by Onder Skall, courtesy of
This just has to be said.
The Herald recently featured an announcement about the using 8 sims with 4 more set aside as backups. Many of us read that and thought: “Oh, ok, I might actually be able to go to this event without the sim crashing.
”
We probably said it without any bitterness because we’ve become used to the limitations of SL. Most of us have abandoned other virtual worlds in favor of this grand experiment in self-expression, and we’ve forgotten that most MMOs don’t lock up just because there are ten avatars within a thousand meters of each other.
This is why I love when publications like comment on Second Life.
While the details aren’t any more in-depth, they say things that we don’t think to, like:
“What I don’t get is why organizations waste their time. I mean most sims have a pretty tiny cap. For instance, the turn out at last week’s book reading by Dean Koontz was expected to be about 30 people.
Why in the hell would he waste his time?”
They have a point. This is ridiculous.
There is no truly viable alternative to SL yet so we put up with the limitations. Nowhere else offers people the opportunities for self-expression that we have here, and when you add to that the free market economic system, Linden Lab pretty much owns our asses.
We’ll all at least check out any system that allows for the independent creation of scriptable objects and a free market system.
Just look at Kaneva - it’s clearly less than SL, but the latent desperation for something better has driven many to put up with it long enough to take a really good look.
When the new thing comes, be it Areae or Outback Online or HiPiHi, the number of people who can sit in a room together will make all the difference. Imagine the Koontz event in front of 100 or 1000 people.
SL’s hype machine will pale in comparison to what would be created by an event like that. No matter what Linden Lab came up with, be it voice capabilities or other marvelous toys, “U2 Plays Virtual Concert For Hundreds” would bury them.
Hype aside, I’m curious about how ready to jump ship SL residents really are.
If something better came along, would you leave? Many would be abandonning a legacy of work, but if it meant that our new creations would have a better home it might be worth it. Some may harbor a sense of loyalty to Linden Lab, and there are a lot of “what ifs” here, so I’ve chosen to phrase my question thusly:
If Linden Lab created a separate, completely rebuilt-from-the-ground grid and client (Second Life v2) that was essentially the same but could handle much higher loads, would you cash out, leave the old grid behind and switch?
Do you think the corporations will?
| The Second Life Herald carries an interesting take by Onder Skall from SL Games. It hits on the real problems with Second Life The Herald recently featured an announcement about the YearlyKos Convention using 8 sims wi.
.. Tracked on Mar 24, 2007 1:59:35 AM It really depends if my items were transferable to the new grid.
If they all were compatible, in a heartbeat. But if it would mean leaving it all to start over from scratch, I´d have to think about it, but might just do that. Eventually everyone is going to, if all the other aspects are the same.
But I would never switch to the Kaneva, cause it just is so much less and needs to evolve more before I jump in.
Lot of ifs here, but I am all for the bigger masses -less lag thing. What would I offer about SL to achieve it?
Well I prefer nothing. It would already be possible having world wide grid. Yes, just like the WWW the WWG would have the texture databases scattered around the globe, so all the wires would have less load.
Hmm, let me think for a moment. OK, moment's over. Yes, sure if ANYONE would come up with a more stable, faster, better graphics version of SL, I would leave in a heartbeat.
But there is not much around (YET) which would tickle me fancy.
On the other hand, Linden has to start understanding, that in the moment Second Life is getting some one who's a (at least) serious competitor, the whole economic system will break down and people will leave ship faster than Linden can say "Bless you".
So for right now, the only thing we can do is to wait and see (and be prepared).
Would I? Yes.
Corporations?
Of course.
SL is, imo, a nice experiment. It's inevitable that something more compelling will replace it.
Whether that's SL 2.0 or some other application, who knows? Personally, I'm watching Croquet and the associated FUNK project.
No small players will ever challenge LL, ever again. That point passed when they opened the world to free signups.
To make the metaverse into what it needs to be in terms of CPU power and network bandwidth requires massive investment.
I've been on the front lines for a much smaller MMO and I understand the challenges.
Ask YouTube. There are only a few companies on this planet that can make the sort of investment needed to create the kind of world we'd all like Second Life to become.
I'm a little puzzled by this "30 cap" stuff. On the mainland, I routinely see it on even my weaker, sicker sims at 39-40.
On new class-five islands, I see 67-100 or more even if they have 2 islands put next to each other.
It's not uncommon to see 100 avatars on Brasil, and you don't actually severely lag out there.
So I can't help thinking that surely the Sheep would have the class-five sims with that capacity for something like Koontz. Even if they happened to have class 4 (and I know of no scientific study that says one is actually better for inworld field purposes of loading avatars!
), they'd surely get more than 30 or 40 and more like 60 on an island.
I personally don't see the need to jump ship. All the kewl kids said The Sims Online was dying, defunct, dead, a horror, and they fled to Second Life.
I lingered in The Sims Online and took my time making the transition, making sure my sim was sold on ebay, etc. I retained an account and pop in now and then. I see a burgeoning, busy world in TSO, which surprises me because everybody said this world was closing completely -- and it didn't.
The cook kids left There, too, for Here -- and everybody trashed There. But now There is under new management, it seems, has more cool stuff, and even the MTV people have put Virtual Laguna Beach on There. So I don't see that predictions of There's demise were relevant.
Kaneva has its potentials, but it has no real estate to buy and no user-created content to sell -- yet, anyway.
So why the dire predictions? The metaverse is a big place, room for lots of worlds.
MY hunch has always been that the Lindens, who are elitists at heart as their practice has shown over and over again, despite their populist and progressive rhetoric, will create some separate grids for business, education, private projects, etc. The Better World will go over there, and we will be in the Worse World. The Better World will cost more, bunches.
The idea that one can "cash out" to go to a Better World and not lose money is silly. Whose going to buy that laggy blighted Worse World property?
i have said for a couple of years it seemed that LL is preparing SL for a sale to a mega corporation with deep pockets and the savvy to expand on what sl is now.
yes, i would move. as to whether the corporations would move i care not a wit.
the scenario i always thought most likely is, LL sells out totally to (lets pretend Sony).
So they keep the current grid limping along and tear apart the tech parts they now own and launch a new viable, stable, built from the ground up metaverse that has the software and hardware to back up the reading by Koontz to 250. the u-2 concert to 500. and etc.
ok, so the sale occurs this year, the new metaverse appears in 2010. that's if blizzard buys it. what im basically saying is, instead of some garage techs doing it, a major player does it building on the Linden Labs original software.
Myself, I just wish LL would fix their problems instead of trying to slap more and more buggy "features" into the system. Find the damned single points of failure and come up with a redundancy path or distribute the tasks more widely. I don't want to move - I like SL.
But a number of my friends and I have made a pact that come October, if SL is still as buggy and crash-prone as it is today, we will quit enmass and go back to a Text-based world.
Already I've watched a number of people take their money and leave because of the terrible reliability. Some had businesses, some did not, and some invested considerable sums of US$ into LL.
They had no other 3d world to retreat to but they couldn't stand SL's constant failures any longer. I understand that SL is still in its teething phase and that problems arise when you are trying something new. But if LL is ready to call their tech the universal Web3.
0 solution (or so it seems) then they should have all the bugs worked out first. They don't, and those of us who have put time and energy into SL for our own amusement have found it less and less fun as time has passed, due principly to the terrible reliability. We are fed up about losing our inventories and having a night's work vanish on us as the sim goes poof beneath our feet.
And when everyone has left because we cannot use the platform, just who are all those businesses LL is bringing on board going to cater to?
Marilyn, my question about the Koontz thing is this: I could go hear him at, say, Barnes Nobles in an audience that seats 300 or more and even have a latte and browse a new book while waiting. That's in RL.
And I could watch him on TV or hear him on radio with millions.
So in a virtual world, why would I bother? The value-add is the community of other readers, his safety in being able to quickly and efficiently interact with me, a nobody, so that he's not facing wierdness, stalkers, draining irritants as a famous person, etc.
etc. But..
.the qualitative differences between 30 and 250 are really no different for him in terms of virtual worlds and their value-add, or for me.
That is, no game is going to likely effectively have more than a real-life venue would that is seeable, hearable.
I'm thinking, geez, let's say 450 in one of the smaller rooms at the Waldorf. 1,000 in that really grand ballroom but frankly, you then have to wire in one of those big screen TVs and a good sound system for the people seated in Siberia. So let's say 300-400 in RL comfortable with an ordinary mike.
And on a game/world, that won't be beat, it seems to me, technology wize.
So..
.why? And if there isn't a value-add that is beyond the numbers, that has to do with other things like community or commodity or whatever, then it doesn't matter.
LL is making, has made, the terrible mistake of thinking too small. That, coupled with their sad attempts to cram much of SL into a straitjacket of conformity with real life.
A point Prok makes rather well in his post above.
Indeed, why visit a virtual world to do things you can do, and do better, easier, cheaper, more comfortably in real life?
The geekoid hippy types who thought up and have attempted to realise SL actually had sadly limited imaginations. Given the opportunity to do.
.. anything!
...
what did they choose? Mimic real life with a few added bits and bobs. Flying is a nice 'extra', but TP?
The only reason for TP is that vehicles, even Avatars at times. are not, cannot be, reliable means of transport in SL.
It's sad that, given the possibility of building ANYTHING, being ANYTHING, what have we got?
So-Cal suburbia writ large in virtual space!
That's not what you come to a virtual world for, not to fit into a bunch of aging hippie's California Dream! Witness that some people in SL do attempt to build outside the straitjacket the Lindens have attempted to cram them into.
Some people ARE what they want to be. But LL surely doesn't make it easy - do they?
Me?
I just have my little slice of virtual reality I can amuse myself in for now, explore the sadly tight limits, but really I'm just marking time, waiting...
Am I going to drop SL like a hot potato when one, or hopefully more, competing products arrive (and if you look carefully there are some interesting possibilities emerging)?
No way.
Firstly I'll be checking out the alternatives very carefully, SL has, if nothing else, taught me a lot about what I want in a virtual world, AND what to look for in it's management and development team.
And what to avoid like the plague! (Hi there, Phil, Robin, Sunshine, Path..
.)
When I find something that looks like a viable alternative I'll still be taking my time, attempting to wring every last US$ I've ever put into SL back out..
. some hopes! But every $1 I do recover will be a bonus, because it's all effectively written off anyway.
So, waiting and watching from my foothold in virtuality - biding my time - planning my moves carefully. But, in time, move I will.
And here's what will break Linden Lab.
The vast majority of the paying residents will be doing exactly the same. Some quickly in a flurry of publicity (dhrama don't you know dharling!), some more quietly - you'll hardly know they've gone.
At first. But go we will..
.
I have been in SL since 12/05. According to may bank statements, during this time, I have spent about $6000 US in game, and about $7,000 US for a gaming set up tweaked for competitive prize fighting.
That is a fair amount of houses, weapons (I play in a Gor sim), clothes, what have ya. Having said that, I would start from zero in a heartbeat for a vastly improved SL type experience. With a one gig card, 8gig RAM (not a typo), I have fast, fairly consistent game, but I watch those around me suffer through all the problems (inability to move, invisible avatars, insanely slow rezz times, chat lag), and in truly interactive situations, their problems become my headache.
Yeah, if they build it, I will come
Bear Graves, Actor playing Bear Jessop, Admin of the City, Foothills, and Valley of Thentis
"LL is making, has made, the terrible mistake of thinking too small." - Inigo
For all it's hype, communal thinking always results in small expectations based on minimal anlysis. The management thought it was cute that a few people were renting apartments when 1.
2 was released. Admittedly, no Linden ever imagined groups would be used for anything more than sharing land and then, only for the purpose of collaborative building. Estates were added amid statements that they would only be bought occassionally by people with highly specialized needs.
We still have one video stream per parcel *and* you must be over that one parcel to download that one stream at a time. The floating point error in the sim code is apparently fixed because LL have published that fact; but it's but they said it is; so it is (not).
The whole experiment has involved the tail chasing itself.
It's good that a couple of projects have solidified enough for the teams to make vast improvements in the system. They'll need those portfolio items in the coming years as people expect techs to work rather than fly around the world posing as virtual world experts extraordinaire.
I think the thing keeping SL as the industry leader is their willingness to allow anything and everything to go on in their world.
Other virtual worlds have, probably in legal terms quite wisely, limited the ability of their members to produce pornographic content, violate copyrights and trademarks, and so on. Linden has for years been one step ahead of a company ending lawsuit or government prosecution.
I certainly don't think much of Kaneva, but There.
com is certainly a superior platform to SL. Except there are no animatronic Xcite penises. No genitals at all.
Design is monitored and censored. Player/"resident" input is minimized and controlled.
The real issue with anyone wishing to take the place of Second Life is not technology, it's taking the legal risk to run a completely wide open world.
Going back to the question posed in the article, If LL made a brand new SL2 on a separate grid. It had all the features of the current SL, was fast, and less buggy too. Would I switch?
Yes I would. Even assuming the only thing I could take with me are the textures I made myself. I would do so for two reasons:
One: LL is not going to maintain two grids for long.
It doesn't make sense. They may run them in parallel for a year or two but eventually they will phase out SL1. It is the most cost effective thing to do.
The key here is that LL would be running the new SL2. If it is a competing product, it is not likely to actually kill off SL. After all, There and TSO are still around.
Two: If I get in early, before the current major players in SL, I have a better chance of becoming a major player.
Stop right there! Hold the phone!
You mean I MISSED A BOOK READING BY DEAN KOONTZ?
I might as well kill myself now.
Oh well, I probably couldn't have gotten in the sim anyway.
"I have said for a couple of years it seemed that LL is preparing SL for a sale to a mega corporation with deep pockets and the savvy to expand on what sl is now."
I fully agree with Marilyn Murphy about that. For me, they are now just trying to improve the company's market value, with the fallacious "let's put a hundred million people inside" bradcasted to the media, once in fact just a few 30-40 thousand really persevere to log, while handling all the terrible well known grid issues/bugs.
The fact is, and it is already incontestable, that 3D online metaverses are the future of the web - we just do not know now HOW important they will be, and HOW they will function (a WWG is not a so bad guess, as someone suggested above). At some time in history, it will be too important thing, to the big companies not invest hard on it. And, in that time, yes we will see a big company creating its own "second life".
The cheaper way to do that? Simple: buy Linden Labs, get all their experienced and expertised engineers, and by this time, do it right, from the beggining.
So yes, I would switch, for sure.
And about companies, of course they would too, if it was more profitable - companies just follow market (read "buyers").
Just a last comment: Don't you people think that is at least strange that a huge company as IBM invests thousands of dollars, just to "participate" in a business created and controlled by a much minor company as LL? Don't this sounds to you as: "let's go in, learn it from inside, not only technologically but philosophically too, and then, control it - in a way or the other"?
???
???
Re: the Dean Koontz reading, the audio was streamed to 9 locations within SL, plus questions were flowing in the group chat. Here's more information:
http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.
com/giff/?p=327
Coco, ESC announces events like this in our Counting Sheep group, plus on the Sheep blogs as well - we'd like to do more events like this in the future, as the feedback from the Koontz event was very positive, so we might be bringing more of your favorite authors inworld soon!
We've long known about both the functional and realistic limit on avs in a sim, and while sharding and streaming events helps distribute the load (a practice LL had pioneered with town halls back when they were still text only), we're among the rest of the residents looking forward to better architecture that allows higher numbers of avatars to exist *comfortably* on a sim.
The answer is yes. I would definitely leave SL for a virtual world that is "done right". Not only is the system highly unstable, but Linden Lab has shown repeatedly how arrogant they are by sticking it to their customers.
In fairness I will offer up that they seem to have gotten slightly better on that front in recent months, but the cold hard truth is that they know they are currently the only "game" in town, so to speak. In most ways, they resemble a classic business monopoly.
New systems are not far off, and SL's days ARE truly numbered.
I see no effort on the part of Linden Labs to make their system scalable, and the same problems that were evident months ago are still there (I'm STILL having to hit the 'region' option to see water after a TP...
.HELLOOOOOOOOO!!
!!).
Not only will I leave for a better virtual world, I won't even look back.
I remember sometime last year - summer I believe - there was a lot of buzz going around about a competitor and LL should be frightened. Philip during the next town hall addressed this as not being worried because LL can "out update anyone.
" Anyone who has been here long enough knows that while they do update fast and often, it's usually to fix the last one and break 2 more things.
The typical LL attitude is that they will never shake in their boots no matter how many times we all tell them we will jump ship the moment something better comes out.
If LL made a SLv2?
I doubt that will ever happen because that would mean LL admitting SL doesn't work. Instead they just blame it on us. Be it our connection or our computers.
If someone else made something that had the capabilities of SL without the band-aid fixes, blame game, worked more often then not, and the holier than thou attitude? Sign me up!
"oh is SL ending again?
Didn't it end last year and the year before too?"
Its been dead for about a year now.
Its just that nobody else has figured that out yet.
People mistake the twitching death throes, the convulsing of muscles into rigor mortis with signs of life and growth.
just cuz my three pound "portable phone" from the 80's still works, doesn't mean its the best thing to communicate with.
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