Infected Second Life and its many strange users/uses.

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To be fair, the strict regulation of "G" regions caused a lot of non-adult oriented places to move to Moderate/Mature land just to avoid petty bullshit like having an abuse report filed for changing clothing and a split second of nipple showing while it rezzed. Also you had users who had enough dealing with immature people over 18 and decided no way were they putting up with teenagers too.

But that aside, if you're expecting anything but dicks of all shapes, sizes, and erect states in Adult rated regions, you're kidding yourself. Most adult land is a bunch of poseballs and a penis vendor.
 
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There was this one time I think I saw the essence of SL.
One of my friends sends me an IM when I'm logged on one day saying he found this really shitty sim that was obviously built as a wish fulfillment fantasy for one guy. It's public land, so anyone can wander around on it. So, we start poking around in it, and at first glance it's pretty tame for SL. Just a shitty slapped-together high school sim probably made by a thirty year old weaboo who lives in his mother's basement. Besides looking like it belonged in 2004, nothing special.
But then, we noticed some kind of elevator, passageway, whatever, that went under the school part of the sim. Everything that we had been looking at before was just one level of this place. So, hoping we'd find more stuff to laugh at, we went down. And for forty floors, there was a highly detailed and very specific fetish dungeon. Things I didn't even know could be a fetish. One room was just a giant hamster wheel. Another room was some kind of doctor's office full of machines whose sole purpose looked to just be nipple impaling. There was a giant tub of jello, too, with some kind of arcade-style claw machine thing that picked you up out of the jello and put you in a giant test tube. The last level we saw before fucking off was just an empty room with real life gore pics on the walls. Second Life had made the image resolution shit, but it wasn't that hard to tell that's what they were.
Right before we left, my friend said that this new fetish dungeon part of the sim hadn't been there the first time he stumbled across the sim, which was the week before. So whoever was the owner of that land built a forty-floor fetish dungeon in a week.
I still think about that place sometimes.
 
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ColumbiaBinks said:
I enjoy playing this game!
The only problem I've had with Second Life? Last week was my 18th birthday, and they didn't consider me an adult until 3-4 days later...so I couldn't get a house and access mature and adult regions during that time period.
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Be sure to stop by the Gay Yiffy Club sometime and enjoy the blocky 2007 furry avatars with poorly rendered animal genetalia!
 
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I must admit I have used Second Life and really liked the concept of creating things, using them as your own avatar and generally just creating a playground where people's 3D models can interact with eachother - unfortunately, it's ruined by unregulated deviancy, a horribly outdated engine, rampant model and texture-ripping, sim crashing and is just generally an anarchist's paradise.

And don't bother going to the forums to complain about it, because the regulars are will fiercely defend their seemingly absent Linden Overlords and shoot down anyone who dares to propose the notion that their preferred form of existence is riddled with problems. "Lindens don't get involved in resident disputes" is a common phrase.
 
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The thing about Second Life is that it can be pretty great, free of drama, and a chill little hobby but you have to look to find those spaces. You don't usually hear about them because the strange shit that goes on in SL is what people focus on and the Info Hubs are packed tight with trolls, lolcows, and deviants. I mean, let's be honest, how many people join and instantly look for sex instead of communities for building stuff?

Lindens are pretty much powerless at this stage of the game. They did play themselves but once the focus turned from a niche virtual world to "let's sell this to millions", they stopped coming in to regularly interact and police things.
 
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Serious necro, but just today I learned that for the past few years Linden Lab has been (somewhat) secretly developing a VR successor to SL called Project Sansar. They launched the invite-only closed beta in September (for a select few SL content creators) and it's scheduled to come out early next year.

This article from last year more or less confirms it's an evolution of SL's business model:

At its core, Project Sansar is a natural evolution of Second Life, Linden Lab's current product. Second Life has been operating for 12 years now, and is not suited for new web trends and advancements in computer hardware. When Second Life was first created, it wasn't built for scalability. Everyone logs in to the same entry point. From there, users will find other experiences that they can enter from within Second Life.

Project Sansar will make experiences much more discoverable and easier to share. Creators will be able to offer an entry point from anywhere, allowing for completely private simulations that can be linked directly from a website, rather than a typical game login. This will also unlock the ability to make these experiences discoverable through search engines, rather than being limited to the pool of Project Sansar members.

Much like Second Life, creators will rent simulators (which the company refers to as "land") within Project Sansar to create and share their experiences with others. The critical difference will be the cost. Altberg said that pricing has not yet been determined, as it is too far in the future still, but the current plan is to make land much cheaper.

You will be able to purchase a larger space, for a lower price up front. He said the company will be "lowering property taxes, and raising sales taxes." Instead of charging large up-front fees, which can be prohibitive for many creators, Linden Labs is more interested in taking a chunk of the growing in-game economy.

Last year, creators within Second Life shared over $60 million of revenue from sales of items such as clothing and furniture for player avatars. Linden Lab expects this economy to grow significantly when more people are able to share their creations. In the current model, the company sees nearly no revenue from in-game sales; the new model will enable sustained growth for the company.

To attract more people to create VR content, which Altberg expects will be in short supply when VR headsets become available next year, Linden Lab is focusing on making Project Sansar into an easy to use platform. Peter Gray likened Project Sansar for VR to what Wordpress has done for the Web; the idea is to make it possible for anyone to create a virtual experience, without the need for a software engineering background.

Linden Lab is creating its own proprietary rendering engine to make this happen. I asked why the company took this direction rather than use existing options, and was told that the problems the company has run into over the years with Second Life made it clear that the company needed an engine designed from the ground up for this platform.

The company needed the ability to make the creator tools simple to use, a task for which the current available engines are not suitable. Project Sansar offers a whole package, including the underlying multi-user functionality, hosting, assets and tools. Additionally, Linden Lab is designing Project Sansar to be accessible through several different media.

Second Life is limited to access through a computer, but with Project Sansar, Linden Lab is seeking to make experiences that work on mobile devices, and through a PC in the traditional sense, or with a virtual reality headset. Currently, the company is not focusing on virtual reality through mobile phones with headsets like Samsung's GearVR. Although Altberg acknowledged that the majority of people will have experience only with mobile VR, the performance concerns of such a setup prohibit the ability to support it. The company is looking into tools that it can offer to creators to gauge what level of device an experience can be accessed through. This would give creators the ability to balance fidelity and complexity, with the potential audience for their experiences.

Currently, Project Sansar is in the very early stages of development, and Linden Lab was not willing to reveal any images yet. The company has invited a half dozen creators to participate and design assets for Project Sansar. The pre-alpha build is only able to support assets created in Maya, and those invited to participate are known to the company to be proficient in the software.

Linden Lab is starting off with the high end to make sure that the engine is robust enough, but future builds of Project Sansar will support any 3D modeling software, and there will be assets available to purchase, with some available for free, to create individual experiences without actually making new models.

Although no concrete dates have been set, there are plans for multiple stages within the development of Project Sansar. Altberg said a semi-open beta should take place in the first half of next year, and a full access beta is tentatively planned for the third quarter. An open public beta should take place before the end of 2016.
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Apparently but unsurprisingly, Second Life's community has been bubbling with anger and anxiety over this. Sansar will not be backwards compatible with SL and while LL has stated they intend to keep SL running, they haven't said for how long. This is fueling suspicion that they'll push SL players to move to Sansar and phase out SL to avoid having to operate two essentially identical games. Naturally, this isn't sitting well with the many no-lifers who've poured years and thousands of dollars into their characters, sims and pretend social lives and now face the distant possibility of having it all wiped out and having to start over from scratch on a platform they potentially won't like.

This could go a lot of different ways, but if they overfocus on VR it'll definitely flop. LL conceived of this a few years ago when VR was all the rage, but by now people have realised that VR is another overpriced gimmick that's hasn't gone anywhere and that the hype surrounding it was entirely manufactured. On top of this, Sansar's most realistic shot at success is importing the Second Life community and SL is a demographic for which having to buy VR gear is an enormous barrier to entry. Like I said, SL's hardcore users operate on the sunk cost fallacy and won't readily give up what they have to start over, much less make a big investment upfront to play an unproven successor.

Also, the lack of barriers to entry is the reason Second Life got huge to begin with. Linden would have to be terrifyingly stupid to not realise today's technology lets them create a platform far more accessible and powerful than SL with far less effort.

But who knows? Unlikely as it is, maybe Sansar will do things right and we'll see a spiritual rekindling of the hilarious glory days of Second Life. The next few years will tell.
 
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RJ MacReady said:
Serious necro, but just today I learned that for the past few years Linden Lab has been (somewhat) secretly developing a VR successor to SL called Project Sansar. They launched the invite-only closed beta in September (for a select few SL content creators) and it's scheduled to come out early next year.

This article from last year more or less confirms it's an evolution of SL's business model:



Apparently but unsurprisingly, Second Life's community has been bubbling with anger and anxiety over this. Sansar will not be backwards compatible with SL and while LL has stated they intend to keep SL running, they haven't said for how long. This is fueling suspicion that they'll push SL players to move to Sansar and phase out SL to avoid having to operate two essentially identical games. Naturally, this isn't sitting well with the many no-lifers who've poured years and thousands of dollars into their characters, sims and pretend social lives and now face the distant possibility of having it all wiped out and having to start over from scratch on a platform they potentially won't like.

This could go a lot of different ways, but if they overfocus on VR it'll definitely flop. LL conceived of this a few years ago when VR was all the rage, but by now people have realised that VR is another overpriced gimmick that's hasn't gone anywhere and that the hype surrounding it was entirely manufactured. On top of this, Sansar's most realistic shot at success is importing the Second Life community and SL is a demographic for which having to buy VR gear is an enormous barrier to entry. Like I said, SL's hardcore users operate on the sunk cost fallacy and won't readily give up what they have to start over, much less make a big investment upfront to play an unproven successor.

Also, the lack of barriers to entry is the reason Second Life got huge to begin with. Linden would have to be terrifyingly stupid to not realise today's technology lets them create a platform far more accessible and powerful than SL with far less effort.

But who knows? Unlikely as it is, maybe Sansar will do things right and we'll see a spiritual rekindling of the hilarious glory days of Second Life. The next few years will tell.
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(:powerlevel: longtime second life user here :powerlevel:)

The reason Linden Labs absolutely fucked themselves in regards to profiting off SL is their idea that use would never go down and that their sales of virtual land would continue going up.

Log onto SL and click around the map of non-private regions, and you will probably find a lot of the land away from landmarks is listed as "abandoned land". In January, a user noted that roughly 20% of mainland was abandoned (which has most definitely gone up based on what I've seen), which is roughly 1227-1267 full regions. Full regions use a dedicated server core, so assuming Linden Labs has refreshed their hardware in the past few years and now use, lets say, boxes with 12 cores, they are running at least 100 servers that see little to no use. And they can't get rid of them because in most cases, there's still one or two people "living" on the sim (whether they use it or it's just sitting there and never deleted since the user has a "lifetime" account is another issue entirely), and removing completely empty sims would leave random voids in the land that would look like shit.

What you do about that, I don't know. They may very well be stuck with hundreds of underutilized servers until the day the game shuts down.

Seeing as private regions are essentially a $300/mo managed 1-core VPS with a couple hundred megs of RAM, they'll probably never stop making money on those until the day the game shuts down.
 
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RJ MacReady said:
Serious necro, but just today I learned that for the past few years Linden Lab has been (somewhat) secretly developing a VR successor to SL called Project Sansar. They launched the invite-only closed beta in September (for a select few SL content creators) and it's scheduled to come out early next year.

This article from last year more or less confirms it's an evolution of SL's business model:



Apparently but unsurprisingly, Second Life's community has been bubbling with anger and anxiety over this. Sansar will not be backwards compatible with SL and while LL has stated they intend to keep SL running, they haven't said for how long. This is fueling suspicion that they'll push SL players to move to Sansar and phase out SL to avoid having to operate two essentially identical games. Naturally, this isn't sitting well with the many no-lifers who've poured years and thousands of dollars into their characters, sims and pretend social lives and now face the distant possibility of having it all wiped out and having to start over from scratch on a platform they potentially won't like.

This could go a lot of different ways, but if they overfocus on VR it'll definitely flop. LL conceived of this a few years ago when VR was all the rage, but by now people have realised that VR is another overpriced gimmick that's hasn't gone anywhere and that the hype surrounding it was entirely manufactured. On top of this, Sansar's most realistic shot at success is importing the Second Life community and SL is a demographic for which having to buy VR gear is an enormous barrier to entry. Like I said, SL's hardcore users operate on the sunk cost fallacy and won't readily give up what they have to start over, much less make a big investment upfront to play an unproven successor.

Also, the lack of barriers to entry is the reason Second Life got huge to begin with. Linden would have to be terrifyingly stupid to not realise today's technology lets them create a platform far more accessible and powerful than SL with far less effort.

But who knows? Unlikely as it is, maybe Sansar will do things right and we'll see a spiritual rekindling of the hilarious glory days of Second Life. The next few years will tell.
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This sounds like the beginning of one of those "trapped in VR" animes that are all the rage lately.
 
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