From Magnus (Magnustemporal Resident)
as of 11:22:47 am on Tue 11/26/24 there are currently 17,560 active users in Second Life.
"The death of SL."
The title of this does sound very dismal does it not? It makes one think that perhaps the grid will shut down tomorrow, or next year....it just sounds dreadful, however it's not quite what you think, In fact there's a lot more to the picture than you think....read on to find out more.
I have been around in SL for a very long time, 17 years in fact....maybe not on this account. But on total it's been about 17 years.
At one point during this time, when content creators failed to gain protections for their IP from LL....a lot left SL in almost a mass exodus....and this is when I started seeing this pattern...I'm not sure what to call it other than a cyclic event, and it works like this:
Whenever a major content creator leaves SL, or a major DJ or venue switches platforms and leaves SL for whatever reason, there is a exodus of people from the grid. This lowers the number of citizens in world, I have seen it happen time and time again, a major club or person or DJ leaves SL and others follow suit, in time the grid does recover some of the numbers lost, however they're never as "good" as the numbers before.
SL is made or broke by us the citizens, with the content we create, the people we help, or the friends and family we make, when people have pleasurable experiences in world, they are much more apt to come back. At some point when the numbers above get small enough SL probably will go offline for cost reasons. But seeing the impact that a single citizen can make in world. I know the power of good things. And of good causes.
I have seen this cycle repeat it's self so many times, and I have no idea how many have caught on to it. The solution however does start with us citizens. We need to be more active in getting people to try the game, to look around and experience all the great and awesome stuff people make and things they do,
I used to own my own business in real life, and I never paid for advertising. My customers had good experiences and I was referenced soley by word of mouth. In time I became rather successful.
The point of that is, that we can grow SL's numbers and draw in content creators and new citizens simply by word of mouth alone.
The next statements are more personal views than anything else and are not intended to offend at all but give cause for thought.
For a lot of people, SL starts with finding out the game exists, either by search engine advert, or you guessed it word of mouth from a friend.
So the experience, the first experience a person has with SL is dependent entirely by the viewer they choose to use.
What I noticed with the PBR based viewers is that there was a rush to be the first to produce one, and with disastrous results.
The first few viewers where atrocious as the different viewer makers struggled with the new technology, there where bugs, but some rushed to press to be one of the first to produce a PBR viewers.
Did anyone stop and think for a moment, how this open experimentation might effect first time users?
they create an account, log in and......lag, missing textures, stability issues.....all sorts of things....what will these people think these potential new citizens? They may have been referenced to a particular viewer by a friend only to have a first time substandard experience, some may try again while others might quit entirely.....this is not good at all for the grid.
I think that more and through testing before releasing a version of the viewer on the grid, to ensure that new and seasoned users have a pleasurable experience. When they do, they talk, and for SL talking is good. it brings people.
Content creators and venues should give careful consideration about quitting SL before doing so because that can also have a grid wide impact especially if the person or venue has a lot of support from the community...
I get people are gonna quit, but there's things even then that can be done to reduce the loss of citizens on the grid, and maybe the cycle that I see everytime a big person or place or club or what have you leaves, there won't be such a hit on the grid, and that 17,560 people could become 100,000.....in fact I think we were somewhere near or over that number of people at one point. and it was awesome.
But things start and end with us, so what are we gonna do with our future?
Magnus.
Extra
PBR isn't really difficult to run and problematic
ReplyDeleteIt's firestorm
I'm running PBR just fine and smoothly on hardware thats over a decade old and its an old mini PC with only a 65w power supply at that, I'm getting a smooth 60 FPS with PBR, but on firestorm my performance takes a hit, most the PBR problems come from the community, people unwilling to viewer hop, basically all that bloat on firestorm has added up and PBR being a fairly demanding feature combined with all that was the straw that broke the camels back for a lot of users
That stated I'm having a pretty smooth experience on a geforce 860m running at 1.2 GHz, SL totally runs like shit on that computer, less I give up firestorm, the point is don't blame PBR, try the other viewers that feature it first, and if it still runs like crap try turning some settings down, and if still, then update your hardware cause that thing is no longer my Primary PC at over a decade old, secondlife needs to change with time to stay relevant and needs new users for the old ones that leave for whatever reason, without updates such as PBR it becomes the next active worlds, so you need to keep up and update your hardware once in a while, or yknow quit using bloated viewers that were already on the edge before PBR
I'm just saying you called out PBR as one of the problems, but its not, Its you.
Youve gotten hooked on one single viewer just as people do for chrome, and now the web communities like whatever will I do with the new manifest now that my adblocker wont work, the solution is simple, switch back or try something else
also hello Elphias good to see your kicking shit after LL banned you again I'll keep it in mind and update my block list, or would you prefer Arthur Littlepaws now?