will click past the window and end up in SL without voice capability shouting into their microphones (their RL neighbor hears them but no one in SL does). The default setting for sound is VERY loud so they also get a good blast of whatever music or media is playing in the welcome area ... unless they used a TPV with media filter enabled by default in which case they can't figure out why SL is dead silent. Next is the welcome area experience itself which has no resemblance to the places you login to in other MMORPGs so they are stuck and many probably give up and logoff. Those who get this far and stick around next are confronted by local residents who may or may not be understanding or sympathetic. The importance of the first contact in SL can not be exaggerated; first impressions are everything RL and SL. Leaving the first contact to be a random SL resident means that first impression is going to be a crap shoot.

Just one perspective.

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Menchor Barbosa

We managed to get 14 fps on a netbook admittedly with ATI graphics, but almost all the Acer netbooks have ATI graphics. And although I wouldn't want to use it all the time the performance was perfectly acceptable for most ordinary SL tasks.

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Baroness Menchor, the Deadly, of the Great Army of the Invincible Infidel, Whose Great Swarms of Evil and Horror Laid Waste to the Souls of a Million True Believers and Left Their Souls Rotting in the Summer Sun for the Buzzards to to Ravish as Their Souls Sunk to the Depths of Torment and Hopelessness, Abandoned by Their Gods.

Youth and strength can almost always be overcome by old age and treachery

Beebo Brink

I suspect I fried the graphics card on my company laptop by logging into SL when I was away from home on a business trip.

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Noob: "okay.... im in a house with cages and people in gags and the door just locked and i cant get out :c"

Penny Patton

I don't think that's quite the case. I think they realize they need to make SL more appealing to users...they just have no idea what they need to do that.

Saying "they should listen to us, the users" misses the obvious, a lot of users have no idea what they want. Many SL users and people who tried SL but quit very soon after will tell you, "we want better graphics." Ok, fair enough, but good luck getting the users to explain what, specifically, they need improved as far as graphics goes. Most people have no idea what they mean by "good graphics". The assumption is that it's a technology issue, that SL needs to be able to push more polygons and whiz-bang Direct X effects or something.

Many SL users and people who quit will complain that there was "nothing to do". Ok, so how does LL fix that? Ask the userbase and you'll get dozens of different solutions offered, many of them outright conflicting with others.

Likewise with the issue of SL's "steep learning curve". Ask a dozen different users how to solve that and you'll get a dozen different answers with about half of them directly at odds with the other half until it becomes a shouting match.

In "listening to the userbase" LL would need to develop a very keen ear for discerning signal from noise.

What LL really needs to do is hire people who understand the fundamental issues behind SL's problems, and who are good enough at engaging their customers to sit down, listen to user complaints with an educated ear, and from there discern what needs to be done to address those issues.

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